FPS drops OCing R9 280?

Hi All,

I picked up the Sapphire Dual-X R9 280 3GB yesterday and have been playing around with it. First off, no major issues which is fantastic, and it's rock solid after a night of being pegged mining (0 HW failures!).

What is a bit weird is that if I take this card anywhere outside of reference speeds (940/1250 for this edition) it immediately starts dropping FPS in all benchmarks I've tested. For example, if I run Furmark's benchmark it sits at 1140fps at stock speeds, but if I take it even to 945/1250 it will drop to ~900fps halfway through the test. Same with even a minor overclock on the RAM.

I have seen lots of reviews stating that this card OCs like a monster so I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong, but what?!

For reference, all OCing has been tested through both Overdrive and MSI Afterburner, and it has been using either 0% power boost, or 5%.

Any ideas are appreciated!

Kick the power all the way up (+20% IIRC) It doesn't actually increase the voltage, it just doesn't cap the power so low.

Aha - I'll give that a shot as soon as I'm done with work today. Thanks! I did see 20% in several of the reviews, but was a bit wary about overvolting on a brand new card... if it doesn't do that though, excellent!

Gillette said:

Aha - I'll give that a shot as soon as I'm done with work today. Thanks! I did see 20% in several of the reviews, but was a bit wary about overvolting on a brand new card... if it doesn't do that though, excellent!

Click to expand...

Furmark is very intensive - it could well be throttling too, have you checked your temps (core and VRM) when the speeds start dropping? It could be power throttling too, so bump the slider up to +20% to make sure that's not happening. If you want to overvolt too (so you can overclock higher) there is no harm in that, just don't go too far above 1.3v and watch your temps (make sure the core stays 85 or under and the VRMs 90 or under).

Can I monitor VRM through GPUZ? I've been watching the core temp and it barely breaks 60C during these tests.

What confuses me a bit about the power throttling is that I can literally overclock it by .005% (940 -> 945) and have this issue, but I won't rule it out until I try it!

Thanks again.

I don't use Furmark as it's not a realistic representative of how you will actually use your GPU. Bump Power Target to 50% and call it a day.

Looks like that was it guys - the power limit settings. Bumped that up to 20%, temps are still good, and the overclocking is actually showing the gains it should.

Thanks so much! Happy with a stable 1050/1500 up from 940/1250

Congrats. Another problem bites the dust.

Trixx also has voltage help for overclocking and can also make the boost clock stay put without up and down scaling.