XFX R9 280X 3GB Graphics Card Review

Overclocking

The XFX R9 280X DD BE OC comes with a significant OC out of the box. It also comes with an unlocked voltage so we thought we’d push it as far as possible with stock voltage, then push that voltage up to the maximum 1.3 volts and see what else we could get out of it. At stock voltage I was hugely disappointed with the core overclock, just 20MHz was possible before the GPU would crash. The memory fared much better reaching an impressive 1735MHz.

Unlocking the voltage should lead to extra performance right? Well in our case not really. We already knew we had a rubbish overclocker when we couldn’t get more than 1120MHz off the stock volts but with 1.3 volts we were hoping to get to at least 1175MHz. Sadly we were only able to reach 1125MHz with the same memory speed as stock volts. Thats just 5MHz more – pretty abysmal. I know the HD 7970 was almost guaranteed to get to 1125MHz and potentially as high as 1250MHz/1300MHz if you had a good chip. The R9 280X is supposed to be more refined than the HD 7970 so should be capable of at least 1150MHz and potentially up to 1300MHz again. That didn’t prove to be the case so clearly ours is just a dud overclocker or the BIOS had some issues with it.