Overclocking
Next up for the R9 290X Matrix is overclock testing. For this I overclock the GPU and memory individually and test using the second test in 3Dmark 11. I document how everything goes below and we can see the improvement as I overclock through the FPS result. Once I get my highest possible overclocks on both I try to run them together and see if the card can handle it together as well.
I was a little worried going into the testing. The 290X Matrix is designed for extreme LN2 overclocking but in my earlier testing I found it to run a little warm and it already pulled a hefty mount of wattage. With that and the card already having a stock overclock I wasn’t really sure how much luck I would have. I started by bumping it up from 1050MHz to 1100MHz with good luck. From there I went to get 1150MHz and the driver crashed. The same happened at 1140 and then at 1120MHz it passed. I started toying with the voltage setting in Asus’s GPU Tweak software and with a bump in voltage I was able to take the overclock back up to 1140MHz. 1150MHz did run without a crash as well but there were some artifacts. Next I went into memory overclocking taking the stock 5400MHz clock speed up to 5800MHz. Next I ran up to 6000MHz but it failed badly, I even had artifacts in windows! I turned things down without any luck as well and ended up having to settle on the initial overclock that I ran. I combined both results together and tested that with no trouble at all as well.
GPU Clock Speed Overclocking |
|||
GPU Clock Speed |
Pass/Fail |
FPS Result |
Notes |
1100MHz |
Pass |
80.52 |
|
1150MHz |
Fail |
N/A |
Driver Crash |
1140MHz |
Fail |
N/A |
Driver Crash |
1120MHz |
Pass |
82.93 |
|
1130MHz |
Fail |
82.31 |
Artifacts |
1130MHz |
Pass |
83.73 |
1300mV voltage over stock 1250mV |
1140MHz |
Pass |
84.26 |
1300mV voltage over stock 1250mV |
1150MHz |
Fail |
84.75 |
Artifacts |
Memory Clock Offset Overclocking |
|||
Memory Clock Speed |
Pass/Fail |
FPS Result |
Notes |
5800MHz |
Pass |
78.76 |
|
6000MHz |
Fail |
N/A |
Major artifacts in windows even |
5900MHz |
Fail |
78.89 |
Some artifacts |
GPU and Memory Overclocks Together |
|||
GPU Clock Speed |
Memory Clock Speed |
FPS Result |
Notes |
1140MHz |
5800MHz |
84.76 |