Overclocking the ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 7600 OC Edition
Prior to overclocking, we determine the baseline GPU clock speed. Both NVIDIA and AMD have dynamic baseline speeds. The GPU clock frequency in games is referred to as the Game Clock on AMD video cards and Boost Clock on NVIDIA cards. Generally, either brand’s card will exceed this baseline frequency dynamically. To determine the “baseline” we record the GPU frequency in our Cyberpunk 2077 manual run-through. This is a lengthy manual run at Ultra settings. Data is captured for frequency, temperature, voltage, and power using the GPU-Z sensor to log the data.
For starters, much like the Sapphire RX 7600 the GPU clock frequency slider has a cap at 3000MHz. The default frequency is likewise 2875MHz, so we don’t get much wiggle room in our overclocking attempts. Also, the GPU voltage is set to the maximum allowable as well from the jump.
To overclock the ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 7600 OC we used the ASUS GPU Tweak III utility. The version used was 1.6.1.5. This download is available from the support tab on the card’s webpage. GPU Tweak III is a very easy utility to use. For testing all you need do is click “user mode” set your sliders, then click apply. There is an “OC mode” that sets predefined albeit very conservative values if you like. Our final settings are listed below, the defaults are listed above.
There were a couple of findings that are worth discussing here. First the GPU “Hot Spot” was indeed hot if the fans were left to default (32%). The Hot Spot was noted to be 81-85C, which we thought was a bit high for such a giant heatsink. Turning the fans up manually to (what settled at) 63% cured this issue and was essentially still near silent. Why 63? Well, I wanted a 65% fan cycle but the settings wouldn’t land there, simple as that. Also, this setting was the highest that was still quiet. Second, overclocking the memory did nothing for the end result, in fact, it degraded performance. The slider caps at +300MHz which crashed the video card. At + 150 MHz the performance was still degraded. So we just set the memory at default. Overall, we noticed a 2% slower performance with any overclock of the memory.
To begin with, our default settings average out at 2724MHz which is 21% over the MBA Game Clock. With the frequency slider pushed all the way right to 3000MHz and the Power Target set to a 12% increase, we averaged 2838MHz. This result is 4% higher than the default Game Clock and a full 26% increase over the advertised reference Game Clock of 2250MHz.
The findings are nicely shown on the graph. You can see that the clocks do start out a bit higher than the recorded average, but about halfway through the benchmark run-through settle in.
Overall the overclock was very easy to achieve. The fans set at 63% were close to silent and the GPU was cool as a cucumber. (GPU 48C and Hot Spot 67C) Given the beefy heatsink and cool temperatures, it seems that this card could reach much higher if given the opportunity.
