Discover How to Overclock Your Graphics Card For Faster Performance

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The first thing to do when overclocking your Graphics Card is to gauge the current performance of your Graphics Card. You can do this by FRAPSing a section of a game or running a synthetic test, but you need to see what effects (if any) your overclocking is having on your Graphics Card performance.

If you chose the real-world test remember that you’ll want a test that’s not limited by the speed of your Graphics Card, that’s consistent from one run to the next and that’s repeatable. You’ll therefore need a game that’s graphically demanding, and to find a section of that game that doesn’t differ from one play-through to the next. This can be tricky, so a synthetic test might be better.

Synthetic tests have the benefit of being absolutely consistent from one run to the next, and they require very little setup time. A real-world test can require hours of double-checking numbers, finding and eliminating inconsistencies and general frustration. However, synthetic tests are just that, and while a 3DMark score of 14,000 rather than 12,000 might sound great, it doesn’t tell you whether your PC can now play Crysis and Very High detail.

Make your own decision on which method to use, based on what you want to achieve. For example, if you’re trying to get Bad Company 2 to play smoothly, it’s probably best to try to develop your own real-world benchmark for this game. Good examples of synthetic tests are 3DMark Vantage and Unigine Heaven, while many games have built-in benchmarks to give a semi-real-world test.

Now For Overclocking Your Graphics Card!

Once you have your baseline performance, you’ll need an application to overclock your Graphics Card. Most Nvidia partners have their own custom applications, but most applications work with most cards, so you could as easily use Zotac’s Firestorm, MSI’s Afterburner or another favourite. Unfortunately it seems that Gigabyte doesn’t have a version of OC Guru to use with Nvidia cards as it does with its ATI alternatives. GPU-Z is an excellent way to determine whether your overclocking application has actually overclocked your Graphics Card,

Your overclocking application will present three crucial sliders – Core, Shaders and Memory – plus manual fan control. Some applications have more options, but these are the important ones for overclocking. The Shaders (usually called stream processors) usually run at twice the speed of the Core. For example, we’ve used MSI’s Afterburner to overclock our Graphics Card and we had to drag the Core slider to 855MHz and the Shader slider to 1,710MHz.

We found that this was the limit of the card by steadily increasing the Graphics Card’s frequency in increments of 50MHz and then 10MHz from the 715MHz core and 1,430MHz stream processor clocks that it ships with. After we applied each overclock, we ran our benchmark test a few times to see whether the card would overheat at its new speed and whether the overclock added any extra performance.

We next increased the memory speed of the Graphics Card, again by sliding the bar upward in 50MHz and then 10MHz increments. We settled on a final speed of 2,100MHz. This is actually a mis-report from Afterburner, as it’s forgotten that the Graphics Card uses GDDR5, which is quad-pumped, rather than GDDR4, which is dual-pumped. The actual effective speed of our overclocked memory was 4.2GHz.

Our overclock added a massive 13-14fps of extra performance for just an hour of patience. In fact, our overclock was so good that our Graphics Card out-performed a stock-version, which costs £50 more!

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