Performance - Overclocking

OverclockingOf course with most videocards we can do some easy tricks to boost the overall performance a little. It's called overclocking the videocard and by increasing the frequency of the videocards memory and gpu we can make the videocard increase it's calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard but it really can be done in less then a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase that frequency any higher then 5-10% of the core and memory clock. Example: if your card would run at 100 MHz then I suggest you don't increase that frequency any higher than 110 MHz.

More advanced users push that frequency often way higher. Usually when memory starts to show white dots 'snow' you should go down 10 MHz and leave it at that. The core can be somewhat different. Usually when you are clocking to hard it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. I recommend that you back down at least 10-15 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well.

All in all .. do it at your own risk. Overclocking your card too fast or constantly to it's limit might damage your card and it's not covered by your warranty.

You will benefit from overclocking the most with product that is limited or you may called it 'tuned down'. Now then, we know that this graphics core is likely more powerful then what we have seen in the previous benchmarks. Therefore by increasing the memory and core frequency we should be able to witness some higher performance results.

Will the cooling solution help cooling down the graphics card enough for a nice overclock ?

Right, let's get started. Default clock speed for the core is 380 MHz. Default memory frequency is clocked at 680 (2x340) MHz on a 256 bit wide memory bus. Now with the help of the latest version of RivaTuner we where able to overclock the graphics card (low-level) towards 400 MHz on the core and 740 MHz (2x370) on the memory. _Exactly_ the same as the reference model.

So the fasting thing available is getting even a tiny bit faster now. If we went towards ~385 on the memory we would get snow and artifacts. If we pumped the graphics core speed up about 15 Mhz we would see small artifacts or system hangs. So the results at 400/370 are 100% stable without any image corruption.

Have a look at the performance gain:

We did manage to benchmark Aquamark at 410/380 .. however once we ran Unreal it crashed. So keep it under or at 400/370.