To discover our samples overclocking abilities we used EVGA’s Precision X software and began raising power and thermal thresholds to the maximum allowed and then increased the voltage also to the maximum permitted. Then using Unigine’s Valley benchmark we began stability testing.
Whether you want to call it a refinement, a rebadge, or a refresh, the end results are the same: very little room for overclocking. This is true for all R9 390X’s and since MSI has already boosted the already ‘boosted’ base clock, manual overclocking will not be as rewarding with this Twin FROZR as it is on other MSI Gaming video cards we have looked at recently. That is a damn shame as this massive cooler had lots of thermal headroom left when we ran into the limits of what this Grenada XT core could do.
By the same token, you can consider MSI having already done most of the hard work for you as we were only able to boost the speeds from 1,100 to 1,175 – a mere 75MHz or 6.8%. The only real area that you can dig deeper by overclocking is on the RAM side of the equation. Yes MSI has also applied a 100MHz (effective) overclock to the RAM but you can easily push this up another 800 – 900MHz. Our particular sample liked 7,008 on the RAM which is additional 14.9% improvement on the factor overclock.
Equally impressive is this card can not only run at even higher than factory clocks speed it can stay at this new maximum frequency. Honestly, unless you have poor case air flow this card will only rarely down clock and that is something a reference design cannot boast. In fact if you modify the default fan profile to be more aggressive it probably will never thermally limit. We know our final overclock posted some of the coolest running numbers we have ever seen – mid 80s at maximum overclock.
As you can see the improvements do result in tangible real world performance boost, but will be only really noticeable in memory intensive games at higher resolutions. In other words if you run at 1080P resolution on games that are core speed reliant overclocking the factory overclock will only net minor – at best results. That however is neither here nor there as overclocking this card is pretty darn easy.
