If you are the proud owner of an AMD Radeon RX 5700 graphics card, you’ll know already that the card is pretty darn fast without modding or overclocking. But, there is a way to squeeze more potential performance out of Navi by using a soft-mod trick. This doesn’t physically modify the actual card itself, instead uses some software trickery inside of Microsoft’s Windows to allow you to push the limits of overclocking beyond what is normally possible.
For example, AMD RX Radeon RX 5700 reference design has a base clock of 1465 Mhz, a game clock of 1625 MHz and a boost clock of 1725 Mhz when running at ‘stock’ and without modifying the fan profile (heat is one of the big factors in the clock frequency, more on that in a moment). For my own test bench, this means that AMD’s reference Radeon RX 5700 card hovers around the 1670 – 1700MHZ mark during benchmarking with 100 percent GPU load.
You can manually overclock this card, however, and nudge the Power Limits of the GPU and clock speed up to +20% and up to 1850MHz respectively, plus crank memory speeds up to 930MHz. In doing so, the GPU will typically hover at higher clock frequencies, generally touching about 1750 – 1780.
In essence, the specs of the Radeon RX 5700 and its bigger brother, the Radeon RX 5700 XT are quite similar to one another – both have identical memory configurations for example. The difference is that the XT features 40 Compute Units while the RX 5700 ‘vanilla’ features 36 Compute Units, and lower clock speeds. This soft mod doesn’t ‘enable’ the 4 ‘missing’ compute units, but what it does do is allow the card to be overclocked to basically identical speeds to the Radeon RX 5700 XT.
So, with this soft mod using SPPT/Windows registry files, you can now crank these values up higher, and in doing so allow your card to hit much greater clock speeds and thus, the Radeon RX 5700 will crank out higher performance, with you being able to select boost speeds over 2GHZ and power limits of 50+%.
Before we delve into the nitty-gritty of how this is done, I’d like to take a moment to say that any and all damage you inflict on your equipment is your responsibility, and we do not take one bit of responsibility for your actions. We also advise the cautious approach, particularly if you’re newer to overclocking, and don’t just crank the sliders as high as possible. This is also not covered by AMD’s own warranties technically speaking, and while it’s pretty difficult to brick a card from overclocking, being careless is a good way to increase the chances. The message then is simply – go slowly, keep an eye on temperatures of the AMD Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT while overclocking it.
The first thing you’ll want to do is download Display Driver Uninstaller if you’ve had other cards installed in the system (this includes Intel’s own IGPUs), and you’ll also need a few things from Igor’s lab. The most important of these is the Windows registry entries for the Radeon RX 5700 soft mod. These .reg files will be inside a zip file, and you can select the version you feel is best (we’ll talk about that more in a moment). Full credit to Igor for the mod’s here. You should also download the Morepower tool also. Extract them / place them all in an easy to accessible folder (ie, make a folder called ‘OCing Navi’ on your desktop).
At this point, I suggest you install DDU, but don’t run it yet. Click on start and type registry, then enter windows registry. You’ll want to find go to the following path – be careful, on the folder which ends in 0318, there are lots of similarly named folders, so you’ll want to choose the one that’s an exact match (see image below if you need visual help).
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}
Inside this folder, you will see subfolders which will be named something like 0000, 0001 and so on. Now, if you have just build your system, or it’s a fresh install with only the AMD Radeon RX 5700 and you don’t have any IGPU, there will only be one folder entry that will be 0000. IF on the other hand Intel’s IGPU drivers installed, or you upgraded from let’s say an Nvidia Geforce GTX 970, you will spot more folders.
At this point, you have a few choices to install the Soft Mod for the Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT overclocking.
Option 1 (beginner). You use Display Driver Uninstaller to remove all the older card entries. You double click on it, then go through the other manufacturers (like Intel, Nvidia) and then eventually uninstall AMD’s own drivers too. To make sure that Windows doesn’t start installing older drivers you could also turn off the internet to stop it downloading drivers for say your Intel IGPU.
Then, restart the system and once on desktop, the very first thing you’ll do is reinstall the Radeon RX 5700 graphics card – check the same windows registry path as before. With any luck, you’ll only have the one entry, if you don’t because an IGPU installed again / something funky happened (you never know), you can then look at option 2.
Option 2 (a little trickier, but not much). Take a look at the registry path above, and browse through the subfolders starting with 000. If you’ve had say an Nvidia GTX 970 installed previously, and the Intel IGPU you can actually see which entries are for Nvidia simply by the text inside the folder. For Nvidia, there will be text inside like “NV”,
For the RX 5700 drivers, you will literally see “AMD” in several pathways. The numbers of the folders also usually increment upwards, so if you have folder 0000 that has a reference to Intel, folder 0001 which references NV, and folder 0002 (as you just recently put in the RX 5700) and that folder has AMD in it… then well, that’s probably the folder for you.
