depends on the card. some cards just don't OC. Fury X comes to mind as a fine example of that. GTX 9xx series cards OC like crazy, even the factory tuned ones. buying a 9xx series card and not ocing it is wasted potential.
RX 480 can OC pretty well too. i have one in an mITX rig i built strictly for VR in the living room. i think the reference clock is 1288 or something like that, but the card is OCed to 1342MHz from the factory. i pushed mine further to 1390MHz and it makes a hell of a difference.
4.3% increase in firestrike GPU score and extra 5% FPS or so in pretty much every game i tried.
the difference is even more profound with my GTX 980 Ti classified cards. 9% gain in firestrike
GPU score and ~10% gain in FPS in EVERY game (factory OC vs my own OC):
http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/10050227/fs/7437806
Agree nVidia OC very well for everyday use
, especially when I read the official spec for 980 Ti is 1000MHz base / 1075MHz boost as shown
here and see you cards results
.
Now in above quoted post you say "RX 480 can OC pretty well too.", in your example you've gone to 1390Mhz, officially boost clock is 1266MHz (on this
page). So you've gained approx 9.9%. Now to me Fiji doesn't seem all that bad, out of 7 cards I had most reached 1100MHz (+/- 20MHz) with upto +50mV, 2 reached 1135MHz/1145Mhz. Now some of those cards may have reached better clocks but I was limiting it to ~+50mV plus time constraint hindered me to do more testing. Any card reaching 1145Mhz is approx ~9% OC for an Fury X and 14.5% for a Fury/Nano which would then put it in the same category as RX 480 OC ability IMO. In those % I'm also discounting where some Fury owners gain shaders with unlock. On Polaris for the node change I had expected more OC headroom TBH.
All the Fiji cards power sourcing is better than ref RX 480, have good VRM as well (ref RX 480 does as well), excluding the Nano the Fury/X cooling solutions are great. The ref RX 480 blower is just adequate IMO like the Nano stock cooler.
I just think Fiji OC ability perception has suffered due to how there was that PR chat of "Overclockers dream". I also had 4 differing Hawaii cards prior to going Fiji, 2x Tri-X / 1x Vapor-X / 1x DCUII, when I compare the Fiji cards to them I reckon I got better performance per watt, similar or not to far behind OC ability/scaling and cooling solution on Fury/X was quieter/better IMO = better value for money if I had changed the coolers on Hawaii to say AIO/WC.
Tri-X 290 sample 1 1100MHz, sample 2 1140MHz, Vapor-X 290X 1100MHz, DCUII 290X 1070MHz.
even gave up on the CPU and just bought a 4790K tho previous 2600K was 4.6
.
