This week, Russian enthusiasts Smoke and Atheros have managed to overclock AMD's Radeon R9 290X. The core frequency on the card was pushed to 1575 MHz. The R9 290X has a stock frequency of 1000 Mhz and is based on Hawaii. It is coupled with 2816 stream processors and also has 4 GB of GDDR5.

R9 290X Core And Boost Frequency Overclocked to 1500/1700 MHz Respectively. First Position in 3D Mark 11 with 23,260 Points

The R9 290X has stock core frequency specification of 1000 Mhz and a turbo frequency of 1500 MHz. Smoke and Atheros have managed to push this to 1500 and 1700 MHz with a power rating of 1.475/1.7 V. SLI/Crossfire on the card was off. This makes for the first position in the 3D Mark 11 benchmark with a score of 23,260 points. It also makes for a Global Rank of 6 for 1x GPUs. The number of UHP points gained using R9 290X is 18, which also gets a top global position. The processor used in the overclocking process is Intel's Core i7-4960x. The processor has been officially rated for a frequency of 4 Ghz (3600 MHz). It has 6 cores with LGA2011 and a TDP rating of 130 W. The 3600 core frequency on the processor was overclocked to 5893 MHz. Through liquid nitrogen, the temperature was kept at -110 degrees.

The operating system used by Smoke and Atheros was 64 bit Windows 7. The motherboard was ASUS's Rampage 4 Black Edition with standard stock cooling. Four modules of G Skill's DDR3 SDRAM were used. Total memory used was 8192 MB (2048x4), with core frequencies of 800 MHz. This was clocked to 1,222 MHz. Timings on the RAM were CL8 12-8-27 1T. The results achieved received a mixed response on the hwbot site. Some were impressed with a good response, while others expected more.