Overclocking

Once I finished out regular testing I did want to see how well the XFX would overclock, especially compared to the Sapphire. 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.

To start things off I did a baseline benchmark at the stock clock speeds. From there I started in on the GPU clock speed jumping right to 1200MHz and failing, from there 1100MHz pass so I had to work in. After trying a few I found that 1130MHz was my peak GPU overclock without running into artifacts. For the memory I went through the same thing only it took a lot more tests to get up to a point where it failed, that was 7400MHz where I had a hard black screen crash that required a manual reboot. In the end I was able to get stable results at 7300MHz on the memory.

Next I attempted to run the two overclocks together but I ended up having artifacts. Normally that would make me think the problem was the memory but this time around I had artifacts when I pushed the GPU clocks too hard. So I turned the GPU clock down to 1120MHz and ran again without any issues. This was 10MHz less than the Sapphire managed and more importantly for some reason the Sapphire managed to put out a full FPS higher in almost all tests when overclocking. That said the XFX still managed to jump from 81.54 up to 89.90FPS with its overclock, a nice improvement.