Overclocking

Overclocking the Red Devil RX 470

Unfortunately, PowerColor originally shipped us a Red Devil RX 470 with its clocks locked down by its Performance BIOS to reference RX 470 boost speeds (1206MHz). The only clockspeed adjustment that we were originally able to make was to increase the memory clocks by 50MHz which did not have any positive impact on performance.

Here is the screenshot of the results of looping Heaven 3.0 continuously with the original BIOS at reference clocks.Stock finish warm

Here is the new BIOS with the PowerColor Boost clocks now steady at 1270MHz and the temperature is up by 10 degrees at 79C.  The Heaven score also increased with the higher clocks over reference.stock-warm-heaven-loop

Next we tried a 2% overclock.  1335MHz - warm heaven loop-1750 memory-stockAfter that, we kept the 2% overclock the same but increased the memory clocks by 50MHz to 1800MHz.2percent-OC-heaven-loop-180Any memory overclock impacted the performance negatively, even with a higher core overclock. So we returned our memory clocks to the stock 1750MHz and increased our core speeds to 3%.1310MHz - warm heaven loop-1750 memory-stock

We noted that the temperatures still remained at around 80C but the fan speed automatically increased to compensate for the incremental increase in core temperatures to 1310MHz although fan speeds and temperatures varied according to ambient conditions.  Next we tried 4%.1320MHz - warm heaven loop-1750 memory-stock

1320MHz was stable so we tried 5%1335MHz - warm heaven loop-1750 memory-stock

At 5%, the clock speed is 1335MHz or 65MHz over PowerColor’s clocks and 134MHz over the reference 1206MHz, and the temperature is basically unchanged from the upper 70sC to 80C.  There was no throttling and the core boost speed remained consistent.

We tried 6% but the overclock was unstable and we experienced crashes to desktop.  Even 5.5% was unstable for many games, so we settled on 5%, or 1335MHz boost with stock memory clocks (1750MHz).  Let’s head to the performance charts to see how the PowerColor Red Devil at PowerColor Clocks (1270MHz) and further overclocked by us (1335MHz) compares with reference RX 470 speeds (1206MHz).  We shall also compare it with the reference RX 480.

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4 COMMENTS

  1. i have got the PowerColor Red Devil RX 470 and mine also seems to have a locked bios as i cannot overclock at all or change voltage or temps or fan speed in wattman, do you have a link for the bios update

  2. It’s very strange that memory overclock reduced performance. First, it’s known that Polaris gains significantly by memory overclock. Second, I believe that there are no 6.6gbps memory chips, the ones used in these cards are downclocked 7gbps chips, so setting them at 7gbps should be without any issues at all.

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