Overclocking The Graphics Card
Overclocking The Graphics Card
Traditional overclocking - 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. By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its clock cycles per second.
Use any tweaking utility of your preference of course. We use AfterBurner based on personal preference, Gigabyte has nice tweaking software available as well, it's just that advanced overlay and tweak functionality that AB offers that has my personal preference. Our applied tweak:
- Core Voltage : +100%
- Power Limit : 150%
- Temp. limit : 90C
- Core Clock : + 40
- Memory Clock : +510 MHz (=12246 MHz effective data-rate)
- FAN RPM: default
Now we increased that power limiter to 150%, now that is total brutal overkill. But the bigger TDP does boost performance a bit overclocked until the GPU runs into other limiters like voltage and load. However we noticed that after a ~330 Watt TDP, no substantial perf increase was really detected. Hence in the end if you tweak we recommend you to keep that limiter at say ~ 130% - Increasing it higher (withouth gain) also heats up the VRM more which is not necessary then.
Now +40 MHz on the core, you might feel that our sample is not the best overclocker on the GPU core right?, but you need to revise that idea, Gigabyte already nearly maxed out the overclock for you by tweaking it so close to it's maximum capability. And that standard tweak is covered by a 4 year warranty. Not bad eh? More Voltage 100% offset applied was stable. Memory as well, we noticed some artifacts at 550 MHz under a stress run, 510 (x2 DDR rate) thus 1.225 GHz was the maximum. Once overclocked keep this in mind: Due to the dynamic nature of the boost clock, your frequency is not fixed. Limiters and monitors, temperature, load, power and voltages will continuously alter a maximum clock state.
With this overclock and with that 150% power limiter the card is only slightly more audible at 40 Dba (you can hear a bit of airflow, that's all) at roughly 75 Degrees C. Impressive.
Above a new chart. It is the relative performance difference in between a reference card, the AIB card with its respective applied tweak and our overclocked results plotted in percentage. The reference card is 100%. To the far right where you can see Aver Difference %, this is the result of the four games tested and averaged out. So the card runs give or take 7% faster compared to reference. And once we teak it manually it is roughly 13% faster compared to the reference card and thus 6% faster compared to the default Aorus clocks. This was with the TDP Power limiter tweak maxed out. The increased TDP certainly did raise the performance a little overall (but not heaps). Below all overclock results, measured at Ultra HD.