Overclocking
Overclocking
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 to 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 AfterBurner which will work with 90% of the graphics cards out there. We can really recommend it, 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, to not increase the frequency any higher than 5% on the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 600 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest that 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.
GeForce GTX 560 Ti
| Original | Overclocked |
| Core Clock: 822MHz | Core Clock: 950MHz |
| Shader Clock: 1644MHz | Shader Clock: 1900MHz |
| Memory Clock: 4008MHz | Memory Clock: 4800MHz |
Radeon HD 6950 1GB
| Original | Overclocked |
| Core Clock: 800MHz | Core Clock: 950MHz |
| Shader Clock: 800MHz | Shader Clock: 850MHz |
| Memory Clock: 5008MHz | Memory Clock: 5000MHz |
Now, we left fan control at default, thus self regulating and during the overclock it did not become noisy. Our stable end So we overclocked both cards at 950 MHz and leave the memory frequency real close to each other. Pretty much the cards are now roughly equally clocked. NVIDIA picks up in scaling much faster than the R6950, equalizing the results even more.
Here's what that does towards overall game performance.
Above, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, maxed out image quality settings as before with 4xAA 16xAF
Above, Battlefield Bad Company 2, maxed out image quality settings as before with 8xAA 16xAF
Above, 3DMark 11 - the Performance test and score Here's where ATI has an advantage with the new 11.1 Hotfix driver.
