@Grindcore77 In short, yup. Even a 1.7GHz clock is probably only going to net you +2-3FPS compared to 1.5GHz because the core architecture itself is a bottleneck at that point so you need to focus on the other end of the scale, the memory. Not to mention without extreme cooling such as LN2 you aren’t going to hit more than 1.7GHz at best on the core and thats if you have somewhat of a golden sample. Not sure why you would want to try and take top spot for Polaris these days anyway lol without a die shrink to like 7nm and a memory upgrade to at least GDDR6 (which I’m pretty sure you can do on Polaris with minimal to no redesigns of the architecture) there isn’t anything interesting left to find out about. I do think with a die shrink and memory upgrade though Polaris could again be a potent budget option for anyone that doesn’t care about Raytracing which… well is anyone who isn’t an Nvidiot even as someone with a 6800XT Red Devil I barely use anything RT related because all it does is tank performance and it does actually look worse, and not even a bit, like a LOT worse, compared to traditional approaches. The only legitimate argument I’ve found for RT is when it comes to reflections, RT reflections blow screen space reflections out of the water. If you don’t have the means to do these comparisons I can just fire up CP2077 and grab a few screenshots.
Ok…its more just learning with extreme overclocking cooling to see if i can get great scores then move up to newer hardware…learn the basics…improve…insulating etc etc…i aint gonna bust open my7900xtx as a beginner! Haha…
So yeah i guess its cheap its old…cap mod…volt mod etc etc…have scores to work with…its just a hobby…and its something to strive for…at the moment i managed to crack top 20…which is pretty good but obviously want to do better…thats without any memory modding…2040mhz and amd fast timing 2…anything near 2100mhz normal timing i get errors and crashing…and its just a shitty 8 pin only gigabyte aorus rx580…not even 6+8 pins like the sapphire…
All that other stuff…ray tracing etc etc i dont bother with anyway…only ever owned AMD cards…
So i guess then yeah i would like to master the memory side of things which in turn could help with later cards?
Look i know its old but ive had a mess around with the memory and i cant seem to get it…im still happy to pay for your time if its something you would still want to mess with…
Asic quality is 80.1% so pretty average…
@Grindcore77 Polaris cards just don’t like Samsung memory all that much it sounds like you’re having the same issues as I had when trying to clock them. AFAIK Samsung draws more power than Hynix\Micron and the cards just don’t like that. If you’re good with soldering you might be able to overcome that cap, @karmic_koala will remember better than I do what to do there but even without a physical mod one thing Samsung does excel at is immensely tight timings at stock frequencies. Being a crummy Gigabyte card the VRM on it isn’t especially good either so that will limit you a lot too and would be all the more reason to optimise the core frequency to voltage curve to save as much overhead as possible to work with the memory. If you can get one for a sensible price where you are you’d have a fair bit more fun with an RX590.
As for ASIC quality 80% is actually higher than ideal (you want around 73%). Higher ASIC = less voltage necessary to reach maximum clocks because there is less leakage. If you want me to take a look at the vBIOS I can but be mindful I’d be working “blind” without the card to test on myself. Annoying thing with Polaris is many settings aren’t copy\paste between brands due to the wildly varying quality of components and PCB designs, in that regard Gigabyte were on the cheap end of the scale even though they still tried selling the card as a premium variant 
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Ok thats all good to know! Hmmm id be interested in that mod! Anything to do with hard modding im all for it! The soldering iron has already come out on this card!!..The card was basically a throw away…got it to next to nothing…and then the journey began 
Yes…these gigabyte cards are def on the low end…but i guess that makes it all a bit more challenging!.yes of course if you want to overclock etc go with better built hardware,but again gotta start somewhere,and by modding i can improve it a little and in turn get good at that for future cards.
So even with a shitty card id just like to see how far it will go.
@Grindcore77 I wish someone would give me a throwaway 590 lol I didn’t play with enough of those so wouldn’t mind messing with one or two more. Lower end cards aren’t really any better or worse at clocking than high end cards as when you are using a properly configured vBIOS (which no Polaris card is due to AMD royally borking up the ASIC table and auto voltages) the cards are fairly power efficient the only advantage in higher end cards is due to them being way better built they can take a lot more torture. Let me know anyway if you want me to take a look at the vBIOS and do some fine tuning its pretty hard to crack even 225w once the voltages and a few other things are redone. With optimised memory timings the performance you’ll get would be roughly equal to Hynix\Micron running around the 8.4GHz mark. In short Hynix\Micron you can’t use timings that are as tight at stock frequency but they OC a lot better than Samsung, reverse that when talking about Samsung, turd for high OCs but great for really tight stock timings.
I will have a look around…a couple of 590s have popped up in these parts…but yeah price is the determining factor…will keep my eye out though! Let you know if its something worth messing around with! Will give the timings and stuff another go and i will get back to you…
250w ay…man i hit 420w going all out…core clocks still averaging pretty high in 3dmark…was expecting something to pop or smoke…haha
Im back again…ok…got my hands on a dirt cheap sapphire rx580 nitro+ special edition…
Messed around with memory and this thing hits 2250 no worries…no errors…micron memory…
I modded the bios and even got some runa in at 2350mhz with about 14 errors average each run…scores still were going up…havent messed with timings either…
As for core clocks i was still getting gains by raising its mhz…
This is my best score so far…cracked the top 10!
Just a question…heat isnt an issue…sub zero cooling…i was running into insta black screen when i upped TDC…volts at 1.375…no LLC…no offset…i set power limit to 300w…TDC at 170a was fine…at 180a i would get black screen and reboot…so obviously somwthing to do with power…
I was reading somewhere also how to calculate TDC? so at the moment 1.375v at 1655mhz…on succsessful runs hwinfo was reporting over 200A?..even with 170a set limit?
Here is my best score to date