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.

Now here's where things get even more interesting. The Radeon HD 4770, despite it's high clocks, seems to be a really nice overclocker!

GPU clock frequencies:

• The reference clock for the card is 750 MHz, we jacked it up-to 850 MHz.
• The memory clock for the card is 3200 MHz (800x4), we ended up at 4000 MHz (=1000x4 MHz).

I would not be surprised to see you guys yield even better results. Especially if you'd apply some extra cooling (we always leave fan RPM at default).

For overclocking we used an internal beta of Rivatuner, a new update will be released in the near future supporting RV740 overclocking. Rivatuner breaks away from the limitations in Catalyst Control Center.

For those that can not wait, grab Rivatuner 2.24 and in the Rivatuner.cfg add 94B3h under [GPU_1002] RV770. The line would look like this:

RV770 = 9440h-9442h,944Ch,9460h,94B3h

Now mind you that ASIC name is misreported, and with monitoring the core frequency is misreported. But the overclocking tab works perfectly fine. This is a small 'fix', until we release a new version of Rivatuner.

* Brothers in Arms hells Highway

BIA: HH shows a very nice increase in performance thanks to that overclock. The trick is the memory. The RV740 really likes memory bandwidth, and the 800 MHz additional we have to offer in combo with yet another 100 MHz on the core is very nice. That's roughly 15~20% extra performance for free right there.Please, don't over-do your tweaks though, and be careful as overclocking typically is not covered by product warranty. Alright, enough numbers already. Let's head on over to the conclusion.