PowerColor Red Devil RX 470 Graphics Card Review

Overclocking and Overclocked Performance

As per usual, before analysing the overclocking headroom, the average boost clock to recorded to determine if there are any drop-offs from the quoted maximum. Unlike the Sapphire reference model, the graphics card maintains its impressive 1270MHz boost and never dips below this figure. This allows for improved performance and a smoother user-experience.

Overclocking the PowerColor Red Devil RX 470 was an interesting process and I initially managed to get 1375MHz functional using Unigine Valley as a baseline. Unfortunately, this didn’t apply to gaming scenarios, and I had to scale back my expectations. After performing additional testing, the boost clock was reduced to 1335MHz which is a decent enhancement over the 1270MHz factory overclock. Saying that, I expected more and there’s probably another 10-20MHz available with a higher voltage. Please note, the highest voltage possible in AMD Wattman was applied to determine the card’s potential. On another note, improving the memory on Polaris couldn’t be easier and from my experience, you should be able to reach at least 1780MHz.

Here is the screenshot which compares the ultimate overclock mode and manual boost.

Ashes of the Singularity

After the overclock was applied, the graphics card’s average frame-rate increased by a minor amount but it was enough to dethrone an overclocked Sapphire Nitro+ RX 470.

Doom

In Doom, the average frame-rate increased by 6 while the minimum figure received a monumental boost. I’m not entirely sure why the minimum frame-rate shot up but perhaps it’s due to the complicated benchmarking procedure.

Just Cause 3

The performance benefit of overclocking throughout the Just Cause 3 benchmark is fairly small and within a margin of error. Nevertheless, it’s always welcome to have a higher frame-rate even if you’re unlikely to notice the difference outside of monitoring applications.