Overclocking the r9 390

[slag]

What voltages are considered "safe" for this card? I only went to + 50 mv, but with adequate cooling, is 100 mv overvolt ok? Does overclocking the memory provide substantial boost or just the core clock speed? I have an xfx card with dual dissipation cooling. I had minor artifacting at 1140 clock speed at + 50 mv and wondered if it's prudent or foolish to increase the voltage more.

Thanks

 

[flopper]

+100 is ok.
but every card behaves differently.

bought a sapphire 390 nitro today.
1140mhz at +81mv and it runs cool and silent.
1500p more firestrike vs my old 290 that crashed and burned.

 

[tolis626]

Well, one good thing about overclocking Hawaii chips (Might as well be the only good thing about overclocking them compared to other cards 😛 ) is that they can take quite a lot of punishment. I mean, you wanna throw more voltage at them? They can take it. Temperatures are getting higher? They are designed to run at up to 95 damn degrees Celsius. You can hammer them all day long with benchmarks while overvolted and overclocked, they'll take it. Not that NVidia GPUs don't take overclocking well or something, but I wouldn't push that much voltage through any NVidia GPU (Maybe on the beefier PCB models while water cooled).

With that said, GCN reaches a point of diminishing returns quickly. My MSI 390x does 1210MHz at +100mV, but at the cost of power consumption and heat. Seriously, it peaked at around 340 watts (around 300 average) for the GPU and close to 600 watts for the system. Not to mention that I slowly boiled in that room. I have now set it to 1050MHz and -75mV and it's quieter, cooler and WAY more power efficient. It consumes like 175 watts average (Never went above 200), as if I have a 980 in there. Nice stuff.

Now, I will apply my overclocked profile when playing Witcher 3 or games that are as demanding as that, but for everything else, I'll back down. That's just my 2 cents though.

 

[casiofx]

Well, one good thing about overclocking Hawaii chips (Might as well be the only good thing about overclocking them compared to other cards 😛 ) is that they can take quite a lot of punishment. I mean, you wanna throw more voltage at them? They can take it. Temperatures are getting higher? They are designed to run at up to 95 damn degrees Celsius. You can hammer them all day long with benchmarks while overvolted and overclocked, they'll take it. Not that NVidia GPUs don't take overclocking well or something, but I wouldn't push that much voltage through any NVidia GPU (Maybe on the beefier PCB models while water cooled).

With that said, GCN reaches a point of diminishing returns quickly. My MSI 390x does 1210MHz at +100mV, but at the cost of power consumption and heat. Seriously, it peaked at around 340 watts (around 300 average) for the GPU and close to 600 watts for the system. Not to mention that I slowly boiled in that room. I have now set it to 1050MHz and -75mV and it's quieter, cooler and WAY more power efficient. It consumes like 175 watts average (Never went above 200), as if I have a 980 in there. Nice stuff.

Now, I will apply my overclocked profile when playing Witcher 3 or games that are as demanding as that, but for everything else, I'll back down. That's just my 2 cents though.

I have to say, 300watts average for 1210Mhz is pretty good for Hawaii. That's like 60-70watts more from stock but with 15% OC

 

[tential]

How are you testing that tolis626 and what is the power slider at for that?

 

[tolis626]

I have to say, 300watts average for 1210Mhz is pretty good for Hawaii. That's like 60-70watts more from stock but with 15% OC

On average, it's a bit lower than 300 watts. But yeah, it's good. It just stinks when compared to my other profile that's 1050MHz with -75mV. That's the efficient side of things. I'll probably use the 1200MHz one all winter, and switch back to the 1050MHz one when it's hot. again.

PS : 1210MHz did give some (rare) artifacts, so I backed down to 1200MHz. Maybe with some aux voltage added I could get it stable because there's some serious vdrop.

How are you testing that tolis626 and what is the power slider at for that?

The power slider is always at +50%, except for the efficiency oriented profile that's at 0%. I usually measure power draw for the GPU with GPU-z. I know it's no the most accurate way to do it, but my kill-a-watt seems to agree with it, so I do trust it for now. If there's a better way, I'd be glad to hear it.