Overclocking & Tweaking

Overclocking & Tweaking

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. 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.

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 then 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.

So overall the reference GTX 275 really is a nice overclocker, typically you'll get ~700 MHz on the shaders, 1500 on the Shader domain and 1250 MHz out of the memory.

Each and every card we used has been overclock manually by us to see where our (stable) limit was. Let's have a peek.

We used Rivatuner 2.24.

As you can see we just clocked the much cheaper GTX 275 model far beyond GTX 285 clock frequencies.

Interesting to see is that NVIDIA apparently seeded us a vanilla sample for the reference review, and it clocked really well. For inno3D to achieve such a massive default overclock, they have to yield the best cards. And that shows, that card clocked insanely as well.

BFG's tweakability on the card also showed really good performance. And the overclocks on Sparkle and Palits offering are to be considered fairly normal.

So above we spot BiA: Hell's Highway again, same setup and image quality settings. Now the reference GTX 275 is clocked at stock clocks, the rest of the cards are overclocked. This way you can observe the performance difference coming from baseline performance, anything in-between 5 to 12% additional performance is a reality.

Should you find it interesting we recently posted an article on GeForce GTX 275 overclocking. You can read that article right here.