Now you’ve identified the registry folder where those pesky Radeon drivers are lurking (or you’ve only got a SINGLE entry where the RX 5700 is 0000 in the registry) you can go ahead and install the SPPT mod.
Extract the zip folder with the registry entries (they’ll end in .reg). There will be several files, with the names like “Vanilla5700” (this puts things in the registry back to stock), and then MorePower and “EvenMorePower”. If you’re on a non-water cooled card, I would HIGHLY suggest sticking with just the Radeon RX 5700 More Power entry. Once again, I advocate caution. For this guide, I will proceed to assume that’s all you’re using (More Power for the Navi 10 / Radeon RX 5700).
IF you only have folder 0000 (with the RX 5700 drivers in the registry inside there) then you can simply double click it the MorePower entry, then confirm you want to merge. IF you went with option 2, you can still do this but with one small step. Open NotePad and then open the reg file inside it (you can drag and drop as its easiest).
At the top of lots of text is the registry path – and it tells the .reg entry where it needs to put these keys. So, all you need to do is change the ‘0000’ to the relevant number where the AMD Radeon RX 5700 drivers are kept for the Soft Mod to work. In this case, I’ll assume it’s 0001, so simply replace the last ‘0’ with a ‘1’ and then save it (ctrl+s or just file -> save).
Then double click it, then confirm the merge. You will now need to restart your system (you can also restart the display driver too).
Back into windows and you can then load up afterburner or the AMD control panel, go back to WattMan and you should be able to crank the power limit to 50 percent now, instead of just the 20 from earlier.
I like a benchmark like SuperPosition to run to test out base stability, temps and also performance increase. This won’t give you the ‘final’ answer on if a clock speed is stable for longer gaming sessions, but will give you an idea of how temps, power limits and clocks perform. Basically, you don’t want to just throw a load of voltage into the core in an effort to reach higher clock speeds, as more voltage = more heat which = boosts suffering.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you exact numbers on clock speeds for the GPU and Memory, as it will depend on the cooling solution of your graphics card, silicon lottery (ie, how lucky are you with what your rx 5700 is capable of), and also other factors like say, air flow of your case and even your tolerance for fan speeds on the card itself.
Make no doubt about it, soft modding the radeon rx 5700/rx 5700 XT means you’ll need to have more cooling than standard reference speeds, so I’d highly suggest creating a custom fan curve using AMD’s WattMan. Basically it works on two Axis. Temp on the X axis, while the Y-Axis is the fan speed. So for example, when the temp of the rx 5700 is 30 degrees, you might want the fan at just 25 percent, but if it reaches 50 degrees, you might choose the fan to ramp up to say 35 percent.
This is all dependant on the cooler on your GPU (and something who’ve chosen to water-cool their Navi 10 cards won’t need to worry about), and also depends on things such as airflow, and how tolerant you are of noise.
While overclocking increase the clock frequency in increments – let’s say 25 – 50 MHz steps on the core until you reach the max, and then start tweaking the memory clock speeds. Your goal is to find the best combination of memory and core clock speeds for the Radeon RX 5700, while also maintaining a balance of heat and noise. Below is our results with the card in Superposition, in the 1080P Extreme preset. We’re running an Intel I9-9900K for our CPU (not that it matters much, as the 1080P extreme preset is almost all GPU).
You might, however, remember, that during the earlier part of this guide I suggested you also download the “More Power” tool also, but we’ve yet to do anything with it. Well, that’s because, without the SPPT / registry soft mode installed in the Radeon drivers, you can’t actually ‘tweak’ anything, and it’ll all just be greyed out.
Now – this is an optional step – and IF you do not have great cooling on your card or not an advanced user I would advocate that you don’t bother to install this application, but if you want to tweak more… then go ahead.
Install it like you would any .exe application, and go through the super simple install. It’ll then load up and you can select the card at the top (using the drop-down). In our case, we’re using the Radeon RX 5700, but this also supports the Radeon RX 5700 XT and even Vega 7 GPUs too. You can then go ahead and start manually adjusting the limits available.
Basically, this means that instead of say, adding a 50 percent+ power limit, you could set the max to be 40 percent, or a higher value. You can also go in and start to adjust the max voltage you can apply to the GPU, max memory and core clocks – you get the idea.
I know I am in danger of repeating myself to the point of frustrating the reader, but I want to stress this. I do NOT take responsibility for you damaging your hardware. If you crank 11-gigawatts of power into the core and push the speeds up to warp 10, that’s your business. With air cooling, you will also most likely not hit much more than 1900-2Ghz on the core anyway (assuming you want a decent level of noise… though that does depend upon lots of variables).
Basically, the More Power tool created by Igor is cool and is great if you’re going for extreme overclocking, but for most users, I suspect that the registry mod will be more than sufficient.
The one negative using the soft mod technique, is that reinstalling and changes to the driver will need you to reimplement the mod.
