MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming Edition OC 3GB - Overclocking

Using MSI's own Afterburner software, we were able to take control of the the clock speeds and voltages for the core and memory. As ever, we began by raising the card's power limit to 120%, the maximum permitted.

We got the GPU to a clock speed of 1,150MHz, which equates to a boost of just under 10 percent. This isn't the highest we've been able to push such a Tahiti GPU to, but it's not bad considering they originally shipped with a 925MHz clock. Above 1,150MHz, the card began to show frequent signs of artifacting, and raising the voltage did nothing to combat this.

The memory was thankfully more open to higher clock speeds, and we eventually settled on a clock speed here of 1.75GHz (7 GHz effective). This is a mighty 1GHz effective increase, or 17 percent. Raising the memory voltage from 1,500mV to 1,600mV was more than enough to keep things running smoothly. The results of our overclocking can be seen below.