GeForce GTX 275 Overclock guide - Introduction

So you picked up this GeForce GTX 275 for 229 EUR, a card full of livelihood, performance and bang for buck. But heck, you are guru ... you want more. And of course that is possible. Very soon you will see overclocked models of the GeForce GTX 275 released by many board partners. These pre-overclocked models will be roughly clocked at 650MHz core, 1475MHz on the shader domain and 1200MHz (x2) on the 896MB GDDR3 memory. With the exception from BFG (OCX) and eVGA (SSC) of course, which will go even higher.

But why not do this yourself ? Overclocking is a relatively easy thing to do if you follow some basic guidelines.

Overclocking can be managed in many ways, through the NVIDIA control panel center or third party software. In this article we'll show you how you can overclock the easy way, with the help of Rivatuner.

This article is really simple as all we'll show you is, how to manage this .. and of course throw in a couple of additional benchmarks. See this as an easy overclocking guide, which is a series we'll start more and more with newer graphics cards.

What is overclocking ? Your graphics card has clock generators that allow several 'domains' on your graphics card to be clocked faster. In current days there often is a lot of overclocking headroom. Because not only does a product need to have a safety tolerance, pre-overclocked graphics cards actually became a market to sell in.

The GeForce series has 3 domains we can play around with and try to clock faster. The core (ROP) domain, the shader processors domain and the graphics memory. Clocking these domains faster (MHz) often can result in performance increases of 5 to 10%. And in the land of graphics, that's the difference between fast and furious..

In our vision, the best tool for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is Rivatuner that you can download here at Guru3D.com, we actually make this software, we know what we are doing.

So what are we doing today? :
Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its compute 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 not to increase the frequency any higher then 5% (in total) of the core and memory clock MHz. But heck, just read our guide here and see for yourself.

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