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 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 of our sample is 1180 MHz GPU base clock (12% overclocking) and 1645 MHz memory (22% overclock).
PowerColor's card reaches the highest overclock of any R9 290X we have tested so far. However, I still feel that memory could go even higher with a better BIOS. Taking small steps, I reached even higher memory frequencies, but none of those were stable after a cold reboot, which is indicative of a BIOS issue. Both the quiet and performance BIOS reached the same clocks in our testing.
Maximum Overclock Comparison |
---|
| Max. GPU Clock | Max. Memory Clock |
---|
PowerColor R9 290X PCS+ | 1180 MHz | 1645 MHz |
---|
MSI R9 290X Gaming | 1140 MHz | 1425 MHz |
---|
ASUS R9 290X DC II OC | 1090 MHz | 1480 MHz |
---|
Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC | 1135 MHz | 1555 MHz |
---|
PowerColor R9 290X OC | 1100 MHz | 1570 MHz |
---|
AMD R9 290X | 1145 MHz | 1575 MHz |
---|
Important: Each GPU (including each GPU of the same make and model) will overclock slightly
differently based on random production variances. This table just serves to provide a list of typical
overclocks for similar cards, determined during TPU review.
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 9.8%.