Overclocking the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7600 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 7600 is designed identically. We use HWINFO64 to generate two graphs for the overclock.
For overclocking the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7600 GAMING OC we used the performance software included in the current version of AMD’s Adrenalin 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. Recall that the “Maximum GPU Frequency” is not an absolute, it is simply the maximum limit set on the GPU.
Actually, overclocking this video card was very easy. The RX 7600 has very minimal user-adjustable frequency choices. The maximum GPU frequency is 3000MHz. That isn’t much headroom when the card sits at 2870MHz by default. The maximum memory setting is 2400MHz, with a default of 2250MHz. The power target does increase by 12%, the voltage is locked. So, we simply set the GPU all the way to the right, 3000MHz, and the memory at the halfway point, 2325MHz. We chose a fan profile primarily at 50% with a bit more flexibility if the temperature rose above 60C. The fans on this card are quite noisy above 50%. Off we went using the mentioned settings. You can see the screenshot above.
Front end and Shader clock performance
Recall that the out-of-box Game clock for the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7600 GAMING OC is 2356MHz, which is a full 106MHz or 4.7% beyond the reference clocks. Our testing looks at the Front end and shader clock performance. Our Front end clock default is an average of 2674MHz. Overclocked it reached an average of 2745MHz or 2.6% boost. Meanwhile, the Shader clock by default averages 2703MHz and when overclocked 2780MHz, or a 2.8% lift. So, basically increasing the GPU “maximum” frequency to 130Mhz pushed the performance up by 70MHz over default out-of-the-box.
Overall, combining factory overclock and our adjustments, we see the reference GAME clock lifted by 495MHz in all, or 22%, not bad right there. We will see how that translates in real-time gaming shortly.
The GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7600 GAMING OC cooler performed well in the overclocking testing. There were no issues in any of our games. The GPU temperatures were not an issue, which speaks well for the heatsink design. The fans on this video card are noisy above 50%, as in a high-pitched whine noisy. In a case enclosure, this would definitely be noticeable, it sure was on the open bench. Fortunately, the fans rarely exceeded 50%.
