MSI RX 480 Gaming X 4G Overclocking Help

d4rk5ky · Nov 20, 2016

Hey everyone, I am looking for some help with overclocking my msi rx 480 gaming x 4gb card. I am not sure if I am doing it wrong but I can't seem to achieve a stable overclock no matter what settings I try.

I am using afterburner to overclock and have added +100mv to the core voltage and +50% to the power limit and it seems stable at 1380/1950 but then after gaming for awhile my system will lock up. I have heard others say that you can get 1400/2200 but I'm sure that is only for lottery winners.

Is there a sure fire way to find out what the best settings are for my card?. I hope I didn't get the worst card of the bunch.

Thanks in advance for the help.

EarthDog · Nov 20, 2016

The only sure fire way is to test it.

Try not just dumping voltage into it and see if you can get any further.

Woomack · Nov 21, 2016

In most cases guaranteed stable clock will be about 1350MHz. Results above 1400MHz are usually not stable or users are showing results in single benchmarks. In games it's not really big difference if there is 1350 or 1400MHz ... 1-2FPS maybe, depends what game.
As ED said, it depends on the card but most of them are not overclocking much better when you set higher voltage. They react better to higher power limit but voltage is high enough to make up to 1400MHz.

Alaric · Nov 21, 2016

Your numbers are not uncommon for RX 480s. There is a thread or two where that has come up. Some folks here (Dolk) are using modified BIOS for the cards which seems to show some promise.

Saul Goodman · Nov 22, 2016

d4rk5ky said:
Hey everyone, I am looking for some help with overclocking my msi rx 480 gaming x 4gb card. I am not sure if I am doing it wrong but I can't seem to achieve a stable overclock no matter what settings I try.

I am using afterburner to overclock and have added +100mv to the core voltage and +50% to the power limit and it seems stable at 1380/1950 but then after gaming for awhile my system will lock up. I have heard others say that you can get 1400/2200 but I'm sure that is only for lottery winners.

You won't get 2200mhz on the memory with a 4GB card, they use junk memory chips. People talking about 2200mhz memory speeds are using 8GB cards.

Mine won't even clock to 1950mhz without causing instability so maybe it needs more memory voltage but I'm not going to bother doing that it's very possible to ruin the memory doing that.

Just leave the memory at 1850mhz and OC the core and see if it's stable for gaming, mine can do 1400mhz.

(Also seems like a fair bit of voltage you have to give yours, mine does 1380 with only +24mv. From stock 1300mhz core speed)

Woomack · Nov 22, 2016

If you check memory IC then you will see that most cards have the same series. Even AMD and Nvidia cards share the same IC for some years now. Difference is in voltages and timings. You can modify timings in BIOS editor but it takes a lot of work and some knowledge to set them right for both stability and good performance.

Higher RX480 series have about 1330-1338MHz as it's max clock considered as fully stable at recommended by AMD voltage. Max OC is always higher but in this case not much above 1350MHz and voltage adjustments are not helping much on some cards.

Saul Goodman · Nov 22, 2016

4GB cards have Hynix memory. 8GB cards have Samsung memory.

cvearl · Jan 23, 2017

d4rk5ky said:
Hey everyone, I am looking for some help with overclocking my msi rx 480 gaming x 4gb card. I am not sure if I am doing it wrong but I can't seem to achieve a stable overclock no matter what settings I try.

I am using afterburner to overclock and have added +100mv to the core voltage and +50% to the power limit and it seems stable at 1380/1950 but then after gaming for awhile my system will lock up. I have heard others say that you can get 1400/2200 but I'm sure that is only for lottery winners.

Is there a sure fire way to find out what the best settings are for my card?. I hope I didn't get the worst card of the bunch.

Thanks in advance for the help.

I would not touch the Memory. Leave it at stock on the 4GB card. But you should have no trouble starting with a basic overclock and try it for a week and then bump it again. With the MSI RX 480 Gaming X I started with 1330 core. No problems. Ran Heaven in loop for an hour. Stable. 72c and 130 - 150 watts. Played a bunch of Battlefront at 120fps. No issues. I have since bumped it to 1340. No other changes. Just using Wattman. Pushed the core % clock increased to 3%. That's all. 1340 stable. No changes to volts or power. 3 nights gaming stable. I really do not know if it is worth moving to 1360 - 1400 range as that will need higher fan speeds and power and volts. Will it be worth it going from 100 fps to 102? I like cool and quiet and having already a good 6% over stock.

