Overclocking
Before finishing up my testing I did want to see just how well the PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 would overclock as well. To do this I broke down the overclocking into three sections, the GPU clock, Memory clock, and then both together. This way I could get my peak overclocks on each and then see if the card could handle them together. Overclocking the GPU clocks went identical with the MSI 380, on both cards I saw 1130MHz. But when it came to memory overclocking I tried to cut out a few of my earlier overclocks knowing how the other 380 performed but I was surprised to run into a wall when testing above 6700MHz. Normally when overclocking memory I will see some artifacts when I push it past its limit or worse case a drive crash. This time around though the PowerColor would actually turn off the PC completely, no artifacts, no drive crash, no bluescreen even. I would be especially careful overclocking the PCS+ R9 380 on the memory side because of this. Not having memory overclocks isn’t really much of a loss anyhow, almost all of the improvements come from a good GPU clock speed bump.
So with my two overclocks I did try to run them together but I had a driver crash. Given the issues with the memory before I went ahead and bumped that down a notch and did the same for the GPU clock. Once I did that I was able to benchmark the card successfully. In the end the MSI overclocked better and saw a slightly higher FPS result as well. The PowerColor overclocked well on the GPU side but there is clearly issues with pushing the memory.
GPU Clock Speed Overclocking | |||
GPU Clock Speed | Pass/Fail | FPS Result | Notes |
970MHz | Pass | 52.22 | Stock Clock |
1050MHz | Pass | 55.61 | |
1100MHz | Pass | 57.88 | |
1150MHz | Fail | N/A | Driver Crash |
1130MHz | Pass | 59.24 | |
1140MHz | Fail | N/A | Driver Crash |
Memory Clock Offset Overclocking | |||
Memory Clock Speed | Pass/Fail | FPS Result | Notes |
5500MHz | Pass | 52.22 | Stock Clock |
6500MHz | Pass | 52.53 | |
6700MHz | Pass | 52.62 | |
6900MHz | Fail | N/A | PC Hard Crashed |
6800MHz | Fail | N/A | PC Hard Crashed |
GPU and Memory Overclocks Together | |||
GPU Clock Speed | Memory Clock Speed | FPS Result | Notes |
1130MHz | 6700MHz | N/A | Driver Crash |
1120MHz | 6600MHz | 59.10 |