Overclocking headroom limited on AMD’s Fury X cards, for now

By Jon Martindale July 8, 2015

AMD Radeon Fury X — Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

Although the performance of AMD’s Fury X hasn’t been quite as impressive as a lot of people had hoped it would be, the fact that it comes equipped at stock with a bespoke water cooling solution, should suggest that it has plenty of overclocking head room. Unfortunately though, getting anything more than a single digit percent bump to the core clock is proving almost impossible to those that try.

Although some publications have been able to increase the clock by around 10 percent, tweakers at MaximumPC barely managed 7 percent, which resulted in around a 5 percent improvement in real-world performance. However, as much as they’d like to go after AMD for this, especially since the card’s temperatures are still quite low at those speeds, they blame the lack of supporting tools for the low headroom.

As it stands, there is no ability to increase the core voltage of the R9 Fury X, which traditionally gives a lot more room for increasing core frequencies, at the expense of temperature. Since the water cooling allows for such low load temperatures however, it may be possible to overclock the card much further when the ability to tweak its voltages becomes available.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming

This isn’t just something AMD should be hoping for though, but something it needs. While we saw that when paired at ridiculous resolutions, that the Fury X cards are very impressive, they still fall behind the 980 Ti from Nvidia at more traditional settings. Similarly so, that card is already coming pre-overclocked by large margins from partner companies, so it’s only getting more powerful as time goes on.

Of course, your results with overclocking the Fury X may vary, since nothing is guaranteed when it can be so dependent on which batch your card came from and its chip’s own particular quirks.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Computing Coordinator

Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…

Computing

AMD just announced the graphics card everyone has been waiting for

AMD announces RX 7600 XT at CES 2024.

AMD just launched the RX 7600 XT at CES 2024. It's a graphics card that makes sense, and one that AMD fans have been waiting on ever since the launch of the original RX 7600. It might not do enough in the hotly contested market of graphics cards around $300, however.

Between the RX 7600 and the RX 7600 XT, not much has changed. These two graphics cards are based on the same GPU, and they come with the same number of cores. The XT model, however, boosts the clock speed by up to 10%, and it comes with a higher power draw at up to 190 watts.

Computing

Please, don’t buy an AMD GPU right now

RX 7900 XTX slotted into a test bench.

It's basically a foregone conclusion that Nvidia is launching new Super GPUs next week at CES. We have no official announcement from Nvidia, outside of a keynote presentation at the event, but a mountain of evidence shows that Team Green may be gearing up to launch three new graphics cards. But what about Team Red?

We have heard murmurs that AMD is set to launch a budget-focused RX 7600 XT soon, but the rumor mill has been quiet about a slate of new graphics cards. Even with a pile of graphics cards in stock at reasonable prices and few indications that AMD is going to upend its GPU lineup, it's best to wait a couple of weeks before picking up a new AMD GPU.
Super AMD GPUs? Unlikely

Computing

AMD might have a new graphics card next month, too

AMD RX 7600 on a pink background.

We weren't expecting to hear much about AMD's graphics cards in January, but a new rumor suggests we'll see a new GPU in just a few weeks. AMD is prepping the RX 7600 XT, according to Benchlife's sources (via VideoCardz). It's apparently an updated version of AMD's budget-focused RX 7600, sporting more VRAM and perhaps a better die.

To understand the rumored card, we have to look at the RX 7600 we already have. It's an 8GB graphics card based on the Navi 33 GPU. The card already maxes out the capabilities of the GPU with 32 Compute Units (CUs), equaling 2,048 cores. If AMD is preparing an RX 7600 XT, there are two possibilities. Either it will use the same maxed-out Navi 33 GPU or a stripped-down version of the Navi 32 GPU we see in cards like the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT. Hopefully, the latter is true. Although the RX 7600 is a solid 1080p graphics card, it remains about 30% slower than the next step up in AMD's lineup.