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.
Above you can see the overclocked results for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, same image quality settings (HIGH / 4xAA / 16xAF) as before, in DX10 mode. Light blue is the default test session we showed you, and then in dark blue the Matrix Platinum, and then in red our overclock.
| Original | This sample | Overclocked |
| Core Clock: 850MHz | Core Clock: 900MHz | Core Clock: 1048MHz |
| Shader Clock: 850MHz | Shader Clock: 900MHz | Shader Clock: 1048MHz |
| Memory Clock: 4800MHz | Memory Clock: 4800MHz | Memory Clock: 4975MHz |
As you can see, the card can overclock much higher, but you'll need the ASUS iTracker2 software to manage that. We squeezed a good 1050 MHz stable out of the GPU core. That required a voltage increase to 1.3v -- instantly your GPU temps will rise to and above 90 degrees C when the GPU is stressed and the noise levels will increase significantly due to an increased fan RPM. 1050 MHz really was the limit. Anything above it would not remain stable.
The memory was a bit of a downer though, roughly 5000 MHz stable, anything above was causing instability, even with and without memory voltage tweaks.
ASUS iTracker2 overclock and voltage tweak software
