AMD RX 7900 XTX OC Does Cross 3 GHz Barrier, But in Non-Gaming Workloads

AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX RDNA3 graphics card does cross the 3 GHz engine clocks barrier, but not in gaming use-cases, finds a ComputerBase.de article, in which the German publication compares the overclocking experience between the RX 7000-series RDNA3 and NVIDIA RTX 40-series “Ada” architectures. The RX 7900 XTX was found to hit engine clock speeds as high as 3455 MHz, but when handling the Blender rendering benchmark, and not typical gaming workloads.

The GPU could even be pushed to 3548 MHz with a power-draw of around 400 W, but it wasn’t stable, the article notes. The top frequencies the GPUs could hit with gaming workloads were around 2.90 GHz. We could be happening with games is that more of the GPU’s hardware resources are tapping into its power-limit (such as the memory controllers, caches, and other special SIMD functions, which could be impacting the engine clock boosting headroom. ComputerBase.de used a Sapphire RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ custom-design graphics card in its testing, which comes with three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and a higher overclocking headroom than what the reference-design cards are capable of.