Overclocking

So we startup our overclock by increasing the GPU Voltage with 150 mVolt. Notice that the second we increase the voltage, we now see GPU Voltage being monitored in the Hardware monitor to the right.

We now gradually increase the Core/Shader clocks (with Furmark active) until we see the temperature hover at roughly 80 Degrees C or if Windows crashed (don't be too afraid about a system freeze or crash .. it's a part of overclocking).

As you can see we clocked the card at 780 MHz on the core, 1564 MHz on the shaders. An extra 150 mV of current was needed to achieve this. At 790 MHz the NVIDIA SAFE sentinel kicks in and clocks back the card. 780 MHz however was really stable. The golden rule for a good overclock is obviously not just the cooler, but also make sure you have plenty of ventilation inside your chassis.

The design of this graphics card is made so that it can clock really high with the extra power phases and such. NVIDIA however has a built in safety sentinel. If temperatures rise too much on selected domains, the SAFE sentinel kicks in and will down clock the card instantly in order to prevent it from damaging itself.

Now our 0.8ns memory can be overclocked as well. We reached 1300 MHz  (2600 MHz effective), at 1350 the GTX 275 Lightning edition crashed.

Bare in mind that a reference clocked GeForce GTX 275 runs at 632 MHz on the core, 1404 (typically) on the shaders and 2264 MHz on the memory. So this certainly is a substantial overclock. Not bad for an overclock tool that you'll receive for free with an MSI graphics card eh ?

So for this test we used

• X58 based ASUS Rampage II Ex motherboard
• 6GB Corsair Dominator Memory
• GeForce GTX 275 MSI Lightning edition
• Windows 7 64-bit
• Forceware 190.62

What does that bring us in performance ? Well have a look, and mostly compare continuously with the reference clocked card please.

Crysis WarHEAD

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti-Aliasing 2x MSAA
• In game Quality mode Gamer

So the best way of looking at this chart is to continuously compare in-between a reference GTX 275 and then our overclock on the MSI GTX275 Lightning edition. Hey .. it's free extra performance, I certainly don't mind. Let's have a peek at what it does with the 3DMark Vantage score.

3DMark Vantage

Now again coming from a reference card, we end up in nearly 2000 extra points in the overall performance score. Again not bad.

Final words

Okay you guys, this was a quick article on MSI AfterBurner, it's intended to give you a quick overview of the software. And obviously we here are Guru3D are quite proud of the application as we have been an integral part of the development.

This is just the beginning with AfterBurner though, more and more cards now and in the future will be supported and likely some new features will be addressed as well. We feel MSI Afterburner is a flexible, advanced yet very user friendly overclocking tool with a lot of extra's like voltage tweaking combined in once easy to use package.

AfterBurner will be fully supported and developed here on Guru3D.com as such I do like to point you guys to a new forum section here at Guru3D, the AfterBurner forums. MSI staff will be present there to answer your questions.

Links:

• AfterBurner Website (MSI)
• AfterBurner Support Forums
• Download AfterBurner