Overclocking

Overclocking results listed in this section are achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. We choose this approach as it is the most realistic scenario for the majority of users.

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. Boost is already factored into our resulting clocks for AMD cards because of the way their technology works.



Maximum overclock of our sample is 1130 MHz GPU base clock (17% overclock) and 1565 MHz memory (12% overclock).

Overclocking works well, which shows that the Tonga chip still has lots of overclocking potential left in it. Absolute clocks seem lower than Tahiti, though, which often reached well over 1200 MHz GPU clock.

The Elpida memory chips seemed to limit memory overclocks, which we've seen before on other AMD cards like the R9 290X.

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 12.0%.