5 Minute Overclock: AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT to 2962 MHz

radeon rx 6500 xt 5 minute overclock

We’re overclocking the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Navi 24 GPU up to 2962 MHz in 5 minutes or less using the AMD Adrenalin software performance tuning toolkit.

I’ll speed run you through the OC settings and provide some notes and tips along the way. Please note that this is for entertainment purposes only and not the whole picture. Please don’t outright copy these settings and apply them to your system. If you want to learn how to overclock this system, please check out the longer SkatterBencher article.

Alright, let’s do this.

5 Minute Speedrun

Open the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition driver software. This official software package includes the graphics card drivers and many valuable tools for finetuning your gaming experience.

Go to the Performance tab. Here you will find a performance tuning toolkit that includes logging metrics and tuning knobs.

Click on Tuning and select Manual Tuning

Set GPU Tuning to Enabled. This allows us to finetune the graphics card’s GPU settings.

Set Advanced Control to Enabled. This presents the frequency and voltage sliders in terms of MHz and voltage instead of percentages.

Set Min Frequency (MHz) to 2675 MHz. This ensures the lowest frequency in a high-performance workload will not drop below 2675 MHz. Setting the right minimum GPU frequency is essential for three reasons.

  1. A high minimum frequency ensures the frequency does not go too low during workloads, thus ensuring high performance
  2. A too high minimum frequency doesn’t cause instability; however, it does induce performance throttling. Ensuring the minimum frequency is not too high is vital to achieving optimal performance
  3. When tuning the voltage frequency curve, certain parts of the V/F curve are no longer stable while other parts are. Setting the right minimum frequency ensures the selected point on the v/f curve stays within the stable region.

Set Max Frequency (MHz) to 2975 MHz. Inexplicably, this is the maximum GPU frequency AMD allows us to set.

Set GPU voltage to 1125 mV. This offsets the standard voltage-frequency curve by a negative 75mV. The voltage frequency curve describes the relationship between an operating frequency and the voltage required to run that frequency stably. The voltage frequency curve for the Radeon RX 6500 XT starts at around 600 MHz with 0.72V and ends at 2975 MHz with a voltage of 1.25V. That said, as per AMD rule, the actual GPU voltage cannot exceed 1.2V. So even though the maximum voltage of the V/F curve is 1.25V, this voltage will never be set.

Set VRAM Tuning to Enabled. This allows us to finetune the graphics card’s memory settings

Set Memory Timing to Fast Timing. This enables more aggressive memory timings than the standard configuration and may help improve performance.

Set Advanced Control to Enabled

Set Max Frequency (MHz) to 2400. Inexplicably, this is the maximum memory frequency AMD allows us to set.

Set Power Tuning to Enabled. This allows us to increase the card’s power budget.

Set Power Limit (%) to 15. This increases the maximum allowed power consumption from the default 80W to the new limit of 92W. Inexplicably, this is the maximum power limit AMD allows us to set.

Then click Apply Changes to confirm the overclocked settings.

Radeon RX 6500 XT Overclock Performance Improvement

To ensure everything is working as intended, we re-run some benchmarks and check the performance increase compared to the default settings. With our RX 6500 XT now running 3% higher GPU frequency and 7% higher memory frequency, at 2962 and 2400 MHz, respectively, we see the highest performance in all benchmarks. The performance increase ranges from +4.86% in Geekbench 5 OpenCL to +33.96% in Geekbench 5 Vulkan.

radeon rx 6500 xt overclock benchmark performance

When running Furmark GPU Stress Test, the average GPU clock is 2602 MHz with 1.014 volts, and the GPU Memory clock is 2384 MHz with 1.36 volts. The average GPU and GPU Hot Spot temperature is 60.3 degrees Celsius and 76.5 degrees Celsius. The average TGP power is 92.009 watts.

radeon rx 6500 xt overclock furmark performance

When running the GPU-Z Render Test, the maximum GPU Clock is 2962 MHz with 1.195 volts.

radeon rx 6500 xt overclock gpu-z performance

And that’s it, thanks for reading and see you next time!

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