Dirt Rally benchmark I am getting 96 fps average.
Firestrike I get 11,044 with my i7 2600k @ 4.2Ghz.
Witcher III I run around locked at 60 at mostly Ultra settings with vsync. Looks and runs amazing.

C.

NewbieOneKenobi · Jan 23, 2017

I'd normally get GPU stable before even touching mem too.

cvearl · Jan 23, 2017

Woomack said:
If you check memory IC then you will see that most cards have the same series. Even AMD and Nvidia cards share the same IC for some years now. Difference is in voltages and timings. You can modify timings in BIOS editor but it takes a lot of work and some knowledge to set them right for both stability and good performance.

Higher RX480 series have about 1330-1338MHz as it's max clock considered as fully stable at recommended by AMD voltage. Max OC is always higher but in this case not much above 1350MHz and voltage adjustments are not helping much on some cards.

So I am at 1340 (MSI Gaming X 4GB) with no other changes except to apply that clock. Stable in games and Heaven Bench for 1 hour. ~140 watts average during Heaven and ~71 C. If I wanted to get to 1350 or 1360 "just because", would I just bump power to 50% and is that ok for this model?

Thoughts?

Saul Goodman · Jan 23, 2017

cvearl said:
So I am at 1340 (MSI Gaming X 4GB) with no other changes except to apply that clock. Stable in games and Heaven Bench for 1 hour. ~140 watts average during Heaven and ~71 C. If I wanted to get to 1350 or 1360 "just because", would I just bump power to 50% and is that ok for this model?

Thoughts?

I run mine with +50% power limit 24/7. Stops any power throttling, and is the reason my card is table at 1400mhz with almost no actual voltage increase.

The MSI is a well built card and will handle it easily plus you have a 3 year warranty. The power restrictions are just to hold the card to a certain power usage/TDP.

Try to monitor the card while testing to see if it's holding the clocks you set, or it could be power throttling.

- - - Updated - - -

cvearl said:
So I am at 1340 (MSI Gaming X 4GB) with no other changes except to apply that clock. Stable in games and Heaven Bench for 1 hour. ~140 watts average during Heaven and ~71 C. If I wanted to get to 1350 or 1360 "just because", would I just bump power to 50% and is that ok for this model?

Thoughts?

Power limit increase is fine I run mine with 50% power limit constantly. To get full stability at 1400mhz I had to increase voltage a touch.

The cards are power limited basically to keep within rated power/TDP specs.

Try to monitor card usage while testing at 100% (ie during heaven/firestrike) to see if it's power throttling at any stage.

NewbieOneKenobi · Jan 29, 2017

Eh, one more thing. Not to be a wet blanket, but these aren't the old days when cards had already been made reasonably safe from frying but still left with some headroom by manufacturers, especially ATI cards. These days not only the manufacturers but even AMD are pushing their Radeons to the physical limit. For this reason I would be afraid to further OC what basically already is an overclocked card. This is also because some of the damage cards face from prolonged 100% loads is hard to diagnose, and it may take some time to show. There is very little to be gained, while the card could suffer permanent damage or outright die from even a little further OC, or even heavy stress without.

Saul Goodman · Jan 29, 2017

NewbieOneKenobi said:
Eh, one more thing. Not to be a wet blanket, but these aren't the old days when cards had already been made reasonably safe from frying but still left with some headroom by manufacturers, especially ATI cards.

Well I've never had any card fail on me and I never do extreme overclocks so may as well keep doing it for free performance. Temps are barely different than stock.

You do realise AMD's own Wattman allows you to increase power limit?

NewbieOneKenobi · Jan 30, 2017

Saul Goodman said:
Well I've never had any card fail on me and I never do extreme overclocks so may as well keep doing it for free performance. Temps are barely different than stock.

I think I can count two or three dead and perhaps two damaged but usable.

You do realise AMD's own Wattman allows you to increase power limit?

