Overclocking The Graphics Card

Overclocking The Graphics Card

As most of you know, with most video cards you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. Typically you can tweak the core clock frequencies and voltages. By increasing the frequency of the video card's memory and GPU, we can make the video card increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard, but it can really be done in less than a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners, to not increase the frequency any higher than 5% on 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 25 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... you always overclock at your own risk!
 

Original	This sample	Overclocked
Core Clock: 1,607 MHz	Core Clock: 1,607 MHz	Core Clock: 1,842 MHz
Boost Clock: 1,683 MHz	Boost Clock: 1,683 MHz	Boost Clock: ~2,138 MHz
Memory Clock: 8,008 MHz	Memory Clock: 8,008 MHz	Memory Clock: 8,808 MHz

If anything, tweaking and overclocking has become more complicated starting with Pascal. You'll see that most cards out there all will tweak to roughly the same levels due to all kinds of hardware protection kicking in. We applied the following settings:

• Temp Target 95 Degrees C
• Power Limiter: 138%
• CPU clock + 235 MHz
• Mem clock +450 MHz 
• Voltage +100%
• FAN RPM default

Above, the relative performance difference between a reference card, the AIB card with its respective applied tweak and our overclocked results plotted in percentages. To the far right where you can see "Aver Difference %", this is the result of the four games tested and averaged out. Once we tweak the card manually it is roughly 8% faster compared to the (baseline) reference clocked performance.