When it comes to Hawaii overlocking, the reference cooler tends to be the bottleneck. The reference PCB and GPU can handle a fair amount of overclocking, but the reference cooler cannot. Usually all it takes to unlock more performance is a decent non-reference cooler.

Thanks to the hefty cooler, the PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 card copes well with the factory overclock and it manages to maintain the GPU at 1040MHz practically all the time. That’s not all, we managed to squeeze out an additional 90MHz on top of the factory overclock. This amounts to more than a 19% boost compared to the reference clock and it’s a relatively good score.



Even after overclocking, the temperature never topped 66 degrees.