Overclocking ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT OC Edition
To overclock the ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT OC Edition video card we are going to use the built-in overclocking performance tuning in AMD Radeon software drivers.
When we open up the Performance Tuning and hit Custom, we find that we can control GPU, memory, fan, and Power Tuning on the ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT OC Edition video card. We cannot, however, raise the Voltage. We can set a maximum Power Tuning slider to a maximum of 15% over the default on the ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT OC Edition. We can also enable 100% fan speeds to ensure the highest overclock, however, we did not have to with this video card. The cooling was so good, that we could leave it at default for our overclocking adventures, which definitely kept the noise level down.
Due to the way AMD GPU frequency scaling works, which is very dynamic, we can simply raise the Max Frequency slider and Minimum Frequency slider in increments until we find the highest overclock, or maximum allowable clock speed. We found that by matching the Minimum Frequency slider to the Maximum Frequency slider, we found an increase in GPU Frequency, and this worked the best for providing a frequency overclock. It was important to move the Minimum Frequency slider, as the Maximum one did not produce higher frequency results. It wasn’t until we moved the Minimum as well, that we saw a bump in frequency. Our final overclock was a Minimum Frequency of 2800MHz and the Maximum Frequency slider at 2900MHz.
The default memory frequency is 19.5GHz on the ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT OC Edition video card, which is the reference spec. We managed to push it up to 2562MHz or 20.5GHz, an increase of 1GHz. At 21GHz, it worked mostly, but there were odd flashes that we could tell were due to the memory frequency being too high. Backing it down to 20.5GHz was completely stable, and did not eat too much into the overall TDP of the video card to allow a higher GPU frequency overclock. Therefore, the memory in our overclock was running at 20.5GHz for the overclocking results. This improved bandwidth to 656GB/s from the default of 624GB/s.
In the graph above, we have graphed out the default (blue line) GPU clock frequency to our overclocked (orange line) GPU frequency as reported by the single metric in GPU-Z. The factory overclock boost is set at 2520MHz on the ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT OC Edition, and the game clock is set to 2213MHz. According to this, we are actually running over the boost clock slightly at around 2540MHz very consistently. This is great news and shows how good the power delivery and cooling is on the ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT OC Edition. The average result is exactly: 2541MHz.
Looking at our overclocking results, we can see that raising the Minimum Frequency slider and Maximum Frequency slider has resulted in a higher GPU clock speed. It now fluctuates between 2660-2690MHz mainly. The exact average is 2680MHz. Therefore, our total overclock from the default is 139MHz, or a 5.4% increase in GPU clock speed. This isn’t a huge increase, but consider that the ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT OC Edition is already running at a very large GPU boost compared to the reference AMD specs as is out-of-the-box with its factory overclock. At 2541MHz it is over 100MHz faster than the reference AMD clock speed out-of-the-box to begin with.