Overclocking the Radeon HD 4770 (Guide) - Introduction

This week the Radeon HD 4770 was released by ATI and as our reference article showed, it has a lot of overclocking potential.

Being a budget card with a lot of punch, overall performance is to be found in the mid-range segment. We here at Guru3D.com would like to teach you how to get more out of your 99 USD investment. In fact we'll show you how to get another 10 to 20% additional performance out of the card, totally free.

I mean seriously, the Radeon HD 4770  has a lot of tweaking headroom.

Typically overclocking can be managed really well through the Catalyst control center, however .. the control center always has certain restriction as in 'how much' you can actually overclock. In this article we'll show you how you can overclock the easy way, with the help of this little application we make ourselves, Rivatuner.

This article is really simple as all we'll show you is, how to manage an overclock; and of course throw in a couple of additional benchmarks.

So what exactly is  Overclocking & Tweaking ? -- Well, 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, which you never want to do really. Then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far, on the fly, for free. it only takes a little time an patience.

Literally by increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and graphics processor, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second, making it run faster. It sounds hard, but it really can be done in less than a few minutes. A word of advise though, 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.

What do we need? One of the best tool for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own Rivatuner that you can download from our website. 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.

Next page please, where we'll learn you to overclock your graphics card, done right..