Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Vapor-X OC - Overclocking

Using MSI Afterburner, we raised the card's power limit by 50 percent and added 75mV of voltage to the core for extra stability. Using these settings we managed overclocks of 1,180MHz on the core and 1.65GHz (6.6GHz effective) on the memory. These equate to 15 and 18 percent improvements respectively over Sapphire's already decent overclocks. Compared to a stock speed R9 290, the card is 25 percent and 32 percent faster respectively, which is a truly excellent result.


We can also compare these figures to those we achieved with the Asus R9 290 DirectCU II OC, which were 1,150MHz core and 1.35GHz (5.4GHz effective) memory. Therefore, Sapphire's card managed an extra 30MHz on the core and a much higher memory speed, though how much is down to luck and how much is down to Sapphire's binning and engineering is difficult to say without multiple samples of each product.