Overclocking XFX's R9 285 Black Edition
When it comes to overclocking, luck of the draw is one of the most important factors. Despite variables beyond our control, we're still interested in seeing how far we can push XFX's Radeon R9 285 Black Edition.
Even though XFX claims to sell the highest factory-overclocked Radeon R9 285, 975MHz isn't particularly aggressive. Let's see how far we can go with the Catalyst Control Center's OverDrive tool.
With the card's power envelope limit increased to 120%, we were able to crank up the GPU clock the maximum-allowed 17.9%, which corresponds to 1150MHz. While we could boot and start testing at that speed, it wasn't stable. We therefore backed off to a 14% boost, yielding 1112MHz. We increased the memory clock from 1375 to 1550MHz, however, that hurt our 3DMark score. So, we dropped that overclock to 1500MHz (6000MT/s effective).
The 1112MHz GPU overclock represents a 196MHz bump, which is sizable. The 50MHz memory overclock has much less of an impact. Nevertheless, the combined effects take our 3DMark Fire Strike graphics score to 9148, just shy of a 20% performance increase. That gets us into Radeon R9 280X territory.
