Introduction
For $499, the new AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is fast, but it can be faster! In today’s overclocking review, we will take the made-by-AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT reference video card and overclock it as high as possible, and see how it performs. The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is a direct performance competitor to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 but launched at a lower MSRP to MSRP. How much faster is the Radeon RX 7800 XT versus GeForce RTX 4070 when you overclock the Radeon RX 7800 XT? We will find out!
The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT launched on September 6th, 2023 and we fully reviewed the made-by-AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT model. This one operates at the reference AMD clock speeds and comes with the reference made-by-AMD cooler. In that review, we focused on the 1440p gameplay experience and compared it with the Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and GeForce RTX 4070. We found that it offers a good performance upgrade over the Radeon RX 6800, but trades places with the Radeon RX 6800 XT. It also performs very well in comparison to the competition’s GeForce RTX 4070, even in Ray Tracing. In our review today, we are going to overclock it and see how far we can push it and how it compares against the same video cards. Please check out that review for full specs on the video card, a brief description is given below.
The Radeon RX 7800 XT has 60 Compute Units, 3840 Shader Units, 60 RT Accelerators (2nd Gen), 120 AI Accelerators, and 96 ROPs. It uses 64MB of 2nd Gen AMD Infinity Cache. It has a Game Clock of 2124MHz and a Boost Clock of 2430MHz. It has 16GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus at 19.5Gbps which gives it 624GB/s of memory bandwidth, and it uses a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface with a TDP of 263W. It also supports AV1 encoding, and DisplayPort 2.1.
How to Overclock the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
To overclock the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT we are going to use the built-in performance tuning in AMD Radeon Software. The software allowed us to control fan speed, power target, GPU, and memory clock. We could not increase the voltage, but this was not necessary and would have eaten into the TDP.
On the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, we were able to increase the Power Limit by 15% from 100% to 115%. We could also increase the fan speeds to 100% to ensure the highest overclock, we found the Voltage set at 1150mV and we could not increase it further.
We had plenty of overclocking headroom on the overclocking sliders for the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT for both GPU and memory. Our final overclock ended up at 3000MHz Max Frequency on the GPU Tuning slider and 2562MHz (20.5GHz) on the Memory Frequency slider. The default GPU Frequency was set at 2430MHz, and remember this is a sliding scale of frequency, an “up to” frequency that is allowable. Pushing this higher did not give us more frequency, but actually hurt our chances, keeping it a little lower allowed the GPU to boost higher.
The default memory frequency is 19.5GHz on the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. With overclocking we managed to hit 20.5GHz just fine. We could actually push it all the way up to 21GHz, but doing so hit the TDP wall hard, and lowered the GPU frequency, keeping it slightly lowered allowed the clock speed to stabilize with a more consistent frequency over time while gaming since power was a bit limiting factor. With a 1GHz bump in frequency, memory increased from 624GB/s to 655.9GB/s of memory bandwidth at 20.5GHz.
The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT has a Game Clock of 2124MHz and a Boost Clock of 2430MHz. When we look at this in the blue line, we see that it is boosting between 2350MHz-2410MHz primarily. The average clock speed over the entire run was: 2381MHz at default.
With our overclock applied, with the GPU Frequency set at 3000MHz and the power increased by 15% our overclock did increase the GPU Frequency in the orange line. We can see that it is hovering just over 2530MHz now and has a more consistent frequency range. The average clock speed over the entire run was: 2534MHz. Therefore, the increase from default was 153MHz on average, or a 6.4% increase in clock speed from overclocking. Combined with our memory overclock of 5%, we have a boost to both GPU and memory.
The system setup for benchmarks is exactly the same as our launch review.