AMD Radeon R9 280 - Overclocking

Using MSI Afterburner, we were able to get the XFX R9 280 DD Edition from 933MHz to 1,080MHz, a 147MHz improvement overall, which is also a tasty 16 percent. Under load, the card was able to stay at 1,080MHz with full consistency.

As for the memory, we managed to push it from 1.25GHz (5GHz effective) all the way to 1.575GHz (6.3GHz effective), the maximum permitted by Afterburner, with no stability issues. This indicates that XFX is indeed using 6Gbps memory chips for this card, though mileage will still vary. Either way, this is a fantastic 26 percent overclock that takes the cards memory bandwidth from 240GB/sec to 302.4GB/sec.


Under load, the power consumption of our system rose from 305W to 322W using the overclocked settings, which isn't bad at all considering the rather large clock speed gains we've seen.