Overclocking the graphics card
Overclocking the graphics card
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 to 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 tools for overclocking NVIDIA and ATI videocards is our own AfterBurner which will work with 90% of the graphics cards out there. We can really recommend it, 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, 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 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.
| Original | This sample | Overclocked |
| Core Clock: 822 MHz | Core Clock: 830 MHz | Core Clock: 966 MHz |
| Shader Clock: 1644 MHz | Shader Clock: 1660 MHz | Shader Clock: 1932 MHz |
| Memory Clock: 4008 MHz | Memory Clock: 4100 MHz | Memory Clock: 4300 MHz |
Overclocking wise the card will allow itself to be clocked to roughly 900 MHz on the core without additional voltage tweaking. Voltage tweaking itself is not a problem as a pretty default CHIL IC is used, being supported in AfterBurner. We could only raise the GPU voltage to 1.11V. And that brings us to a completely stable 966 MHz as a result, and that is still very impressive.
Increasing the voltage any further would result in the GPU overheating as we reached 90 Degrees. At 1.1 Volts you'll stay at roughly 80 Degrees C, the noise level will rise though, we ended at roughly 43 dBA.
Above, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, maxed out image quality settings as before with 4xAA 16xAF.
Above, Battlefield Bad Company 2, maxed out image quality settings as before with 8xAA 16xAF.
Above, 3DMark 11 - the Performance test and score. As you can see, an additional bump in this very GPU limited title, lovely.
