Sapphire R9 290x Tri-X 8GB Graphics Card Review

[section_title title=Overclocking]

Overclocking

I am not going to beat around the bush here or give you a load of twaddle; AMD and their r9 290x had so much potential but due to high power consumption and temperatures, water cooling was the only real conventional method of cooling to keep these tamed and allow for higher overclocking potential.  With a factory overclock of 1020/1375MHz, I was itching to push the card even further and given Sapphires successful Toxic series, I thought I would hit the jackpot

Unfortunately this wasn’t the case and I only managed a meagre 1150/1600MHz out of the card; an increase of 130MHz on the clock with a nicer more respectable 225MHz on the GDDR5 memory.  This isn’t exactly “blistering” but given that I have had reference models do this, I would say it’s just down to the silicone lottery as temperatures although a tad higher than NVIDIA offerings, certainly are well within their limits and the Sapphire does a good job at taming the Hawaii core; just a shame that the overclock couldn’t have been higher today!

Here we have how the overclock relates in terms of performance compared to the rest of the cards on test as well as this card at stock clocks to show comparison:

The overclocked performance although relative to the mediocre increase in clock speeds is still well received by the results; the strongest showing in 3DMark 11’s performance preset with a nice solid 15k result with the overclocks applied; a very nice score but an overclocked GTX 970 should match this card if not beat it due to the higher overclocking capability of NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture.