ASUS Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC - Overclocking

We used Asus's free GPU Tweak software to overclock the R9 290 DirectCU II. As well as clock speeds, you can also adjust the GPU voltage of this card, though not that of the memory.

Our initial overclock of 1,150MHz proved too much, and the card buckled under load almost immediately. However, we then used GPU Tweak to lock the core voltage. With the clock speed at 1,150MHz this forced the voltage up from 1.25V to 1.343V, and this allowed the card to remain stable. We were able to reach slightly higher clock speeds, but the card proved unstable after a lengthy stress test, so left it at 1,150MHz, which is still a solid 15 percent boost (21 percent over stock speeds).

The memory wasn't quite as responsive, but we still managed to go from 1.26GHz to 1.35GHz (5.4GHz effective), a 7 percent increase. As the Elpida memory chips used are each rated for 6GHz effective speeds, we can safely assume that the point of failure here was the memory system of the GPU.