Overclocking
My last few experiences with overclocking R9 290’s have been iffy at best. Specifically all of the cards I have tested hit a wall when overclocking the memory that causes a black screen. This is an issue because without it causing a driver crash or a reboot rebooting windows would sometimes lead right back to another black screen as the software reoverclocks the video card. So going into the testing on the 290 Gaming I was a little more careful. GPU overclocking went fairly standard. I started with a small overclock and worked my way up only slightly only to find that the highest I could go without having issues was 1120MHz. This is in line with the other R9 290’s. Next on the memory overclocking I worked my way up to 6000Mhz where I ran into a new issue. At this clock speed my benchmark went perfectly but I had artifacting when in windows. Going one step higher, as expected, gave me the black screen issue that the other cards also had. My last round of overclocking was just to take the top GPU and memory overclocks and see if they would run together. I was able to pass the benchmark twice, but a third benchmark did give me the black screen issue again. I would recommend staying conservative on your memory overclocks, you won’t see much of a performance improvement on them anyhow.
GPU Clock Speed Overclocking |
|||
GPU Clock Speed |
Pass/Fail |
FPS Result |
Notes |
1050MHz |
Pass |
74.48 |
|
1100MHz |
Pass |
77.69 |
|
1150MHz |
Fail |
78.79 |
Heavy artifacts |
1140MHz |
Fail |
79.09 |
Heavy artifacts |
1130MHz |
Fail |
79.19 |
Some artifacts |
1125MHz |
Fail |
79.14 |
Some artifacts |
1120MHz |
Pass |
78.89 |
|
Memory Clock Offset Overclocking |
|||
Memory Clock Speed |
Pass/Fail |
FPS Result |
Notes |
5500MHz |
Pass |
71.98 |
|
6000MHz |
Pass |
72.78 |
Artifacts in windows |
6200MHz |
Fail |
N/A |
Black Screen |
GPU and Memory Overclocks Together |
|||
GPU Clock Speed |
Memory Clock Speed |
FPS Result |
Notes |
1120MHz |
6000MHz |
79.98 |