Overclocking SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC
There are some unique design features of the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT GPU that must be considered when evaluating an overclock. There is a nice review of the 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 “shader” clock is generally lower than the “front end” clock. The Radeon RX 7700 XT is designed identically. We use HWINFO64 to generate two graphs for the overclock.
For overclocking the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC 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.
In the image above, you can see the final settings we used for our overclock. We adjusted the Power Limit by +15%, the fan cycles at 60%, and the GPU Maximum clock frequency to 2850MHz. We were able to adjust the memory frequency to +125MHz resulting in a 19GHz memory frequency. Testing was performed over 4 different game benchmarks within our suite. The GPU clock was adjusted gradually from 2800MHz in small increments.
The only significant response was seen at 2850MHz, where the FPS increased as did the VCore response in the monitoring software. At any other GPU frequency, the results did not change from what was seen running at default settings. 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
Recall that the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC comes out-of-the-box with a factory overclocked Game clock of 2226MHz, roughly 2.5% above reference. The Boost clock is 2584MHz or 1.5% above reference. You can see by the graphs above we weren’t able to squeeze much more out of this video card with our overclock settings. On the front-end clock, the average was 2747MHz, merely 6MHz above the default(blue line). That being said both the default and “overclocked” results are roughly 521MHz over the actual listed Game Clock giving an uplift of 23%. The shader clock average is 2540MHz in the overclock, this time just 2MHz above the default. However, the shader frequency operates at almost the listed reference Boost clock frequency.
All in all, our manual overclock doesn’t amount to much. No matter where you set the “GPU maximum frequency” the real-time FPS result is nearly always the same, plus or minus a handful of frames. We have seen this nearly across the board in our recent reviews of Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT video cards. The out-of-box cards are clocked just about as far as they can go when you open the box. But still, the dynamic real-time results are pretty good nonetheless.
On the cooling front, the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC performed very well. We set the fans up manually to run around 60% and the GPU temperatures were very cool at 45 to 49C. At the high-temperature end of the graphs, we did leave room for the fans to ramp up, but that rarely happened. Overall the fans are audible at 60% but not annoying at all. A gentle rush of airflow is noted without any whine. The heatsink seems to do a very good job.