Overclocking
The XFX R9 280X DD BE OC comes with a significant OC out of the box. It also comes with an unlocked voltage so we thought we’d push it as far as possible with stock voltage, then push that voltage up to the maximum 1.3 volts and see what else we could get out of it. At stock voltage I was hugely disappointed with the core overclock, just 20MHz was possible before the GPU would crash. The memory fared much better reaching an impressive 1735MHz.
Unlocking the voltage should lead to extra performance right? Well in our case not really. We already knew we had a rubbish overclocker when we couldn’t get more than 1120MHz off the stock volts but with 1.3 volts we were hoping to get to at least 1175MHz. Sadly we were only able to reach 1125MHz with the same memory speed as stock volts. Thats just 5MHz more – pretty abysmal. I know the HD 7970 was almost guaranteed to get to 1125MHz and potentially as high as 1250MHz/1300MHz if you had a good chip. The R9 280X is supposed to be more refined than the HD 7970 so should be capable of at least 1150MHz and potentially up to 1300MHz again. That didn’t prove to be the case so clearly ours is just a dud overclocker or the BIOS had some issues with it.
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You seem to have real problems overclocking a lot of cards you get in for review. Have you tried swapping out other parts of your test bench to see if it fixes it?
The majority of cards we get overclock okay. The only cards I can think of that didn’t were the two MSI GTX 700 ones (GTX 760/GTX 770 TF Gaming) and this card. Everything else did what was expected or sometimes more. Overclocking is more a result of the silicon lottery than anything else. We’ve got a capable motherboard, CPU and PSU so there’s no reason to assume it is being caused by anything other than rubbish overclocking samples.
These temps make no sense. Unless you are testing inside of a commercial refrigerator there is no way your temps can be this low. Cards at less then 5c when idle??? That would literally be just 5 degrees above freezing, so even if powered off those cards could never hit those temps as they would never go below the ambient room temperature.
Your 290 and 290X temps under load are also a full 20c, or more, then every other benchmark that has been posted. No way these numbers are real unless you are doing something else to chill the units.
We use delta temperatures as stated in the methodology and as written on the graphs, normally the room temperature is about 21-23 degrees.
That way readers can estimate what temperatures it will run at for them by adding on their typical room temperature. Of course if it is an card with a thermal control point (which is increasingly becoming the trend these days) then deltas can become a little irrelevant.
Hmm I have R9 280X DD Black 1080/1550 1.2v (cant use the voltage on XFX BIOS lol but on the box i have that has unlocked voltage, strange indeed) but i have flashed the BIOS from Sapphire TOXIC and now i have ulocked Voltage 🙂 so i Gaming on 1050/1550 1.175v +5%POW and its safe, cool and efficient even better that my last XFX 7970DD GHzEd 😀 My temps in BF4 1h gaming is about 56-58 deg. cels. I have Corsair 750D Silento with 3x140mm fans on 50-75% I cant even hear my XFX 😉
the last one was noisy and hot 68-71deg. cels. So XFX is better and better. RMA is Great also.
And question 4U – why the v is locked? is maby the BIOS is set to 2 (default?)
my xfx r9 280x idles at 30 c and folding 57c and heavy gaming 63c
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