PowerColor Radeon RX 7900 XTX Overclocked to 3.25 GHz on LCS
When PowerColor unveiled the Liquid Devil Radeon RX 7900 XTX with a factory-fitted water block, it said the graphics card would guarantee “ultimate” overclocking capabilities, but didn’t provide any details. Well-known overclocker Roman “der8auer” Hartung finally test drove the card this week. According to him the GPU he can push to 3.25 GHz to 3.39 GHz. Youtube Video (via video cards). In this case the board drew 650W of power.
With a boost clock of up to 2,680 GHz with Unleashed BIOS mode enabled, PowerColor’s Liquid Devil Radeon RX 7900 XTX features significantly higher GPU frequencies out of the box compared to AMD’s reference design, It has become one of the best graphics cards.
In this mode the graphics board consumes about 420W of power and the graphics processor can be pushed to 2.95 GHz to 3.0 GHz. 3.0 GHz is an impressive clock for a GPU, but it’s possible to go even higher by boosting the chip’s voltage.
Since it’s impossible to boost the voltage of AMD’s RDNA 3 based GPUs and use software like More Power Tool to optimize its voltage curve, Roman “der8auer” Hartung Elmor Labs EVC2SE A device that allows manual voltage control.
The default voltage for AMD’s Navi 31 GPU on the Liquid Devil Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card is 1.030V. If the GPU voltage rises to 1.050V, it will go up to 3.05 GHz, but the power consumption will increase to 500W.
By increasing the voltage even higher (to 1.142V for example), der8auer pushed the GPU to 3.25 GHz in the 3DMark TimeSpy Extreme test and 3.39 GHz in light 3D rendering workloads. The GPU voltage increased significantly, and at some fairly extreme frequencies, the power consumption of the board out of the slot increased to 650W. This means that it consumed about 700W from the slot and the auxiliary PCIe power connector.
Such a huge overclock delivered around 28% extra performance compared to AMD’s reference Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but it did so at 83% more power. This clearly shows that GPUs are not designed to handle such frequencies. So 3.25 GHz to 3.38 GHz is an impressive achievement.