Sapphire Radeon RX 480 Nitro+ OC 4GB and 8GB Overclocking

For both cards, the first step in overclocking was to whack the power limit to 150 percent (the highest available setting) to reduce the potential for bottlenecking.

For the 8GB card, the core was stable up to 1,422MHz, but only after we also increased the voltage by 100mV. The memory was also happy with a small bump to 2.1GHz (8.4Gbps effective). These are overclocks of six and five percent respectively, although 1,422MHz compared to reference speeds is 12 percent higher – not bad.

As for the 4GB card, the core this time around was stable at 1,426MHz, an increase of 120MHz or 9 percent (13 percent over reference) – again, 100mV more was needed to hit this. The memory here managed 1.925GHz (7.7Gbps effective), a 10 percent increase.

At these speeds, and with the additional power headroom and voltage, system power consumption rose to a hefty 412W – this result was the same for both the 8GB and 4GB cards.