Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC 4GB Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC GPU Overclocking

trixx

How well does the Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC 4GB graphics card overclock? We were wondering the same thing and fired up the Sapphire TRIXX v4.8.2 overclocking utility to find out!

trixx-oc

We left the VDDC offset at 25 and increased the GPU clock, memory clock and power limits to improve performance.

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The Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC comes clocked at 1080MHz on the core and 1410MHz on the Hynix GDDR5 memory ICs. Were able to overclock the card up to 1140MHz Core and 1500MHz on the 4GB of GDDR5 memory. This is a 60MHz increase on the core clock and 90MHz on the memory!

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The Sapphire Vapor-X R9 290X out of the box with the latest Catalyst 14.4 drivers scored 10,318 points in 3DMark Fire Strike.

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After our overclock we were able to get a score of 10,879 3DMarks. This is 5.4% performance improvement and shows that despite the fact this card is factory overclocked that there is still some more headroom available for end user overclocking. If you wanted to increase the voltages (VDDC Offset) there is likely more performance to be had, but we didn’t want to damage the loaner test card.