Overclocking XFX Speedster QICK 319 Radeon RX 7700 XT Black Edition
There are some unique design features of the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT GPU chip that make the discussion of overclocking quite interesting. There is a nice review of overclocking nuances of this video card located here. As the article states, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX has two clock domains; a “shader clock” and a “front-end clock”. Both are integral in the graphic displayed. Both are dynamic and will adjust to the game’s demands. The Radeon RX 7700 XT is designed identically.
For this reason, we have generated two charts for this overclocking review. These particular charts were created by using the logging function of HWiNFO64, as it has the capability to distinguish and capture data for these two clocks.
For overclocking the XFX Speedster QICK 319 Radeon RX 7700 XT Black Edition we used the performance software included in the current version of AMD’s Radeon Software Performance Tuning. Here we can adjust the GPU clock frequency maximum, memory frequencies, fan cycles, and power target. The GPU core voltage is maximized by default. The default settings are shown above.
We were able to increase the Power Limit by 15% over default, as well as the fan speed. We set the GPU frequency to 3300MHz, the fans to 50% and the power limit to its maximum of 15%. Below you will find the settings used for overclocking testing, the top screen capture is the AMD Radeon Software default. We were also able to overclock the memory to +125Mhz giving us 19GHz total from the default of 18GHz.
If you recall, the GPU Maximum Frequency is just a limit set. It does not guarantee that the GPU clock will match what is set there. The maximum reached is determined by a number of factors we cannot adjust.
Front End and Shader Clock performance
The charts above show our benchmark run-through in default and final overclocked settings. You can see that the shader clock runs slower than the front-end clock frequency. Our XFX Speedster QICK 319 Radeon RX 7700 XT Black Edition arrives with a Game Clock of 2276MHz while the Boost Clock is listed at 2599MHz. Right out of the box we have a 105MHz or 5% uplift over AMD reference Game Clock listing. Looking at the default performance on our charts, both the Shader and Front End clocks run well over the listed reference clock. (268MHz and 471MHz respectfully) with overclocking, we are able to increase this performance by roughly 75MHz or 3% above the XFX out-of-the-box clocks. In the next pages, we will see how this translates in real-time testing.
In our overclocking testing, we settled on a 3300MHz maximum frequency setting, a 15% increased power target and fans set roughly at 50%. We progressed incrementally from 2900MHz. The best result for this video card is the settings shown. There was no issue with running all our games at these settings. The GPU was very cool and the fans were barely audible. XFX has done a nice job with its cooling solution.