Of course, the RX 480 reference card has been fitted with a pokey little heatsink. Just to make sure we weren’t being thermally limited I cranked the fan to maximum speed. The amount of air this thing moves is incredible, though it sounds like a Hoover doing it. Anyway, with the fan maxed we still couldn’t get a stable overclock beyond 1350MHz.
It’s a shame we couldn’t get much out of our sample. It would have been nice to achieve R9 390X-like performance in Far Cry Primal. Still, the overclock did net us 8% more performance as it took the average frame rate to 42fps, allowing the RX 480 to match the GTX 980.
Doom also saw an 8% performance boost from the overclock – enough to overtake the R9 390X this time, but not the GTX 980.
