XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition OC 8GB Video Card Review

XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition Overclocking

If you want to get even more performance from the XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition OC 8GB video card you can do some manual overclocking. XFX doesn’t offer its own in-house designed overclocking utility for use with their graphics cards, but you can use a third party utility to do so. We are using Sapphire TriXX version 5.2.1 to overclock our Radeon R9 300 series card. This is a powerful overclocking tool that allows you to adjust clock speeds, over-volting, power limits, fan speeds and even the ability to save your favorite settings to one of four available profiles.

The image above shows you the default settings that you’ll see after installing and running the Sapphire TriXX utility on the XDX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition OC 8GB. The default operating speed for this card is properly shown at 1050MHz on the core clock and the memory is running at 1500MHz or 6000MHz effective.

We increased the core clock on our card in 10MHz increments and found that we were able to achieve a 100MHz overclock without any adjustments to the cards GPU voltage. Overclocking the memory doesn’t yield much performance, so we increased it by 100MHz and called it a day. This meant that the XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition OC was running at 1150MHz on the GPU clock and the memory at 6400MHz effective, which is good for over 400GB/s of memory bandwidth.

By overclocking the XFX Radeon R9 390 BE OC 8GB video card we were able to play Battlefield 4 with an average of 35.5 FPS on our 4K display. This is an improvement of 6.9% from our 9.5% core clock increase. We tested with the power limit at +5% and +50% and saw no difference in performance on this particular benchmark by jacking up the power limit. Raising the power limit did show some changes at the power meter though…

• Stock: 448 Watts
• Overclocked w/ +5% Power Limit: 470Watts
• Overclocked w/ +50% Power Limit: 501 Watts

The power usage of the card jumped up by over 50 Watts by raising the power limit as high as possible! Just something to keep in mind when overclocking.