Radeon HD 7790 review

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Overclocking the graphics card

Overclocking the graphics card

As most of you know, with most video cards you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. Typically you can tweak on core clock frequencies and voltages.

What do we need?
One of the best tools for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own AfterBurner which will work with 90% of the graphics cards out there. We can really recommend it, download here.

Where should we go?
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard, but it really can 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 600 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest that you don't increase the frequency any higher than 30 to 50 MHz.

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 10-15 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 20 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... do it at your own risk.

 

Original This sample Overclocked 
Core Clock: 1000MHz Core Clock: 1075MHz Core Clock: 1200MHz
Boost Clock: 1000MHz Boost Clock: 1075MHz Boost Clock: 1200MHz
Memory Clock: 6000MHz Memory Clock: 6400MHz Memory Clock:6400MHz

The Sapphire R7790 is really fun to tweak and play with and you will not be disappointed by the results. Coming from a reference 1000 MHz, to 1075 MHz factory overclocked is already nice. The reality is that we had it running stable at 1200 MHz with just a few tweaks:

You can use any tweak utility of preference of course, I'm just very handy with AfterBurner hence I use it all the time. But here's what you need to do:

  • Increase power limiter to 120%
  • Unfortunatekly we had no voltage control
  • Increase core clock frequency to 1200 MHz
  • You can leave the fan at default fan RPM
  • Memory could not be clocked higher
In total we just gained another 5~10% in performance. Have a peek at the results when overclocked.

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Above, Sleeping Dogs, same maxed out image quality settings as before yet now with added overclock results. DX11 High Quality mode in-game AA enabled in-game AF enabled. As you can see that's free extra performance.

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Above, 3DMark 11. There is an additional bump in this fairly GPU limited software. The interesting thing is that once overclocked this 139 EUR card would perform roughly at R7850 performance.

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And here's Aliens vs Predator, which was showing a smaller performance increase. Likely the power boost function kicked in and the game then reached its maximum TDP (and lowered the clock frequency to match the desired power signature).

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