Overclocks and undervolts on a R290 discussion

[Chrisoldinho]

Interested to see what everyone has managed using stock volts on their R290's and also if they have attempted to undervolt, what they could manage.

On stock volts mine will do 1075 / 1375, unsure if this is if this is good or not but from the few reports I have seen, it feels average.

I would be interested to know what others have achieved using stock clocks and with increased voltage.

Memory overclocks seem to be tied heavily to the core voltage I am finding...

Undervolting wise, has anyone tried this? I can undervolt by 25mv before it begins to become unstable at stock clocks (random screen artifacts), again I am inclined to believe this is more memory related than core, as this is easily fixed by lowering memory clock speeds.

 

[LtMatt]

Bump. Interested to see if anyone has tried this and what their results were like.

 

[tommybhoy]

All I can remember off hand is 1240/1500 (MHz)+150mv 290 (X) at a highly respectable ~65c under an AC Xtreme.

I never tend to push vram clocks as that's the best bet to gub your card, so I just left it there.

Undervolting doesn't hold that much interest apart from the crazy 7950 boost setting that was way ott.

Was running stock 290X clocks until last night when I pushed the slider downsampling thingy up in bf4 and sat the core at 1150MHz+50mv and all was well.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Doing mining my best speeds are at around 1500Mhz mem/980-1000 on the core. At stock voltage one card easily hits 95C and throttles(though not much) it fluctuates between aroudn 930-980mhz and barely reduces performance. THe other card sitting lower runs at full speed(and higher intensity as the monitors aren't connected to it) at only 85C full load with no throttling.

At 980Mhz clocks I can undervolt easily to -62mv, which is different on both cards, but it drops temps probably 7-8C, stops the hotter card from throttling, drops power usage by 50-70W(it constantly fluctuates so difficult to get a base line reading at any particular voltage).

Undervolting on a reference heatsink improves performance by dropping heat and temp under load. I've not really done any overclocking yet due to having watercooling waiting to be set up, seems a bit pointless spending ages finding the best temp/voltage/clock combo when it will change after. However I tried 1100/1500Mhz, it runs fine to about -30mv, lower voltage caused a lock up.

At stock I can easily do the -100mv maximum that Afterburner gives me, it drops temps even further, means I can run the fan way quieter and still be quite a bit under 90C.

Basically my cards under volt pretty well, dropping heat/power usage and increasing actual performance due to reduced throttling.

 

[Chrisoldinho]

Doing mining my best speeds are at around 1500Mhz mem/980-1000 on the core. At stock voltage one card easily hits 95C and throttles(though not much) it fluctuates between aroudn 930-980mhz and barely reduces performance. THe other card sitting lower runs at full speed(and higher intensity as the monitors aren't connected to it) at only 85C full load with no throttling.

At 980Mhz clocks I can undervolt easily to -62mv, which is different on both cards, but it drops temps probably 7-8C, stops the hotter card from throttling, drops power usage by 50-70W(it constantly fluctuates so difficult to get a base line reading at any particular voltage).

Undervolting on a reference heatsink improves performance by dropping heat and temp under load. I've not really done any overclocking yet due to having watercooling waiting to be set up, seems a bit pointless spending ages finding the best temp/voltage/clock combo when it will change after. However I tried 1100/1500Mhz, it runs fine to about -30mv, lower voltage caused a lock up.

At stock I can easily do the -100mv maximum that Afterburner gives me, it drops temps even further, means I can run the fan way quieter and still be quite a bit under 90C.

Basically my cards under volt pretty well, dropping heat/power usage and increasing actual performance due to reduced throttling.

Far better than mine, what ASIC is your card? Mine is 67% which is pretty pants..

On a plus note now the card has bedded in a little I can do 1075/1400 on stock volts, the memory is the issue past this unless I overclock.

As for undervolting, I still struggle but can now do -41 on stock, possibly because I have a "boost" edition card and it's increasing the core voltage higher than 947 without me knowing.

 

[cmsbfent]

After being too festive over the past few days, and now feeling like death, I've spent the day playing with overclocking my msi 290. Got it just before Xmas, and even though very powerful, it was throttling due to airflow at a guess, and reaching the dreaded 95 degrees after about 20 mins of gaming

So, bought myself an ek block, and now it's a totally different card : )

Overclocking wise, I'm finding it's quite game/bench dependant. I've ran heaven at 1205/1660, with the memory increases giving positive results (in regards to the memory correction I've read about), with a voltage bump to 1.315. Temps under water at that speed top out at around 70 degrees. Stock speeds and temps are around 55 degrees for comparison. Now, heaven loops and loops with no issues, getting me thinking it's stable

Then, with the same settings, using 3dmark11, it's instantly obvious there's pretty bad artefacting going on. So, lowering the speeds to 1150/1550 seems to fix it

But no. I then started up tomb raider. The benchmark runs and loops fine, but in game, it crashes a lot. Lowering further to 1100/1550 and it's all good

Could add more voltage, to see if it makes any difference, but I'm not sure what's classed as safe yet, so I'm leaving it at that. It's running silently, and is warming my house nicely. Coming from a gtx570, it's a hell of a leap : )

Good job ati/amd (apart from your insanely poor cooling solution)