[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
Overclocking on AMD graphics cards over the last year or so has been a challenging task in some respects; AMD don’t “officially support” overclocking as an organisation, but they do give their cards the ability to be pushed and for that, we salute you. This isn’t the first XFX branded AMD card we have overclocked in recent times, in fact the last time out was the R9 380 4GB model which is practically the same; bar the increased shader count of course.
We weren’t able to push as much out of the R9 380x as we were the R9 380, but a 7% increase on the core clock is nothing to be sniffed at; it is free performance after all. For those wondering what 7% actually is, we managed a final stable core speed of 1105MHz with an increase of 100MHz on the memory; this takes the memory up from 1450MHz to 1550MHz. Anything more threw up artifacting and instability issues, which in our eyes, isn’t runnable for 24/7 use and is likely to crash the driver, or blue screen the system.
With that 7% in mind, here is what that equates to across a couple of difference benchmarks…
`That 7% in terms of overclocking on the core equates to a nice 12.4% overclock in 3DMark 11; pretty good considering, although the 100MHz overclock on the memory helps too!
3DMark Fire Strike normal yields an increase of just 9%, but it’s still a good increase and shows that overclocking on the R9 380x actually gives a nice improvement in performance.
Total War: Rome II shows one of the best increases in overclocking we have seen so far, with a fantastic 14.8% jump in frames; still not 60fps, but this is a very intensive game at the maximum setting so take that into consideration.
In our most modest overclocking result of the review, Total War: Rome II at 1440p/maximum settings only gave an overclock of 6.2% overall. This isn’t too bad, but this isn’t exactly the card you should be buying for 1440p gameplay anyway in our opinion, especially not for AAA intensive titles such as this one.
