PowerColor Radeon RX 5500 XT Red Dragon 8GB review

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Overclocking the graphics card

Overclocking the graphics card

Most graphics cards you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. Typically you can tweak the core clock frequencies and voltages. By increasing the frequency of the video card's memory and GPU, we can make the video card increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard, but it can really be done in less than a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners, to not increase the frequency any higher than 5% on the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 1500 MHz then I suggest that you don't increase the frequency any higher than 25 to 50 MHz step by step.

More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually, when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 25 MHz and leave it at that. Usually, when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 25 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today's tested card anyway, but we'll still show it. All in all... you always overclock at your own risk.

  

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Reference (FE) This sample Overclocked 
Game Clock: ~1845 MHz Game Clock: 1845 MHz Game Clock: ~1950 MHz
Memory Clock: 14000 MHz Memory Clock: 14000 MHz Memory Clock: 14.880 MHz
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  * Game clock is the actual value measured on our side - not the advertised one.

With AfterBurner (download) you can tweak the card both manually and with the new curve based OC scanner. You'll see that most cards out there will all tweak to roughly the same levels due to all kinds of hardware protection kicking in.

We applied the following settings in Afterburner:

  • Core Voltage n/a
  • Power Limiter: +20%
  • GPU clock @ 2000 MHz (dynamic boost then hovers at ~1950 MHz)
  • Mem clock 1860 MHz (=14.880 GHz effective), AMD restricts this as maximum memory clock frequency.
  • FAN RPM default

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The results show respective default clocked results plotted in percentages. To the far right where you can see "Aver Difference %", this is the result of the four games tested and averaged out.  


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