OVERCLOCKING
As mentioned earlier, AMD employs a newer system of clock speeds which directly impacts how overclocking works. Most companies provide their own overclocking solution (Sapphire TriXX in this instance) for more intuitive overclocking but we’ll take a closer look at AMD’s new method for now, we’ll handle 3rd party OC tools on another article.
The new R9 cards will feature dynamic clocks, handled by the new Powertune 2.0, which makes it so that clocks are now tuned to how much noise and power the user demands. The R9 290 X features two modes of operation, Quiet Mode and Uber Mode, wherein Quiet Mode locks in the fan speed to 40% and Uber Mode bumps it to 55%. With regards to the new dynamic clock setup, this means that clocks will stay at 1Ghz if the card maintains 95*C at 40% fan speed for Quiet mode and at 55% fan speed for Uber mode. Depending on your game, the effects of these thresholds will vary. Note that the cards will not go past 1000Mhz as there is no boost functionality.
Pictured above is the dual-BIOS switch. By default, the card ships with quiet mode enabled but toggling the display puts the card into uber mode.
In terms of tuning, users can increase or decrease the power and fan speed limits according to their taste, increase and decreasing performance in proportion to the settings used.
Our reference card’s specs are listed below:
Unfortunately, we hit a very large snag when overclocking this reference card hence no overclocking performance results will be present in our tests.
OVERCLOCKING FAILED!
Our Sapphire R9 290X sample crashes at the slightest overclock, even going unstable in Crossfire even when its the primary card. This is very, very disappointing but due to time constraints and availability, we were not able to get a more stable card for our testing. That said, all the results in the following section will be from reference stock settings.