Overclocking & Tweaking
Overclocking & Tweaking
As most of you know, with most videocards 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 simply 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 tool for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own Rivatuner that 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. Based on Rivatuner you can alternatively use MSI AfterBurner which will work with 90% of the graphics cards out there. We can recommend it very much, 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, not to increase the frequency any higher than 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 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.
ASUS issued GPU Voltage moddable software with this release. As such we'll be using that software for overclocking. Surprisingly enough it works out well. We can increase the GPU voltage towards 1.138 Volts and as a result we boosted the core to 850 MHz, the shaders processors to 1698 MHz. The memory unfortunately could not be overclocked, the ASUS software returned an error the minute we fiddle around with memory.
None the less, above in the upper chart you can see the overclocked results for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, same image quality settings as before, in DX10 mode. Blue is the default test session we showed you, and then in red the overclocked results.
| Original | This sample | Overclocked |
| Core Clock: 700MHz | Core Clock: 700MHz | Core Clock: 850MHz |
| Shader Clock: 1400MHz | Shader Clock:1400MHz | Shader Clock: 1698MHz |
| Memory Clock: 3700MHz | Memory Clock: 3700MHz | Memory Clock: 3700MHz |
Have a look at the screenshot below to see what that software looks like. The overall design can be done much better as the GUI really is so-so. But yeah, Voltage overclocking does work and the overclock achieved really is impressive.
When we look at 3DMark vantage again, the overclock resulted into a 2500 points overall increase of the P score. Not bad.
