Sapphire ITX Compact R9 380 Review

Overclocking

We like to test how far graphics cards can be pushed. Overclocking can damage your hardware, so please be careful. Do not use the clock rates we achieve as an indicator of what you'll see; no overclock is guaranteed, and your results will most certainly vary from ours.

To adjust this card's settings, I used MSI Afterburner. It supports almost every card out there, and Sapphire doesn’t bundle its own branded tool.

The first thing I always do is adjust the power limit all the way up. For this card, that limit is 20% above stock. From there, I began to increase the core frequency in increments of 10MHz. After each change, stability is tested by running 3DMark FireStrike, and the results of each run are recorded. This process continues until the test either starts reporting lower results or artifacts start to appear on-screen.

Sapphire ships this card with a stock core clock of 980MHz. Impressively, though, despite its compact frame and single fan, we managed to get 1100MHz out of ours.

Once the GPU's maximum clock was established, the memory was adjusted. Bumping it up by 20MHz at a time (from 1400), the maximum stable frequency ended up being 1500MHz. The test did complete at 1510MHz, but our test results slid back the other way.

With the GPU set at 1100MHz and memory clocked at 1510MHz, we realized decent gains in 3DMark. More important, in every game other than Shadow of Mordor, the overclocked card managed to improve average frame rates by between three and almost 10.