Club3D R9 280X royalKing 3GB Graphics Card Review

Overclocking

Overclocking the Club3D royalKing gave a decent result, though nothing to write home about. The voltage of the graphics card already comes out of the factory set higher than a default R9 280X so we didn’t want to raise the voltage any further. We still managed to squeeze an additional 65MHz out of the GPU, anything above that resulted in minor artefacting but not crashing. On the memory we managed an additional 150MHz, 600MHz effective, taking the final memory speed to 6600MHz up from 6000MHz. Compared to other R9 280Xs we overclocked the GPU core clock does slightly better than average but the memory is quite a bit below average.

Summary of overclocking results in our R9 280X reviews:

• Club3D royalKing R9 280X – 1165MHz core and 1650MHz memory
• Sapphire Toxic Edition R9 280X – 1230MHz core and 1800MHz memory
• XFX Double Dissipation Black Edition OC R9 280X – 1125MHz core and 1735MHz memory
• Sapphire Vapor-X OC R9 280X – 1160MHz core and 1600MHz memory

That said the slightly below average memory clock didn’t affect performance too much as it was our second best performing R9 280X coming below only Sapphire’s Toxic edition. Our 6% core overclock yielded a 4.3% increase in performance, these are all very small numbers but not something we can really penalise Club3D for as it was AMD’s decision to overclock and rebrand an existing GPU that results in most 280Xs having limited headroom, especially factory-overclocked variants like this one.