Conclusion
The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is AMD’s entry into the mainstream market geared for 1440p gaming at $499. In our launch review, we looked at the gaming experience compared to the Radeon RX 6800 XT, Radeon RX 6800, and GeForce RTX 4070. In this review, we took the made-by-AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT video card and overclocked it as high as we could to see how much more performance we could get out of it and where it ended up comparing afterward.
In our overclocking endeavors, we managed to push the GPU Clock speed up to 3000MHz in the performance tuning of AMD Radeon Software. This increased the GPU Clock speed from a default average of 2381MHz up to an overclocked average of 2534MHz with a +15% power limit. This resulted in an overclock of 6.4% higher GPU Clock frequency. In addition, we were able to increase the memory from 19.5GHz to 20.5GHz without compromising the clock speed. Through our overclocking efforts, the clock speed stabilized and remained more consistent than without overclocking, thanks to a higher power limit and fan speeds.
However, power increased quite a bit from overclocking by increasing 15% to 291W board power from 254W. This is a dramatic power increase, for what ultimately resulted in a less dramatic performance increase. This means the power efficiency of the Radeon RX 7800 XT is not that great, and power limits are the limiting factor in our overclocking effort.
Final Points
Overclocking improved performance on the made-by-AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, but it does have its limits. Overall, we saw a greater increase in percentage from overclocking with Ray Tracing, versus Raster performance. However, in Raster performance, overclocking mattered and affected performance the most for actual gameplay performance. It is in these scenarios that the Radeon RX 7800 XT was able to either overtake the competition or not. In some games, it was under GeForce RTX 4070 performance until we overclocked the video card. The same is also true against the Radeon RX 6800 XT. In some games, the Radeon RX 6800 XT was faster, but by overclocking the Radeon RX 7800 XT it was able to overtake it in performance. It also allowed the Radeon RX 7800 XT to achieve the highest performance in many games.
We found that overall there was a 5-8% performance increase from overclocking, with the average somewhere around 6%. This is not huge but falls in line with other overclocking we have done on AIB custom Radeon RX 7800 XTs. Our overclock testing reveals that the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is nearing the edge of its potential out-of-the-box. It is limited by power and Voltage headroom, which means overclocking is going to be very GPU-dependent or similar to the “chip lottery” where certain GPUs will overclock better than others with less power or Voltage.
The made-by-AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT has more headroom than AIB cards will because it is not already overclocked, it operates at reference clock speeds. However, AIB cards that carry factory overclocks are most likely at the limits for overclocking out-of-the-box. The little headroom the Radeon RX 7800 XT has is eaten up by pre-applied factory overclocks. On the one hand, this is good news, as it means you’ll be getting the most out of the GPU you can with no performance left on the table, on the other hand, there is a small window for enthusiast overclocking.
Overall, if you have a reference clocked Radeon RX 7800 XT like the made-by-AMD model we overclocked here, you will generally find about 5% or so more performance out of it by overclocking. It will allow it to compete better with the GeForce RTX 4070, and will definitely offer a big improvement over the Radeon RX 6800. It will also look a little more appealing compared to the Radeon RX 6800 XT, but not by much. More and more, we are finding that the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series of GPUs are rather limited when it comes to overclocking potential and the potential benefit considering the power requirement from overclocking.