OVERCLOCKING
As mentioned earlier, AMD employs a newer system of clock speeds which directly impacts how overclocking works. We discuss this new dynamic clock system in our reference Radeon R9 290X review. For this article, we use ASUS’ own OC tool, GPU Tweak. This software gives us access to the GPU Clock, Voltage, Memory Clock, Power Limit and Fan Speed.
Our card’s specs are listed below:
Contrary to our reference card review, we managed to bring up our ASUS Radeon R9 290X to 1125/1450Mhz without any voltage adjustment.
Bumping up the voltage, we managed to get a benchmark stable 1250/1500Mhz clocks on our cards. This is a great improvement and with some intense cooling could really bring incredible performance but it just wasn’t game stable enough for our usage.
For testing purposes, we will use a game-stable frequency 1150/1475Mhz as pictured in our GPU Tweak screenshot.
6 Comments
I’m sorry but it is rather disingenuous to rate graphics performance by maximum FPS, instead of Average FPS. I’m getting the feeling that you guys don’t play a lot of games, to not realize something as technically fundamental as that.
Looking at the graphs, I don’t see that the graphics performance was rated by maximum FPS. Are we reading the same article?
Please take a look at the last chart on page #4 for example. It is for “Torchlight II”. The Asus 290X DCU2O OC is positioned at the bottom of the chart based on it’s max FPS (158) being the lowest, even though by it’s average FPS (150.64) it should be placed at the 2nd position. Similarly, in the chart for “Bioshock Infinite” (2560×1440, Ultimate), the 290s are placed at the top even though the 780s have a significantly higher average frame rate. If you look carefully at the charts for other games, it becomes obvious that the performance is being rated based on max FPS, which is technically unsound, because max FPS numbers are based on random performance spikes and hence are never a fair representation of a GPU’s true capability.
Also, it is important to note that high max FPS but low average FPS is indicative of performance inconsistency of the GPU under that particular workload, which means unpleasant stuttering with V-Sync turned on, and significantly profuse screen tearing with V-Sync turned off. Both the scenarios lead to a much poorer user experience, as any regular PC gamer would tell you.
For comparison, please visit a proper hardware review site (e.g. Anandtech.com, Tomshardware.com, Guru3d.com, etc) and look into their benchmark charts, where the Max FPS is often not even mentioned.
We used to only display average FPS for the comparative charts but when readers started demanding they wanted to see both min and max in the graphs.
That said, I can see the flaw in this and we will devise another format for our GPU performance charts.
Cheers. Apart from the aforementioned problem I appreciate the to-the-point article and the format of your site.
Appreciate the inputs also. I look forward to using your advice in our upcoming GPU reviews.