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.