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.

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 9.8%.