Best RX 460 Overclocking Settings Guide
If you want to get more performance out of the AMD Radeon RX 460, this guide walks through the exact overclocking steps and benchmarks that show how much extra speed this compact Polaris card can still deliver. The RX 460 may be a low to mid range GPU from 2016, but with the right tuning it can still handle 1080p gaming and squeeze out more performance than its stock configuration:
This is the AMD Radeon RX 460 and we’re going to overclock and benchmark it.
Now before we jump into all the awesome benchmarking, let’s take a look at this graphics card and see what we’re dealing with. The RX 460 is a low to mid range graphics card that was first introduced in mid 2016. It’s based on the Baffin Pro graphics processor, has 896 shading units, and supports DirectX 12. The card runs at 1090 MHz core clock and 1750 MHz memory clock. The card comes in both full height and low profile versions and features single fan, dual fan, or passive cooling. The RX 460 comes with 2 GB or 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and uses up to 75 watts of power.
So let’s get ready to overclock and benchmark this bad boy and see what kind of performance we can push out of it.
The first thing we did was update the drivers. The Adrenalin 22.11.2 drivers are the newest ones AMD offers for this card, so we installed those.
The overclocking utility we used is MSI Afterburner version 4.6.5. If you don’t know MSI Afterburner, it’s a totally free tool. I’ll put a link for it down below.
Now if you’re unfamiliar with the basics of overclocking and the steps needed to obtain a stable overclock for your graphics card, there are full overclock guides on the site that will take you step by step through everything you need to know.
The program we used to test our overclock for both stability and performance was Unigine Superposition. It’s also a free tool.
Now I’m going to put a list of known successful RX 460 overclock values on the screen. Every card is different, but this should give you a good starting point for finding potential overclock values that may work for you.
So how did our test card do with overclocking? Well, after quite a bit of testing, this particular card was only able to reach a solid overclock of 1260 MHz core clock and 1750 MHz memory clock. Needless to say, this is pretty disappointing and is actually the lowest overclock out of all the example values. In fact, we couldn’t get the memory clock to even go up an additional 5 MHz without performance decreasing noticeably. Attempting to add additional voltage made no difference whatsoever.
Why could this be the case? It looks like this card may be heavily starved for power. PCIe slots only supply a maximum of 75 watts of power. This being a fairly large 75 watt card including two decent size onboard fans means that trying to supply the card with more voltage basically has no effect. If you’re interested in overclocking with this card, I would strongly recommend opting for a variant that includes an additional 6 pin power connection.
That being said, we’re certainly not going to let that stop us. So let’s run through a set of 10 benchmarks to see how well the RX 460 performed.
First up is Unigine Superposition running at the 1080p Medium preset. Base results achieved a score of 3106. After overclock, the score increased to 3212. That’s an increase of 3.4 percent. Nothing spectacular so far. Let’s see if any of the other benchmarks did any better.
Next up is 3DMark Demo running the Time Spy test at default settings. The initial graphics score came in at 1628. After overclock, graphics score increased to 1682. That’s an increase of 3.3 percent. So it’s right in line with the last test.
Next up is Grand Theft Auto 5 benchmark. Running at 1080p, 100 percent resolution scaling, and the lowest settings, initial average FPS came in at 121.2. After overclock, average FPS increased to 125.7. So a small bump here as well.
Next up is Shadow of the Tomb Raider Trial. Running at 1080p in the Lowest preset, initial frames rendered came out to 9013. After overclock, frames rendered increased to 9231. That’s an increase of 2.4 percent. Our overclock isn’t having much of an effect on Tomb Raider.
Next, for all our video editors out there, we’ve got Blackmagic RAW Speed Test. Testing the performance for decoding 1080p RAW video files, initial results came in at 346 frames per second. After overclocking, results increased to 366 frames per second. That’s an increase of 5.8 percent. A decent boost to be had here.
Next up is Red Dead Redemption 2 benchmark. Running at 1080p, 50 percent resolution scaling, and the lowest settings, initial average FPS came in at 61.9. After overclock, average FPS increased to 65.4. That’s an increase of 5.6 percent. Nothing spectacular, but we’ll take it.
Next up is Valorant. Running at 1080p in the lowest settings, initial average resting FPS came in at 181.0. After overclock, average resting FPS increased to 191.1. A small but measurable bump.
Next up is BioShock Infinite. Running at 1080p in the Very Low preset, initial average FPS came in at 82.3. After overclock, average FPS increased to 85.1. That’s an increase of 3.4 percent. Just a slight boost here.
Next up is CS GO benchmark map. Running at 1080p in the lowest settings, base FPS came in at 198.0. After overclock, FPS increased to 206.1. Yet again it’s a slight boost to performance for CS GO.
Next is Borderlands 3 benchmark. Running at 1080p, 100 percent resolution scaling, and the Very Low preset, initial average FPS came in at 44.3. After overclock, average FPS increased to 46.2. That’s an increase of 4.3 percent. Another slight yet perhaps noticeable boost to performance for Borderlands 3.
So there you have it. The AMD Radeon RX 460 in all its glory. Certainly a solid base level performer for basic 1080p gaming, though beginning to show its age.
Do you have any experience using this card? Perhaps a better overclocking version than we were stuck with? If so, leave a comment in the video!
MSI Afterburner download page:
