Overclocking the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7600 XT Gaming OC
For our overclocking trials, we had a choice of using the GIGABYTE Control Center software or the Adrenalin performance section of the driver package. The GIGABYTE Control Center (GCC) failed to recognize the card, so the choice was pretty easy. We downloaded the latest GCC three separate times successfully. It installed just fine. However, when opened, it would not show a performance tab for our graphics card. Only tabs for RGB and fan control were visible. Given that, we settled on the Adrenaline performance section of the drivers. We were able to adjust the GPU frequency minimum and maximum, memory frequency, fan cycle, and power limit. Voltage adjustment is locked on this video card. Our final settings are shown below. The default Adrenalin is on the left.
The adjustments made to the frequencies are as follows: minimum GPU 2900MHz, maximum GPU 3000MHz, memory pushed to the right, 2500MHz, and power limit +20%. You can also see we turned the fan cycle up quite a bit. This was due to high temperatures on the “Hot spot” measurement, which we will discuss a bit later. The video card was rock solid at these settings but ran quite hot.
Our charted results are noted above. To recap, the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7600 XT Gaming OC is supplied with a factory overclocked game clock of 2539MHz and a boost clock of 2810MHz. This is in comparison to the “reference” clocks of 2470 and 2755MHz. The baseline game clock of a RX 7600 non-XT is 2250MHz. You can clearly see that the base XT version is already 10% overclocked and our GIGABYTE RX 7600 XT Gaming OC is another 3% beyond that, right off the shelf. Put another way, the GIGABYTE RX 7600 XT Gaming OC is 13% overclocked versus a plain RX 7600 without doing anything.
When we look at the chart, the default FPS averages 2786MHz. This was very steady as you can see. The default card then is 247MHz above the factory overclocked game clock! When we applied the overclock, our average FPS was 2935MHz!! That is 396MHz beyond the factory overclock or 15%. Not bad right there. From “reference” that is 18% and finally from the baseline non-XT, 30%……yikes. We will see how this translates in real-time gaming.
We will discuss temperatures later, but suffice it to say the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7600 XT Gaming OC runs quite hot. On automatic fan settings, the default GPU settings caused the fans to ramp up to nearly 100%. The downside of using 80mm fans is that they are really noisy. Really noisy. Did I say the fans are noisy? Anything on this video card set over 50% fan cycle is obvious. 100% is high-pitched and annoying. We had to use a very aggressive fan cycle when overclocking. The card was stable, but the noise was the loudest and most bothersome we’ve had to deal with in a long time.
