We also spent a little time overlcocking to see what kind of additional performance we could squeeze out of the AMD Radeon R9 380X. We kept things simple, and used the tools built right into AMD's drivers, but were still able to massage a few additional MHz from the card’s GPU and memory, which helped boost performance quite a bit.
To overclock the Radeon R9 380X, we hit the Overdrive menu available in AMD’s drivers. First we cranked up the power target by 20% and kicked up the GPU and memory clocks a few MHz at a time until our test system was no longer stable Ultimately, we got another 8% out of the GPU -- which resulted in 1123MHz -- and were able to take the memory clock to 1675MHz (6.7Gbps effective data rate).
While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw some incremental improvements in performance with the games / settings we tested. While overclocked the R9 380X inches closer to the GeForce GTX 970's performance, though it wasn't quite able to catch the more expensive card. The delta separating the cards shrinks considerably though.
