For overclocking the R9 280X DirectCU II card we will be using ASUS' own Tweak GPU tool as this gives us all of the options we require.



Above is a screenshot of GPU-Z showing the reference (factory overclocked) speeds We have also included the ASIC rating of our sample. The ASIC rating basicly tells us how good the overclock will be. The higher the ASIC rating, the better the overclock is likely to be, particularly on air cooling at a given voltage for example.

In truth, we are still dubious as to the real value of this reading but time will tell. As we have been asked on numerous occasions to include it in our reviews we felt it only right to show it although please take any of these values with a pinch of salt until we can confirm whether it does actually mean a higher or lower overclock will be achieved.



Thanks to the excellent cooling properties and the power management of the ASUS R9-280X, we managed a fantastic and fully stable overclock, increasing the core to 1235MHz. The card would run benchmarks at 1250MHz but sadly some artifacting was noticeable so we dropped back our 100% stable (verified by multiple passes of Unigine Heaven 4.0) overclock.



After settling on our stable clockspeed which was verified by multiple runs of Unigine Heaven and 3DMark we benchmarked the overclock and compared it to stock results with Unigine Heaven 4.0 to evaluate the benefits of overclocking the GPU.