Conclusion
In today’s overclocking review, we took the new AMD Radeon RX 7600 that was recently released and overclocked it as much as we could. In doing so, we found out the general performance uplift you should expect with the Radeon RX 7600 from overclocking. We tested at 1080p, in many new games, and with Ray Tracing.
If you are unfamiliar with the Radeon RX 7600, the Radeon RX 7600 was released in May of 2023 as a 1080p mainstream video card for an MSRP of $269. The video card became available on May 25th, and while there will be many custom add-in-board partner-made video cards, the one we have today is the made-by-AMD model to test. This gives us a good baseline for overclocking, then we can see if custom video cards can add to this overclocking in any way in the future. Here’s a brief run-down of the Radeon RX 7600 specs.
The AMD Radeon RX 7600 is manufactured on TSMC 6nm and is the NAVI 33XL GPU. It has 32 Compute Units, 32 Ray Accelerators, 64 AI Accelerators, 64 ROPs, and 2,048 Stream Processors. It has 32MB of 2nd Gen AMD Infinity Cache. The Game GPU Clock is 2250MHz and the Boost GPU Clock can go up to 2625MHz. It has 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM capacity at 18GHz on a 128-bit memory bus providing 288GB/s of actual memory bandwidth. It uses a PCIe 4.0 x8 lanes interface. The Total Board Power is 165W.
Performance Summary
In Returnal, at 1080p and EPIC settings the Radeon RX 7600 was playable. Overclocking the Radeon RX 7600 resulted in a performance uplift of just 2%, and did not add up to anything much, except for maybe FSR. In The Callisto Protocol, we saw a larger advantage overclocking, with an uplift of 4%, which is still overall small. Performance was playable though at 65FPS at 1080p with the highest settings. Call of Duty Modern Warfare II was more than playable at 1080p and maximum settings over 100FPS. Overclocking the Radeon RX 7600 improved performance by just 3%. In Chernobylite Enhanced Edition overclocking resulted in nearly 100FPS at 1080p, but this was only 4% higher than stock performance. Overclocking the Radeon RX 7600 in Dying Light 2 resulted in another 4% gain in performance, but the game was already more than playable over 100FPS. Finally, in Cyberpunk 2077 we saw another 4% gain in performance with overclocking in an already playable game at over 80FPS.
When it comes to Ray Tracing, at first glance the percentages may indicate some higher single-digit numbers, but when you look at the actual framerate increase, it is very small. Firstly, in Returnal overclocking did bring a 2% gain in performance, but in reality, this was only 1FPS and did not change gameplay. The Callisto Protocol kind of breaks that rule, as it did bring a 7% gain in performance by overclocking the Radeon RX 7600. This brought performance up to 60FPS with Ray Tracing, and the game was playable. Chernobylite Enhanced Edition was very bottlenecked with Ray Tracing however, overclocking did not help at all here. Dying Light 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 were also games that did not gain much traction by overclocking the Radeon RX 7600 with Ray Tracing. Overall, Ray Tracing is a bottlenecking feature on the Radeon RX 7600, and overclocking has little effect.
Final Points
Overall, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 does not seem to offer a lot of headroom for overclocking. We asked at the beginning of this review if there was any gas left in the tank. The answer is clearly no, at least it seems so with the limitations currently. The limitation could be due to firmware/BIOS limitations in regards to Total Board Power and power tables, or it could be a limitation in terms of software range. We were limited by the range of GPU Max Frequency, and VRAM Max Frequency in AMD Adrenalin Software, as well as lacking the ability to manipulate voltage.
With these limits in place, the potential for overclocking just doesn’t exist. In order to gain more headroom for overclocking, limits would need to be removed, perhaps custom BIOSs from manufacturers, and software that opens up the proper ranges for overclocking. There could potentially be more headroom from a hardware perspective, but with the limitations in place, we will never know for sure where the limits are. Memory is going to be dependent on the modules chosen, but there could be more potential there. The problem is, we will never know unless we see some manufacturer push the limits on the Radeon RX 7600.
As it stands, the Radeon RX 7600 is very limited for overclocking, and simply won’t be a lot of fun for enthusiasts in this regard. We also question how far manufacturers will be able to push the Radeon RX 7600 with custom factory overclocked models. Perhaps manufacturers will be able to tweak power tables, and BIOS, and have better cooling for higher clocks than we achieved here today. We will have to see what specialized factory-overclocked models are to come in the future, and if AIBs are even able to offer highly overclocked models.
If you are in the market for a Radeon RX 7600, buy it knowing that the performance you get out-of-the-box is going to be all you get. There won’t be any hidden performance you will be able to squeeze out of it, in terms of hardware overclocking currently.