GamePlay and Performance
Contents
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We all have different needs for our PC’s, gaming, video editing, workstations or plain old simple web browsing. While an on dye GPU can do it all, you will hurt in any other than web browsing. This card even though it is a budget card works pretty well on the rest. Benchmarks aside, this chapter will show you how the card performs in games. I test 6 games for you:
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Fortnite
- Ghost Recon Break Point
- Borderlands 3
- Doom Eternal
Check it out and let me know what you think
In these games, I am not only playing the games, I show you gameplay at 1080P with AMD’s RDNA2 architecture utilizing AMD FidelityFX, Radeon Image Sharpening and their Vulkan support. I would have loved to have shown you the benefits of FreeSync2 but since I was using the AverMedia 2 Plus LiveGamer Portable to capture it all with zero performance hit, it did not work.
Another thing you might be sensitive about is noise and in this video I show you how loud it is idle and a few different variations of noise in between, all the way to 100%.
It stays pretty cool right? Well, in order to be able to modify the fan speeds and all, I used ASRocks own Tweaker Utility. This utility not only raises and lowers the fan speeds, but it can actually overclock the card as well and set your own automatic fan curve.
This is the utility at a glance when you first open it up.
It shows you your current GPU clock speed, memory clock speed, GPU and memory usage as well as temperatures and fan speed. It also has a few options.
OC Mode allows you to overclock your card with its own preset overclock which raises the Max Power Limit by 10%.
Silent Mode, which lowers the Max Power Limit by 10%, helping to keep your card cooler but will also lower performance a bit.
In User Mode, you can adjust the GPU and Memory Target Clocks and adjust the Max Power Limit. Fan Tuning, available in all modes, allows you to set the fans to Smart Mode, Fixed mode and Customize.
Smart mode adjusts the fans itself based on GPU and memory temperature. Fixed Mode, allows you to set the fan speeds to the way you prefer and only at that fixed speed and finally customized. Customized, allows you to set up your own fan curve, this is a great feature.
The preferences tab, allows you to automatically start the program when windows start and then also allows, if you do allow this to start up with windows, to minimize the window so that you don’t have to do it manually. It also allows you to set up your own language preference.
So since we have the option here to overclock, I did and I wanted to show you the performance differences between the overclock and stock versions. I did not spend a ton of time overclocking here, due to a few issues on time, I had to scale back a bit but I did get a decent overclock, you do have more room to play with it.
If you are interested, you can find the ASRock Tweaker software here: Click Here
Here, you will notice I overclocked the card to 1980Mhz on GPU, 1848Mhz on Memory and played a bit with the fan curve as well as the Max Power limit. With that, I have given you a sample of what’s to come in the next chapter. Let’s jump over to Performance comparisons and overclocking.
Continue To: Performance Comparisons and Overclocking
We are influencers and brand affiliates. This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.
I have spent many years in the PC boutique name space as Product Development Engineer for Alienware and later Dell through Alienware’s acquisition and finally Velocity Micro. During these years I spent my time developing new configurations, products and technologies with companies such as AMD, Asus, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA and more. The Arts, Gaming, New & Old technologies drive my interests and passion. Now as my day job, I am an IT Manager but doing reviews on my time and my dime.