R9 290 VRM TIM material thickness recommendation

[Headfoot]

Yeah, mine do 1025 on -12mv for example. I've seen people get as high as 1100 core on stock volts

 

[Killrose]

So I set the clocks GPU 1050mhz and mem 1395mhz and all was well for better than 2hrs gaming. I then set GPU 1075mhz and left mem alone. Saw a few sprites running Furmark stress test (I know, I know we talked about this) so I put it back to 1050mhz and set the mem to 1425mhz and ran Furmark and saw some artifacts. I shut down Furmark and as I was loading Crimson drivers to get into overdrive settings the screen went black and I could not make it past user screen picture to load Windows 10 on several re-starts.

I had to put an HD 7850 I have into the second pcie slot to get into windows and removed the Crimson driver package, ran disp drivr uninstaller in safe mode, shut down, put the 290 in and booted up just fine although I was a little worried. Have the card set at 1025mhz gpu and 1395mem now and that's probably where it will stay.

 

[Headfoot]

When you're doing memory overclocking you should run something like 3DMark, because the 290 has memory error compensation. So essentially, when you overclock the memory, it will re-try the failed operations reducing performance even though it will still appear functional. So you have to find the sweet spot for memory oc as opposed to maxing it out. 3DMark will show you whether the score goes up or down as you change clocks, letting you know whether your mem OC has error compensation kicking in or not

Core overclock you just max out like I had written earlier.

You will get the majority of your performance gains out of the core overclock, i'd say its either 75/25 or even 80/20 in favor of the core clock. At times you'll find that you can get a bit more core clock by reducing memory clock just a bit and that trade off is usually worth it on the 290.

This is why overclocking is fun!

 

[Killrose]

I used Furmark because it was a quick and dirty test I suppose. I was surprised that it reacted like it did, I thought these cards clocked at the lower speeds on start up and shocked that it locked up on a re-start. I normally try a 15mhz or so change and as I start to get close to the edge 5mhz. I also did not increase the power limit OC setting in Crimson driver, mainly because I was trying to keep it at the coolest running setting.