AMD Radeon R9 and R7 Series - Overclocking

As mentioned, our non-stock sample of the R9 280X 3GB means we can't assess its overclocking capabilities in this review. However, for the R9 270X 2GB and R7 260X 2GB, we fired up MSI's Afterburner software to see how far we could push them.

The first thing we noticed was that neither card could have its voltage adjusted, even when telling the software to unlock it. Nevertheless, we maxed out the power limit to 120% in both cases and got cracking.

For the R7 260X 2GB, we were able to increase the core clock speed from 1.1GHz to 1.24GHz, an improvement of around 13 percent. Meanwhile, we got the memory all the way up to a mighty 1.8GHz (7.2GHz effective), which is not only an 11 percent boost but the maximum clock that the software would allow us to use by default. This is pretty impressive when you consider that the card's memory chips are not actively cooled either. These efforts were rewarded by healthy gains in both Battlefield 3 and Crysis 3 that put the card almost (but not quite) on par with the Radeon HD 7850 2GB.

As for the R9 270X 2GB, we settled on clock speeds of 1.19GHz for the core and 1.6GHz (6.4GHz effective) for the memory. These represent boosts of 13 and 14 percent respectively, so both cards appear to overclock to similar levels. This memory frequency is also just 100MHz away from the maximum permitted by Afterburner (without unlocking it). The new speeds were especially effective in Battlefield 3, where the card improved its performance by 14 percent, pulling ahead of the GTX 660 Ti 2GB in the process, which is a brilliant result, although the 10 percent jump in Crysis 3 wasn't enough to do the same thing.

Overall, we're impressed by the abilities of the R7 260X 2GB and R9 270X 2GB when it comes to overclocking. That said, not every card overclocks the same, and our R9 270X 2GB came with a note to say that it had passed testing at specific overclocks, indicating that at least some internal testing on AMD's part had been done on it before we received it.