**OMGITZFATAL's Graphics Card Overclocking Guide**

OMGITZFATAL's Guide to Graphics Card Overclocking

DISCLAMER

I am not in anyway responsible for any damage caused by overclocking, overclocking will almost always void your warranty and can damage or kill your components if done incorrectly!.

DO AT YOUR OWN RISK!


This guide is to help people overclock their graphics card, I frequent the graphics and displays section aswell as the overclocking section of the forum and often see people asking for advise on how to overclock their graphics card, what programs to use, what is safe and also how far can their graphics card be overclocked?
Hopefully this guide will answer these questions and perhaps a few more you might have.

So what are the real benefits of having an overclocked graphics card?

Enthusiast grade PC components come at a high price premium, not everyone can afford the very best but this is where overclocking comes in, you can buy a mid range graphics card and overclock it to significantly boost the performance of your graphics card.
This can be said for all level of graphics cards, not just mid range ones, the beauty is overclocking in most cases is free and may make a game playable that was previously a slide show or mean you can now increase the in-game eye-candy. In essence boosting the performance of your graphics card.

A few precautions before overclocking!

• 1. Make sure your case has good airflow throughout and that your graphics cards temperature's at stock clocks aren't already approaching 90C, Excessive heat will damage your graphics card so keep it cool. Do not let your graphics card exceed 90C!
• 2. You must have a good quality power supply, AMD's and nVidia's recommended power supply specifications are based on the graphics card operating at stock frequency. Overclocking a graphics card will increase the power consumption, thus putting more strain on your power supply, make sure your power supply can handle it, if your not sure ask the community.
• 3. Don't go crazy with voltage, with any overclocking, not just graphics cards too much voltage can damage or kill your components so take it easy, again if you don't know what is safe ask the community.
• 4. Overclocking in most cases will void the cards warranty! Do it at your own risk!.

Lets get started!

Ok so you have your PC up and running and you would like some extra performance from your graphics card, and you've checked your temperatures at stock speed (You can use GPU-Z to monitor temps!).

Your going to need some tools to overclock, monitor temperatures and check stability, below are some of my favourites

For overclocking: http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

For Monitoring: http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/SysInfo/GPU-Z/

For stability testing: http://unigine.com/

A quick word on stability testing

I've listed Unigine Heaven above as I've found overclocks pass hours of gaming, but fail on Unigine Heaven, How far you test for stability is up to you, if its stable enough for gaming and that's all you care about then that's fine.
Also many people will recommend the use of a program called Furmark (A.K.A MSI Kombuster) which is fine for most graphics cards, just make sure you monitor the temperatures closely as such programs will stress the graphics card to the absolute limit.

Pushing the sliders to the right!

Now you've got your tools first thing to do is open up MSI Afterburner and GPU-Z, you'll notice on MSI Afterburner you'll have several sliders for Core Voltage (mV), Core Clock (Mhz), Shader Clock (Mhz), Memory Clock (Mhz) and Fan speed (%) Some of these sliders may be “greyed out” and you won't be able to adjust them, here's how to unlock them:

Voltage Control: Click on the “Settings” button, and simply tick the check box next to “Unlock Voltage Control” which is under “safety features”.

Unofficial Overclocking: Click the Windows Start button, choose Computer/My Computer, then go to the following path (providing you installed MSI Afterburner in the default location): C:\Program Files (x86)\MSI Afterburner, in this location you should see a file called “MSIAfterburner” which is a CFG file, Right click the file and choose “Open with”, then choose Notepad.
This should open up the file in Notepad, scroll down to the bottom and look for a line of text that says “UnofficialOverclockingEULA = 0”, replace the “0” with the following: “I confirm that I am aware of unofficial overclocking limitations and fully understand that MSI will not provide me any support on it”
Then simply save the file and restart MSI Afterburner, you should now be able to adjust the sliders as you wish.

When overclocking its best to overclock one part of the graphics card at a time, rather than overclocking say, the core and memory at the same time otherwise it can be differcult to know what may have caused instability.

So with that in mind lets start with the core, generally speaking overclocking the core frequency will have the biggest impact on performance and will bring the biggest gains.
Increase the Core frequency by 15Mhz, then hit apply. This may seem like a small increment and it is but its better than increasing the frequency by 200Mhz and seeing the temps sky-rocket into dangerous territory.
Next step is to test the overclock for stability, this is where Unigine Heaven comes in, run the benchmark for about 10 minutes, we just want to make sure we have some stability and that our temps are still good (Leave GPU-Z open in the background, alternatively you could use MSI Afterburners Hardware monitoring).

TIP: If temps do become a problem and you are using air cooling, you could try a more aggressive fan speed or create a custom fan profile in MSI Afterburner.

If your overclock is stable and the temps are good then we can progress, simply increase the frequency again by 15Mhz and repeat the previous steps of testing for stability and monitoring the temps.

You will inevitably reach instability where you may notice artefacts, the display driver may stop responding, your monitor may switch off, your PC may restart or bluescreen, whatever happens you have two choices

• 1. Increase the Core voltage in MSI Afterburner, This will increase temps! Also be sure you know what is a safe voltage for your graphics card, I find that a 0.025V increase is enough to stabilise an overclock if your overclocking in 15Mhz increments.
• 2. Decrease the overclock, If your temps are already nearing 90C or you don't feel comfortable touching the voltage then decreasing the overclock will re-gain stability.

Shader and memory overclocking

Just like the Core frequency the Shader and Memory (or Video Random Access Memory) can be overclocked too, if you find that the shader slider is “greyed out” then its likely the shader frequency is linked to the Core frequency, this is common amongst modern graphics cards and will mean that increasing the core frequency will increase the shader frequency.

Memory overclocking will also increase the performance of your graphics card, but in my experience not nearly as much as overclocking the Core.
Follow the basic principles of Core overclocking, slowly increase the frequency testing for stability and monitoring temps as you go.

Modern memory overclocking Vs older memory overclocking.

It used to be that if your graphics card's memory was unstable you'd really know about it, artefacts would be all over your screen in a multitude of colours.

Things aren't as simple with GDDR5 error detection technology, in very simple terms if the memory is unstable and fails to transmit data it'll keep trying to transmit that bit of data until it is successful, where as before if data was unsuccessfully transmitted you would have seen an artefact.

Re-transmitting data over and over again will obviously take time, this delay will cause performance to decrease, so to test for memory stability you have to make sure your FPS aren't decreasing as you increase the memory frequency.

Final Testing

Once you've reached a point where you can no longer increase your overclock due to heat or voltage limitations or your simply happy with your current overclock and don't wish to overclock further you'll need to stability test your overclock, I would suggest that 10 minutes of Unigine Heaven isn't enough to be sure of stability. Like I said before its up to you what you consider stable. I personally let Unigine Heaven loop for a few hours, as always monitor the temps closely, you may even want to create a custom fan profile with MSI Afterburner if your using air cooling.

Conclusion

Hopefully you've overclocked your graphics card and have gained a nice performance boost whilst maintaining stability and reasonable temperature's, you may even of found it fun and strangely addictive.
Many of the basic methods and principles in this guide apply to overclocking any part of your PC, take it slow, monitor the temperature's and don't go crazy with the voltage, oh and enjoy the benefits