Overclocking

I for one am not one to settle for stock speeds or even the overclocked speeds that manufacutres provide. Because of that I was sure to go through and overclock the MSI R9 270X Gaming to see what kind of headroom you still might have. Obviously this depends on the card, but this should give you an idea at least. I started off by bumping up the GPU clock speed from the 1080MHz that it ran stock to 1200MHz and then to 1300MHz. At 1300MHz it did fail with a blue screen, from there I knew our limit was between 1200-1300MHz. I slowly bumped it down until it finally passed at 1225MHz. This gave an additional 4+ FPS over the original overclock.

Next I moved on to overclocking the memory, sadly the results here are the same as what I have seen on all of our 270X’s with our limit being a software limit. There is obviously still a lot of room there if you do a BIOS overclock, but in my experience memory overclocks don’t give as much return. Last I ran through tests with both of our overclocks, interestingly enough it failed until I bumped the Memory clock down slightly. Obviously the higher GPU clock pulled away some of the voltage needed to maintain the memory overclock. If you look you will even see that my test results were faster at the stock memory clock than overclocked at all.