R9 290x Overclocking

[Gunjob]

Was wondering how other 290x owners are doing dialing a clock, had 1.1GHz on the core but was getting some issues in BF4. Current clocks as in the screenshot below, seems the most head room is in the memory.

[Saladin]

Was wondering how other 290x owners are doing dialing a clock, had 1.1GHz on the core but was getting some issues in BF4. Current clocks as in the screenshot below, seems the most head room is in the memory.

Cant see the image. As for the overclocking its not particularly surprising that  the card doesn't overclock very well, even underwater (at least compared to this generations Nvidia cards), given the extremely high starting temperatures. It appears that the 290x is overclocked to near its limit out of the box, in some ways this is good as it removes a barrier to performance for users, on the other hand it means that there simply is much more the card and give. In many ways it is like the AMD FX-9000, both are at their max already.

[Gunjob]

Cant see the image. As for the overclocking its not particularly surprising that  the card doesn't overclock very well, even underwater (at least compared to this generations Nvidia cards), given the extremely high starting temperatures. It appears that the 290x is overclocked to near its limit out of the box, in some ways this is good as it removes a barrier to performance for users, on the other hand it means that there simply is much more the card and give. In many ways it is like the AMD FX-9000, both are at their max already.

Feels more like a silicon lottery thats holding me back, thermal wise I didn't hit 95c or the fan limitations, also heres the imgur link for you http://imgur.com/cvusUYw I was hoping to break 400GB/s bandwidth but its not stable up that high, least not with the current cooling. 

[Saladin]

Feels more like a silicon lottery thats holding me back, thermal wise I didn't hit 95c or the fan limitations, also heres the imgur link for you http://imgur.com/cvusUYw I was hoping to break 400GB/s bandwidth but its not stable up that high, least not with the current cooling. 

92-94C is right at the limit (within the margin), the 350 MHz on the memory is nice, I would suspect the voltage is not as close to the limit on the V-ram as it is on the GPU core. Also, these overclock numbers are right about what reviewers were getting, so I doubt its a lottery issue, though I will happily stand corrected if we start seeing some 290x cards with +250 MHz on the core. It will be interesting to see if non-reference PCB/power delivery can help with the overclocks though I am not going to hold my breath on that one. Truth is that some cards overclock well and some don't, if you go back to the GTX 480 that card didn't overclock well either and was also hot as balls, if you will excuse the language.

[D3MON]

nice overclock, maybe the brain donors can stop saying you can't overclock on it now and "it runs too hot and too loud", really? im pretty sure you could get it down to 80*c with 60% fan speed and it still have a respectable noise, i put my 295 to 55% fan speed and it hit 92*c thats worse than the 290x and I'm ocd when it comes to cleaning cards and doing paste jobs.

and you ACTUALLY cant overclock on it, its not stable over 655mhz. 648 is stock..
might look at a 290 depending on how cut down it is, you can nearly buy 2x 290's (£310ea) for the price of one 780ti (£550ea)

[Gunjob]

92-94C is right at the limit (within the margin), the 350 MHz on the memory is nice, I would suspect the voltage is not as close to the limit on the V-ram as it is on the GPU core. Also, these overclock numbers are right about what reviewers were getting, so I doubt its a lottery issue, though I will happily stand corrected if we start seeing some 290x cards with +250 MHz on the core. It will be interesting to see if non-reference PCB/power delivery can help with the overclocks though I am not going to hold my breath on that one. Truth is that some cards overclock well and some don't, if you go back to the GTX 480 that card didn't overclock well either and was also hot as balls, if you will excuse the language.

I tried with the fan at 100% and the thermals stayed pretty much within the 92c range, now i think its just the heatsink just can't get that amount of heat to dissipate quick enough. With some nice heat pipes and a larger fin array it could get the heat away from the core giving more head room.

[Saladin]

I tried with the fan at 100% and the thermals stayed pretty much within the 92c range, now i think its just the heatsink just can't get that amount of heat to dissipate quick enough. With some nice heat pipes and a larger fin array it could get the heat away from the core giving more head room.

That is what everyone is hoping, though if it doesn't overclock well underwater it wont do it on air (still yet to see benchmarks with a waterblock on it). It is important to remember that even if you control the thermals it doesn't guarantee that you will be able to increase clock speed without producing an instability, at a certain point the card reaches its limit. Now not having seen benchmarks of the card underwater I cannot say one way or the other, however one can surmise that the card is closer to its overclocking limit than if it was inherently running at say 80C.

[Gunjob]

Interesting with the memory clocks, @ 1525Mhz its only stable underload, while underclocked to the desktop it causes flickers and issues, for complete stability i dialed it back to 1450Mhz.

[FernandoTeixeira]

 

 

it's over 9000c