In the end the MSI overclocked better and saw a slightly higher FPS result as well. Once I did that I was able to benchmark the card successfully. Given the issues with the memory before I went ahead and bumped that down a notch and did the same for the GPU clock. So with my two overclocks I did try to run them together but I had a driver crash. Not having memory overclocks isn’t really much of a loss anyhow, almost all of the improvements come from a good GPU clock speed bump. I would be especially careful overclocking the PCS+ R9 380 on the memory side because of this. This time around though the PowerColor would actually turn off the PC completely, no artifacts, no drive crash, no bluescreen even. Normally when overclocking memory I will see some artifacts when I push it past its limit or worse case a drive crash. But when it came to memory overclocking I tried to cut out a few of my earlier overclocks knowing how the other 380 performed but I was surprised to run into a wall when testing above 6700MHz. Overclocking the GPU clocks went identical with the MSI 380, on both cards I saw 1130MHz. This way I could get my peak overclocks on each and then see if the card could handle them together. To do this I broke down the overclocking into three sections, the GPU clock, Memory clock, and then both together. Before finishing up my testing I did want to see just how well the PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 would overclock as well.

Memory overclocking fail msi