MSI Radeon RX 580 Gaming X review - Overclocking The Graphics Card

Overclocking The Graphics Card

Traditional overclocking - 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. By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second.
 

Original	This sample	Overclocked
Boost Clock: 1267 MHz	Boost Clock: 1290 MHz	Max Boost Clock: 1500 MHz
Memory Clock: 8000 MHz	Memory Clock: 8000MHz	Memory Clock: 9000 MHz

You can use any tweaking utility of your preference of course. We use AfterBurner based on personal preference, all other brands like ASUS, Gigabyte and thus EVGA all have nice tweaking software available as well, it's just that advanced overlay and tweak functionality that AB offers that has my personal preference. Our applied tweak:

• Core: 1500 MHz
• Mem: 2250 (x4) = 9000 MHz
• Power +50%
• Voltage +96
• Fan 45%

 
In the above chart you can see relative performance difference in between a reference RX 480 card, then the AIB RX 580 card and then added the applied tweak and this our overclocked results plotted in percentage. The reference card is 100%. To the far right where you can see Aver Difference %, this is the result of the four games tested and averaged out.

So RX 580 card runs give or take 6% faster compared to RX 480. And once we teak it manually it is roughly 13% faster compared to the reference RX 480 card and thus 7% faster compared to the default MSI clocks. This was with the TDP Power limiter tweak maxed out. Below all overclock results, measured at WQHD.