Overclocking The Graphics Card
Overclocking The Graphics Card
As most of you know, with most video cards you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. Typically you can tweak on core clock frequencies and voltages.
What Do We Need?
One of the best tools for overclocking Nvidia and AMD videocards is our own AfterBurner which will work with 90% of the graphics cards out there. We can really recommend it, download here.
Where Should We Go?
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard, but it really can be done in less than a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners, to not increase the frequency any higher than 5% on the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 600 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest that you don't increase the frequency any higher than 30 to 50 MHz.
More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 10-15 MHz and leave it at that. Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 20 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today's tested card anyway, but we'll still show it.
All in all... do it at your own risk!
| Original | This sample | Overclocked |
| Core Clock: 863 MHz | Core Clock: 954 MHz | Core Clock: 1074 MHz |
| Boost Clock: 900 MHz | Boost Clock:1006 MHz | Boost Clock: 1241 MHz |
| Memory Clock: 6008 MHz | Memory Clock: 6008 MHz | Memory Clock: 6610 MHz |
With ASUS Tweak software we applied:
- Power Target 110%
- CPU clock +120 MHz
- Mem clock +295 MHz
This overclock is based on air cooling. Liquid cooling did not bring us much further other than the fact the card ran cooler. We also tried adding 62mV on the GPU, but that didn't result in anything better either. So our sample unfortunately was not the best overclocker available, not even memory could really break away from 325 MHz. ASUS is using Elpida ICs on this board.
Still, we do have extra performance on our hands, as the boost clock will now render at roughly 1200 MHz depending on the power and temperature signature. The GPU will continuously be dynamically altered on voltage and clock frequency to match the power and temperature targets versus the increased core clock. Have a peek at the results when overclocked.
For all overclocked games above we have used the very same image quality settings as shown before. Overall we have been able to get another 10% performance out of the graphics card.
