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 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.
Now this was a little surprising, but as you can see, the card can overclock much MUCH higher and that has a very positive effect on overall performance. We did not apply any voltage tweaking here. Play around with that and you will pass the 750 MHz marker, no doubt, maybe even 800 MHz like we did.
Above you can see the overclocked results for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, same image quality settings as before, in DX10 mode. Blue is the default baseline session we showed you, and then in red the overclocked results, and that is just a downright good result.
- Level Contingency
- 4x Anti-Aliasing
- 16x Anisotropic Filtering
- All settings maxed out
Check out what we accomplished overclocking wise:
| Original | This sample | Overclocked |
| Core Clock: 607 MHz | Core Clock: 607 MHz | Core Clock: 815 MHz |
| Shader Clock: 1212 MHz | Shader Clock:1212 MHz | Shader Clock: 1620 MHz |
| Memory Clock: 3348 MHz | Memory Clock: 3348 MHz | Memory Clock: 3800 MHz |
In the above chart we load up Battlefield Bad Company 2 again with DirectX 11 enabled.
- 8x Multi-sample Anti aliasing
- 16 Anisotropic filtering
- All image quality settings enabled at maximum
Again, that is a significant increase in performance thanks to the overclock.
And the last test run, this time with 3DMark Vantage. As you can see we increased the GPU score with roughly 3000 points to ~15000. No voltage tweak was applied. This is a pure and simple overclock.
A direct result of the overclock temperatures increased to over 90 degrees C on the core with FurMark. Make very sure your PC is well ventilated.
