AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Fiji And HBM Put To The Test
Overclocking The Fury X
We’ve only had our hands on the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X card for a relatively short time (a few days), but were able to spend a little while overlcocking to see what kind of additional performance we could squeeze out of the card. Due to time constraints, we kept things simple, but were still able to massage a few additional MHz from the card’s GPU. Unfortunately, memory clocks can’t be manipulated with the current drivers.
To overlcock the Fury X, we used the Overdrive tools built right into AMD’s drivers. First we cranked up the power target by 30%, maxed out the fan speed (which didn't seem to do anything) and kicked up the GPU by 10%. Things initially ran well at these settings, so we pushed the GPU clock up further (to 20%), but games would immediately crash. We incrementally backed down the GPU by a couple of MHz at a time, but continued to experience instability and ultimately ended up right back where we started with a 10% overclock--at least according to the drivers.
While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw some small improvements in performance in the games / settings we tested, but the improvements weren't there on every single run. We suspect there’s still some work to do on the drivers to ensure Overdrive is working as it should at all times. And we assume that memory overclocking will be introduced at some point as well based on some conversations we’ve had with reps from AMD, though we don’t have official confirmation on that front.
