Overclocking
When overclocking, we gave the voltage a slight tweak and were still able to reach a stable 1141 MHz boost result via MSI Afterburner. When we tried for a higher overclock than that artefacts started appearing so we backed off. Even on the overclock, the card remained under 68C and the cooler was able to maintain this without registering above ambient room noise on our decibel meter at 40cm on the open test bench. This gave us about 11% improvement on our benchmarks across the board but keep in mind that overclocking is not consistent with each chip and your mileage is likely to vary.
Noise and Temperatures
Under load (even overclocked), the card didn’t go over 68C was barely audible. The loudest part of our test bench was the power supply fan in the Corsair HX-850W. The Twin Frozr V fans didn’t spin at idle which made the MSI R9 380 Gaming 4G silent. Every now and then on low GPU intensive games, one of the fans would tick over for a few seconds and then stop but even then, on an open test bench, I was able to see it but I couldn’t hear it.
