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 1140 MHz GPU base clock (11% overclocking) and 1425 MHz memory (14% overclock).

GPU overclocking works well and reaches clocks higher than other retail R9 290X cards we tested before, just 5 MHz shy of AMD's reference design. Memory doesn't overclock that well despite the Hynix chips MSI used, which should OC much higher than chips from Elpida.

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.

Overclocked Performance

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 10.2%.