14 - Overclocking & Tweaking

Overclocking & Tweaking

As most of you with most videocards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple, tamper with Image Quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far.

What do we need?One of the best tools for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own Rivatuner which you can download here. If you own an ATI or NVIDIA graphics card then the manufacturer actually has very nice built in options for you that can be found in the display driver properties.

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 not to increase the frequency any higher then 5% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 600 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest 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 artefacts 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 artefacts, 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'd need to overclock today's tested card anyway, but we'll still show it ;)

All in all... do it at your own risk.

We started overclocking the card with the help of Rivatuner (4830 is not yet supported in the current build). As you know the standard clock frequencies for the GPU and memory are 575 MHz and 1800 MHz respectively.

Easily we were able to push the core towards 700 MHz and the memory towards 2000 MHz (effective).

As you can see, the result yielded a faster performing card mainly thanks to that additional memory bandwidth we created. The game you are looking at is Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway with maximum in-game quality settings enabled. Everything is maxed out, no AA though (not supported in-game).

This really is a worthwhile 15% overclock bring performance on par with Radeon HD 4850, congratulations .. you just saved 70 USD.

Please, don't over-do your tweaks though, and be careful as overclocking typically is not covered by your warranty.