Overclocking Vega 3
One of the unique abilities of the AMD Athlon 3000G is being able to overclock the CPU, as we have shown here. However, you can also independently overclock the iGPU Vega 3 graphics portion of this APU as well to improve GPU performance. With the ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING motherboard, it is actually quite easy, you can enable AMD Overclocking in the BIOS and simply type in the frequency you want! You can even change the voltage. This is the easiest and best way to achieve an overclock.
We tried AMD Ryzen Master but had continuous application lock-ups with it trying to enable any APU overclock. But in the BIOS, it worked out perfectly with no problems.
Default Settings
First, we wanted to see what the APU looks like at its default settings before we overclock it so we can compare it.
This is GPUz and it shows the GPU clock operating at 1099MHz exactly, which is normal, as it is set to run at 1100MHz. GPUz shows a slight offset. The memory clock was running at DDR4-3200MHz, and you can see that there is a bug reporting the correct GPU temperature. The GPU voltage seems to run at 1.287V.
This graph shows the default clock speed and that it is consistent at 1100MHz.
Overclocked
Now it is time to overclock, for this we set our sights toward the BIOS. We input several figures until we found a stable overclock, which happened to be a very high bump of up to 1600MHz GPU frequency! Bumping the voltage didn’t really help here, it seems we have hit a process limit at 1600MHz. This is a large overclock, from 1100MHz to 1600MHz is a 45% increase in clock speed!
You can see in the GPUz screenshot we are hitting 1599MHz according to GPUz, which is offset slightly. In the BIOS it’s set to 1600MHz. The GPU voltage actually dynamically overvolts, taking us up to 1.293V. This is probably why overvolting manually didn’t help us, the iGPU’s voltage is already dynamically managed and is what allows us to hit 1600MHz.
This graph shows that it is a stable and consistent 1600MHz overclock versus 1100Mhz at default.
In our testing, we will show the overclocked iGPU performance versus default.
We will also show the Athlon 3000G overclocked at 4GHz with the Vega 3 overclocked at 1600MHz as well so that both overclocks are in play. This way you can see if the CPU overclock improves game performance beyond the iGPU overclock.