[section_title title=Overclocking]
Overclocking
AMD cards in recent times haven’t exactly been what you would call overclocking friendly, but this is due to many different reasons. First of all, some of the cards succumb to the silicone lottery gods; basically if there are good chips, there has to be bad ones too. Secondly, some of the latest AMD cards use a lot of power, which in turn spits out a lot of heat and cards like the R9 290x, have suffered this problem with some manufacturers aftermarket coolers struggling to tame the beast within.
In regards to the XFX R9 380 DD graphics card on test, I found that although the cooling performance from XFX’s Ghost 2 technology was nothing short of superb, the silicon gods decided to slay me down which only allowed me to get pretty meagre overclocks. Now this could be because the R9 380 is effectively a rebrand of the older R9 285 chip which in my experience with them, none of them that I have had my hands on have overclocked well. In fact I think I did quite well to get overclocked speeds of 1139/1500MHz out of the card. In terms of mathematical figures, that equates to a hefty 15% overclock on the core, with a slightly disappointing 5.2% overclock on the memory.
Overall, a 15% overclock on the GPU core will do me very nicely, but one could be a little bewildered about the meagre 5% overclock on the memory; this is even more so given the XFX R9 380 uses Hynix memory chips where are usually pretty good. Question is though, how does the overclocks equate to performance?
Can I use a Corsair 500w without fear?
Depends on the “quality” of the Corsair 500w? Is the CX range or something a bit beefier? I have ran more on less without problems, but it depends on how good/old your power supply unit is!
Yes Corsair CX 500, currently use it with a R7 265, I doubt that because if I need to buy a new source will no longer compensate buy this xfx R9 380 but a GTX 970 would be more obvious.
I saw that the R9 380 model from other manufacturers is recommended 500w.