Hey JCM. I have the XFX RX 470 in my current build. I'm surprised no one's answered your question. I'll add a screenshot of my overclock profile in WattMan for the GPU in this post so you can see how I have mine set up. My card is not liquid cooled and my case is pretty open to the air and equipped with three 120mm case fans (two intakes and one exhaust) so when I'm gaming the fans can get really loud when the entire computer is under load. The double fan system on the card itself can get really loud too, but I have a 5.1 surround sound system hooked up to my PC so if the nose of the fans bothers me (which it usually doesn't since I'm good at tuning things out) I just turn up the volume and shake the walls of the house instead.
A few things to note about overclocking:
Make sure you have adequate ventilation for your case. When you remove the factory limits of a GPU or CPU, all that extra electricity generates more waste heat. If your system isn't up to snuff your computer will actually take a performance hit if the components can't keep within certain temperature ranges and in the worst case your system will become really unstable. The basic thing to keep in mind is the lower the temps the better...always. There is an inherent risk in overclocking, so if you're not sure what to do DON'T mess around with settings; in the old days your PC would fry instantly with incorrect settings, but usually these days the PC will shut down before damage is done to the parts and factory settings will be reapplied upon the next startup. There is no guarantee though that your PC is 100% safe from your tinkering. Hardcore OCer's will tell you that manually adjusting voltages and whatever is the "real" way to do it, but if your motherboard came with software to automatically overclock the CPU I would just use that. I have an MSI board and it bumped my FX-8300 (?) from the factory 3.1 GHz to 4.2 using their OC Genie program. I was more than fine with that. DO NOT use a stock CPU heat sink if you plan to overclock the CPU. It'll be too weak to effectively cool the CPU and you'll either take a big performance hit or the PC will become unstable. I got a cheap (maybe $20 USD) "tower hybrid" heat sink and it keeps my GPU super cool, usually idling around 29 C and hitting around 50 C at load. Contrary to what others will say, you don't really need those $200 heat sinks to get good temps. Moving along...
Just a general note about GPU overclocking; it's a good idea to start small and work up if you're ever in a situation where you don't know what the upper limit of your card is. First, crank the Power Limit as high as the slider will go. Set your fan limits if you don't mind extra noise, but if fans running at load really bother you then work around the factory settings. Apply those settings so they're in effect as you work and open a game and let it run in the background so the card will be under load while you proceed. Move on to the GPU/Core clock and work in .5 MHz increments, gradually going higher from the factory limit until you start to see weird artifacts show up on your monitor. And when I say gradually, I mean gradually. Let the card run a few minutes under each .5 increment so you can see if instability shows up after a time. After all, we usually game for hours in a single sitting so you want to try to recreate those conditions as you work on your overclock. Anyway, those artifacts show the core being pushed just beyond what it can handle. Lower it by .5 MHz until they stop showing up. When you find that setting, drop the GPU clock back to factory and move on to Memory working in the same .5 MHz increment until you see artifacts showing up and dropping by .5 increments until they stop showing up. Set both sections to those numbers you've discovered and hop into a game for a while to make sure everything is nice and stable. If you don't get any crashes or weird artifacts, congrats, your card is at a stable OC!
Here's my WattMan profile:
The GPU is the "core clock". This usually can't be raised much over factory settings without rendering the card unstable. This is the "main processing area" for the data that gets shoved in for calculations.
The Memory section is the RAM part of the card and is used as a holding space for the data that's coming in. You can usually get this raised higher than the core clock, but it too has it's limits. On this card I thought I'd be able to get it higher than 1.9 GHz but, I can't. I had an HD 7850 that went from like 780-ish MHz to 1 GHz with no effort. This is the only thing that disappointed me with the RX 470.
I manually set my Fan to not run which is nice since the GPU will make no noise when the load is below a certain threshold; a nice touch from XFX. I'll also let it run full blast when it has to. The card will regulate anywhere in between as needed. I tried leaving it on Automatic but it wasn't cooling the card enough to stay stable at the speeds I set it to. I think XFX went a little conservative with their limiters to reduce fan noise so I just bypass all that. I crank the lower Min. Acoustic Limit at the highest limit, since the noise doesn't bother me. If the fans are too loud you can always adjust it down, but the reduced RPM may not be enough to keep the card cool. In that case go back and drop both your clocks down a bit.
Finally Temperature is what you really want to keep an eye on. Too high and the card resets to factory defaults if not just shutting down the PC altogether. In Automatic mode it's set to shut that s**t down if it goes over 90 C and to try to maintain 70 C at all times. I found these numbers to be completely unrealistic, as when the card reaches about 70 C mine started to act very strangely. So I set it to maintain 60 by try to stay at 40 C. It does a good job, usually hovering just above 50 C at load. Finally, on any AMD GPU you'll want to crank the Power Limit as high as you can go. That takes the brakes off the card and allows it to draw the extra power it needs in order to run the higher clock settings. Not giving the card permission to draw extra power won't get your overclock very far.
Chill is a new setting. Only certain games are able to take advantage of the lower power requirements, games I don't own. You can find a list of games that currently support this function online. If you play any of the games that take advantage of it it's well worth it according to some independent benchmarks I've read.
I hope this information helps! Let me know how your overclock works out and if you need anything else feel free to ask. I'm not an
expert expert, but I've been doing this stuff long enough to have more than a working knowledge. Happy gaming!
Chris
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram