HBM Can be Overclocked Thanks to a Glitch?

With the recent launch of the brand new AMD R9 Fury X graphics card, it brought forward a new architecture in the form of Fiji XT and a brand new memory technology, High-Bandwidth Memory. During the reviews and briefings, it was made evident that HBM will not support overclocking due to the technology being so immature compared to GDDR5. If you have been living under a rock for the last few weeks, here is our coverage of the lack of overclocking capability.

The overclocking features were locked in all third-party software and even in AMD’s own Catalyst Control Centre it was locked; however a review has found a small glitch after a routine of system restarts. uk.hardware.info apparently managed to yield a 20% overclock, going from 500MHz to 600MHz, along with this a core clock was boosted to 1145. As we can see from the results below in Fire Strike, the card managed to achieve a score of 16,963

As we can see from the results below in Fire Strike, the card managed to achieve a score of 16,963, compared to our overclocked Fire Strike (core 1139MHz) score of 16771, this is an extra gain of 198; however the CPU has also been overclocked in this instance too.

Generally VRAM overclocking yields very little gain, so was this stunt to prove it can be done rather than the quest for performance? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Thank you to WCCFTech for providing us with this information.

An update from AMD has now confirmed that even though GPU-Z is showing an increase in memory speed, the frequency never actually changed as the memory frequency is configured at hardware level and no software is able to alter this.