Overclocking

Before pulling the Nitro R9 390 off of our testbench I did want to see how well it would overclock. To do that I broke the overclock down into three different sections, the GPU clock, the memory overclock, and lastly the two put together. The whole time I documented everything and included it below along with the FPS results from our 3DMark 11 benchmark that I use to verify that the overclock works. With the results we can see what works for actual performance and what doesn’t.

I started on the GPU with the 1010 MHz stock clock speed and bumped it up until I ran into issues. In this case when testing at 1150MHz and later 1140MHz I had artifacts when testing but the tests still completed. I still consider that a fail though as you wouldn’t game with that. I turned the Nitro down to 1130MHz and it was rock solid. Next I did the same with the memory overclock. Here I started at 6000MHz and went up hue increments the first few times until it failed at 7200MHz and later 7100MHz with a hard black screen that required a full reboot to see anything. This put me at 7000MHz at the highest result. I took our 1130MHz GPU clock and 7000MHz memory clock and attempted them together with good results. In the end with both overclocks we went from 81.41 FPS to 90.95, a huge jump. Most of that was from the GPU clock speed, you could most likely hold off on the memory overclock all together and still see a good improvement in game.