keeping those low temps so
that may compromise your
maximum clock frequencies
perhaps. Again, given
that people using water
cooling can easily reach
1500MHz, it could ver y well
be that LN2 is overkill for
where you eventually end
up regarding frequencies.
Either way, once you get the
hand of the eccentric nature
of this GPU and driver,
you’ll have no troubles
matching these scores of
course exceeding them.
voltage was obviously lower,
with no load line set). The
scaling after this didn’t’ help
at all, so one has to pin it
down to an inherent design,
process or combination of
both property of the GPU.
The upside here is that once
you get that stable 1650MHz
or whatever, it will pretty
much run at this frequency
through all benchmarks
with little to no intervention
needed form you side form
pouring more LN2 into your
container.
The cold bug here was
relatively shallow as the
GPU would crash to a black
screen at less than -90’C.
This would indicate that dr y
ice may be a viable cooling
method as well which
would be true, apart from
the fact that the GPU puts
out so much heat, the Dr y
Ice would have a hard time
Only four benchmarks
were used and each of them
resulted in a hardware
first place, using an AIO
cooled 6950X CPU and X99
motherboard of course.
Nothing special here but just
a quick show of the “fun” that
can be had with the RX480,
with minimal effort. One only
wishes that it had longer
legs as it would have been
great to see 2GHz or so on
the GPU. The performance
would have easily rivalled
that of the GTX 980 on LN2
perhaps exceeded it, who
knows. Alas that is all
speculation. For now, the
RX480 is what it is. Here’s
hoping that the bigger GPUs
promised next year form
AMD have more overclocking
headroom as these are
fairly low frequency limits
especially given that these
were possible with a few
exceptional samples of
some 28nm parts from last
generation (Team green that
is). We will of course look
at the aftermarket RX480
GPUs in the next issue with
the game tests etc. and
significantly more mature
drivers. Until then, if you
have do happen to own an
RX480 and a POT, consider
adding an eVc to your arsenal
for some quick LN2 fun. If
you don’t’ want to spend
more though, you can just get
by with the software. Either
way, give it a bash and see
where you end up.
[ TheOverclocker ]
Issue 39 | 2016 The OverClocker 27