Overclocking the graphics card
Overclocking the graphics card
Most graphics 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 1500 MHz then I suggest that you don't increase the frequency any higher than 25 to 50 MHz step by step. More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually, when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as dots of ("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 25 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. All in all... you always overclock at your own risk.
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| Reference (FE) | This sample | Overclocked |
| Game Clock: ~1600MHz | Game Clock: ~1700MHz | Game Clock: ~1760 MHz |
| Memory Clock: 12000 MHz | Memory Clock: 12000 MHz | Memory Clock: 13000 MHz |
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* Game clock is the actual value measured on our side - not the advertised one (!)
With AfterBurner (download) you can tweak the card. You'll see that most cards out there will all tweak to roughly the same levels due to all kinds of hardware protection kicking in.
We applied the following settings in Afterburner:
- Core Voltage 1050
- Power Limiter: +20%
- GPU clock @ 1800 MHz (1820 MHz is the maximum we can set, a limitation enforced by AMD).
- Mem clock 1625 MHz (=13.0 GHz effective)
- FAN RPM default
Please note: both the GPU core and memory clocks have been limited, this is a forced restriction set by AMD. This was the first card that did not take a full 14 Gbps tweak well. Ergo we lowered it to 13 Gbps
The results show respective default clocked 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.
