Overclocking
The overclocking results listed in this section were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently which is why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.
On NVIDIA cards with boost, the values discussed here are base clock. Boost will further increase clocks.
Maximum overclock on our card is 1255 MHz GPU clock (9% overclocking) and 1590 MHz memory (14% overclock).
Maybe even a bit on the high side, GPU overclocking reaches levels typical for other HD 7870s. In our previous reviews, overclocked HD 7870 cards managed between 1200 and 1260 MHz.
Memory overclocking also reaches levels similar to HD 7870 cards, though the R9 270X HAWK uses Elpida chips, which tend to overclock worse than Hynix or Samsung.
Using these clock frequencies, we ran a quick test of
Battlefield 3 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.
Actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 8.9%.