For overclocking today's sample we will be using ASUS' own GPU Tweak tool as this gives us all of the options we require.



Above is a screenshot of GPU-Z showing the reference (factory overclocked) speeds and reference boost clocks. We have also included the ASIC rating of our sample. The ASIC rating basically 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.

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.



We had some fun overclocking the R9 290 DirectCU II. We did initially manage to break the 1200MHz on the core but after a lengthy period of benchmarking and stress testing we started to encounter anomalies so we reduced this back to 1175 which is still an excellent overclock by any standards. As expected, the memory overclock was not so great but we did manage a respectable 100MHz (400 effective) 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.