Gadgetory

everyone I'm Steve from gamers Nexus Don and today we're talking about the r9 390 and r9 380 I know it's old news now that the fury X is out and speaking of which we've got to fury axes here on the table as stand-ins because I had to send the 390 and 380 back as part of our reviewer agreement with sapphire so we're doing a retro look I already overclocked 390 and 380 it's already on the website but haven't published it yet and that's what we're looking at today for for video format of the overclocking and procedures for the 390 and 380 it's pretty easy we basically use AMD's overdrive at the time of review which was when these cards launched there were no proper tools available for for over volting there's only and these overdrive which allows overclocking of the core clock the memory clock and the power percent target increase which is the same as Maxwell's power percent increase he basically just increased the percent power allowance over TDP over talking the video cards will impact a few things were mostly changing the memory and core clock the power percent increase allows these jumps in the clock rates but doesn't really change watch house the obviously draws a bit more power but that's sort of the end of the story there and the base power is to 75 watts for the 390 the r9 390 so that's TDP and the 380 is 190 watts which is actually a slight improvement over the 280 both of these cards are refresh is of the 200 series so the 285 would be one of them the 290 and I'm using the word refresh because a little bit different than a rebadged with a refresh andy has taken the same architecture and slightly improved it by doing a few things like overclocking it by an extra 50 megahertz and things like that and because of this overclock there's not a lot of room for us to further overclock it because they've already done it factory to really the level that the sort of old architecture will allow at this point overclocking the core clock will impact the texture fill rate which is a product of the TM use the texture mapping units and the core clock you multiply them to get the texture fill rate and then it also just generally speeds things up a bit overclock from the memory speeds up memory transactions so this actually have a slight impact on the non HBM cards and that's worth noting here only the fury X is HBM right now high bandwidth memory so the 390 and 380 that we looked at a couple weeks ago when I did this overclocking test we're on the more traditional gddr5 this chart shows the performance output gained by the small over clocks that were done so what you're looking at is the increment for each overclock and you see them in steps and they're performed with two tests there is a short pass basically five minutes does it work and then there's an endurance test that's 25 minutes to see if it actually survives in the long term when playing a game you can see that we increase the power percent target by the maximum 20% allowed for the r9 380 and 50% for the r9 390 and the clock rate of the 380 we were able to get a total overclock of 8.4 percent which is certainly not huge and the overclock for the 93 98 point 5 percent any more than this and we suddenly exhibited instability which in this instance is described as red flickering and textures flickering artifacting visually and then eventually a driver failure if you go too far over the line so that's where our limiter was with these tests whether or not this impact performance is really shown in these charts and and it's kind of questionable whether it's worth your time so for the 390 and 380 overclocked looking at the benchmark charts the FPS you see about a 1 to 7 percent framerate gain frame rates per second for the AMD cards when overclocked and again this is because they've already eked out as much as possible in terms of the core clock for the new series over the existing architecture on the old series so at best you get 7 percent in our testing eyes maybe 8 percent at Absolute Max and your increase increasing the power draw increasing the abuse on the GPU itself so whether that trade-off is worth 4 to 5 frames per second is really somewhat questionable I certainly wouldn't do it but if you'd like to it's not hard it's very easy with and these overdrive utility there are tools that exist with voltage changes as well I haven't used any of them for the 300 series because we don't have 300 cards anymore but that's where the results live for the AMD 300 series overclocking to items that are worth notes the power draw increase I've gotten this chart as well is under 20 watts additional for system peak load for both of these cards when overclocked so not a huge power draw game but they're pretty high at the the 275 and 190 watt range anyway so you do get a bit more draw out of that when overclocked and then for the temperatures these sapphire coolers are actually again very impressive this was the thing I was most impressed with when I benchmarked and reviewed the 393 a week or two ago was the sapphire cooler and in this case we can see if they're effectively the same temperature with the overclock and a lot of that is because the the fans will increase their speed based on demand of the GPU they're trying to keep it at a certain temperature and in this case it's about 45 Celsius delta T which is 60 65 66 absolute temperature overall the overclocking experience with the 390 and 380 feels somewhat pointless we only get one to 7% frame rate increase which in the real world translates to maybe 5 frames per second increase so if you're playing a game and you're borderline 60 55 to 60 you're really not going to notice for the most part you'll see a tear every now and then but it's it's certainly not in my view worth the added abuse to the card it's definitely something I would recommend try and if you have a MD devices it's certainly worth playing around with to learn about overclocking but I wouldn't push it at the absolute maximum power percent target and core clock for long periods of time because it does wear down the GPU and this isn't just a MD I'm talking about this is anything this is Intel CPUs AMD CPUs and videos GPUs any kind of overclocking does add abuse to the chip especially if you're over bolting it can kill it early it decreases the longevity of the silicon die in there and compared to the gtx 980ti that i reviewed recently though we're talking for the 300 series is is certainly a bit lower it's not as exciting the gtx 980ti about a 40% clock rate gain which is a noteworthy performance gain when overclocked and the 980ti hybrid which is the liquid cooled one can overclock even higher than reference because it's on a liquid and that's that's a lot of room to play with that gets to be fairly substantial in your frame rate as indicated by the 980ti hybrid outperforming the Titan X which is a much more expensive card by a couple hundred dollars so in that instance overclocking is worth it but you still have these same warnings in place and the same concerns of damaging longevity of the chip for the 390 and 380 it's not really too worth it unless you just want to play around the fury X is what we're targeting next so do stay tuned for that and if you like this content as always you can support the journalism research and all the videos and writing and produced by the team on patreon check that link in the post roll video and I will see you all next time