Yeah. But I'm not as optimistic as most people about the high temps being good for AMD cards, especially in the long term. I've seen way too much of trouble around 70C, sometimes a couple more or a couple less. This isn't a valid opinion, just a very subjective kind of feeling.

deftmousetrap · Jan 30, 2017

OC gains thwarted by OC utilities

Just a suggestive question: is it really worth having such a meagre overclock in place?

I have an MSI 4GB non X model and the performance gain I got from a 1400/1898 oc (50% power limit, +22mV) in Tomb Raider was basically sucked out by MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner running in the background. In other words, when I ran the internal benchmark without MSI Afterburner and hence with no OC, I had the same frames per second (Afterburner, no OC vs. no Afterburner vs. min. 71 vs. 75, max. 125 vs. 137, avg. 96 vs 105).

I haven't tested any other games nor OC software to verify this.

PS: The 1400 OC didn't last very long though, 1360 looks stable with no additional voltage.

Saul Goodman · Jan 30, 2017

We are on overclockers right?

But fair points guys.

deft it sounds like yours probably wasn't even holding 1400mhz. I find a reasonably small improvement in performance but still like to have it.

Tír na nÓg · Jan 30, 2017

deftmousetrap said:
Just a suggestive question: is it really worth having such a meagre overclock in place?

I have an MSI 4GB non X model and the performance gain I got from a 1400/1898 oc (50% power limit, +22mV) in Tomb Raider was basically sucked out by MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner running in the background. In other words, when I ran the internal benchmark without MSI Afterburner and hence with no OC, I had the same frames per second (Afterburner, no OC vs. no Afterburner vs. min. 71 vs. 75, max. 125 vs. 137, avg. 96 vs 105).

I haven't tested any other games nor OC software to verify this.

PS: The 1400 OC didn't last very long though, 1360 looks stable with no additional voltage.

That's a 10% increase on average, it is far from marginal IMO.

Edit: MSI AB and Riva don't "suck out" GPU processing. maybe 0.5% of the CPU but not the GPU.

Saul Goodman · Jan 30, 2017

Tír na nÓg said:
Edit: MSI AB and Riva don't "suck out" GPU processing. maybe 0.5% of the CPU but not the GPU.

They had some sort of software issue I believe.

Back on topic I don't think the nitro components are going to struggle over time, and as long as the chip is kept under 75C or so it should last too.

@Kenobi Mind elaborating on how your previous AMD cards failed and what speeds voltages you ran them at?

Rhasta · Feb 21, 2017

Saul Goodman said:
4GB cards have Hynix memory. 8GB cards have Samsung memory.

I first read that comment _after_ receiving my 4GB card. I was a bit disappointed because I thought the only difference between the 4GB and 8GB was 4GB less memory with the rest being identical.

As it turns out, my MSI Gaming X 4GB has Samsung memory on it, as reported by GPU-Z. Probably why I can get it to run at 2250MHz with very few errors reported in HWiNFO64.

Also, for the records, I can run with the core stable at 1450 with a 48mV increase and +50% power limit. ASIC quality for the curious is 76.3% and the GPU-only power draw reported by MSI AB never reached 140W. I ran several passes of Heaven benchmark without problem. I don't really need that extra performance at the moment so I'm keeping it at 1303/1750. I just like to know what it can do for when I do need it.

manigma · Feb 28, 2017

I have Asus Dual RX 480 O4G. In GPUTweak2 (Asus tweaking tool) the card's default voltage is set to 1.137v and RAM clock 7000Mhz on all three modes below:
1280 Mhz (Silent Mode) -10 Power Limit
1300 MHz (Gaming Mode) 0 Power Limit
1320 MHz (OC Mode) +10 Power Limit

I have uninstalled GPUTweak2 and installed my favorite MSI Afterburner. I want to overclock without touching the voltage (for another year or so). My current settings:
1340 MHz, 7300Mhz, +25 Power Limit, 1.137v

The core gives stable 1340Mhz while playing Witcher 3 (75c / 64% fan) and passed FireStrike Extreme stress test with 98.7% (80c / 67% fan). I will raise core to 1350Mhz today on same settings and see how it goes.

My question is what does Power Limit actually do?? The RX480 has default TDP of 150w, so does +25 Power Limit raise it to 175w?? Is 0 Power Limit = 150w ??

And does raising Power Limit alone (not Voltage) raise Temperature too???

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