Overclocking a R9 290

Hello all,

Noob here. You've been warned.

So I just ordered a Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC Version. Should be here relatively soon. I'm upgrading from a HD 6870. I never did any GPU overclocking previously so I'm not really sure how to do it or how it works. Any advice or suggestions are welcome.

My system specs are:

i7 4790k
8GB GSkill RAM
MSI Z87 MPower
SeaSonic Bronze 620W PSU

Grab MSI Afterburner and Unigine Heaven

I've seen the MSI app before. Not familiar with the other. I'm assuming they will allow me to overclock safely based on my system.

Unigine Heaven is an application to test your overclock. Its a benchmark, but its pretty stressful and what a lot of people here use to test their overclocks on the video card.

In MSI AB, just raise the power limit all the way up, raise the core clock in 25 Mhz increments, run Heaven benchmark. If it completes and there are no artifacts, raise 25 Mhz more test again... rinse and repeat. Once you hit a limit (benchmark freezes/shows artifacts) you have two choices. Back down and call it a day on the core, or raise volts .05 and keep pushing. Keep that GPU under 90C while running heaven and all will be well. Keep the voltage under 1.35v. You should be able to see the voltage in MSI AB if not, check GPUz sensor tab.

As far as the memory goes, same story there except with most cards you do not have memory voltage to raise.

Thanks man. I'll try this out and see how it goes.

I dunno if this helps as im new to this card as well.. However In MSI AB I cant figure out how to turn on the setting to let me overvolt the gpu core.. Its greyed out and the program is so shiny and blingy it makes it hard to find buttons.. I wish they would make it simplier.. But using sapphires Trixx program I was able to get my tri-x o/c to 1150/1400 so far and ive only raised the voltage +50 so the core is only at 1.20v.

Going from 1,000 to 1100 gives me about 4 maybe 5 more fps in Witcher 3. The memory though I noticed doesn't do anything fps wise

You can revert afterburner to the classic skin. I find the current default skin unusable and obnoxious. It should be under settings/user interface if I recall right. There is also a setting for unlocking voltage control, it is off by default.

Many games don't show any improvement from added memory bandwidth, so you either have to test in a game by game basis or just ignore it and focus on core overclocks instead.