AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Memory Overclocked By 20% – Can HBM Really Be Overclocked ?

uk.hardware.info have apparently managed to overclock their AMD Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card sample by 20%, from 500mhz to 600mhz. 

This naturally raised some eyebrows here at WCCFTech.com and at uk.hardware.info as well. 

The reviewer achieved this overclock by adjusting the memory frequency through a slider in AMD’s Catalyst Control Center drivers.

However AMD stated in the R9 Fury X reviewer’s guide that there was no such slider for the R9 Fury X to enable memory overclocking via the drivers.  According to Koen Crijns from uk.hardware.info however, a memory overclocking slider did appear randomly “after every other few reboots”.

AMD Radeon R9 Fury X HBM Appears To Be Overclockable But Is It Really?

Thus Crijns proceeded to overclock both the core and the memory and to his surprise , and ours, he successfully managed to overclock the memory by 20% as shown inside the GPU-Z window in the screenshot below. The core clock was also pushed to 1145Mhz and both the core and memory overclocks were reportedly stable.

Frankly we were very surprised by this result as we’d previously mentioned AMD had stated that the on-package HBM VRAM of the R9 Fury X was not overclockable due to the relative immaturity of the technology and its poor response to higher voltages.

With half a terabyte/s of memory bandwidth as well as AMD’s new GCN 1.2 compression engine introduced with Tonga, which significantly improves bandwidth utilization. We’re looking at unprecedented levels of usable memory bandwidth. So users would be hard pressed to find any reason, performance-wise, to overclock the memory. Still, it would be quite interesting to see how far HBM can be pushed and the performance improvement that would be attainable from doing so, just as a healthy exercise of curiosity.

We’ll make sure to check with AMD about what exactly is going on here with regards to HBM overclocking. Sometimes the software would report things that are very different from what’s actually going on inside the hardware. And this could be a case of the software reporting frequency increases that have actually not taken effect on the hardware. The score shown above isn’t very different at all from what other Fury X cards have achieved with overclocked GPU frequencies and stock memory clocks.

UPDATE : We’ve confirmed with Robert Hallock, technical PR lead at AMD, that while the GPU-Z tool is reporting an increase in memory frequency in reality the frequency did not change.

Interestingly enough we’ve also heard that R9 Fury X over-volting might be coming sooner rather than later. In fact we’ve found out that some users have already managed to unlock voltage control on their R9 Fury X cards. And we’ll be covering it in detail very soon in a forthcoming article.

We’re looking forward to seeing what AMD’s add-in-board partners will be able to pull off with their own custom designed PCBs and cooling solutions. AMD doesn’t impose any restrictions on its AIB’s when it comes to overclocking and over-volting. So partners like MSI with their triple-overvoltage feature can really make a case for their over-engineered power delivery circuitry and use of top notch components. Especially in their top of the line Lightning and Hawk series of enthusiast graphics cards.

Custom air cooled Fiji powered cards are launching on the 14th of July in the form of the AMD Radeon R9 Fury ( non-x ). We’ll make sure to bring you in-depth coverage of these cards as we get closer to launch, so stay tuned.