Overclocking GPUs (newbie questions)

[metallicaband]

Hello all,

I'm pretty new to overclocking Graphic cards, they didn't interest me much before because the performance to heat/power consumption ratio wasn't so good compared to overclocking CPUs.

I'm more interested in Overclocking Nvidia cards, will be getting a GTX 460 soon and I know those are one of the cards that generally have great overclock value, so I'd like to take advantage of that till I get a nice GPU maybe when the 700 series cards are released or the 670s/680s see a price drop.

So my questions are:

1- What's the preferred application to overclock GPUs these days, is MSI afterburner a good choice or should I go with something else?

2- Is it recommended to flash the BIOS with the overclocked values so I won't have to run an application on system startup? i.e the BIOS flash overclock will be more stable than application controlled overclock?

3- I'm only interested in getting Real world video game performance boost, not just getting high numbers in certain synthetic benchmarks to increase my e-peen or whatever, so how much does increasing the Shader clocks and Memory clocks effect FPS in real games? I know that core clocks will definitely change the performance but I'm not so sure about those.

4- Is this the correct way to overclock the core, shader and memory clocks:

> Find max stable core clock at desired safe voltage value
> Reset values
> Find max stable shader clock at desired safe voltage value
> Reset values
> Find max stable memory clock at desired safe voltage value
> Reset values
> Run all together at their max values and decrease across the board if they're not stable together

??

Any help/tips/suggestions would be appreciated.

ps: Mods please move this thread if it belongs in the overclocking board, I posted it here because discussions are mostly about general cooling and CPU overclocking over there.

 

[Forceman]

You can use either Afterburner or Precision, they are both based on the same core tech. You can flash the BIOS, but it really isn't worth it unless you are doing something other than just changing the clocks - Afterburner and Precision make their changes at the driver level, so they are applied even if you don't run the application on startup.

I'm not sure whether the 460s are memory bandwidth constrained so that you would want to prioritize core or memory versus adjusting them both equally or not - someone else will have to weigh in on that. I would say just leave the core and shaders linked (can they even be unlinked on that card?) and just increase both the core and memory together while you test stability.

 

[metallicaband]

Thanks for replying, in that case I'll probably go with afterburner since I've already used it before.

More replies/info would be great.

 

[CleanSlate]

I don't at all think you should flash the bios (unless you don't care about warranty). Flashing the bios to overclocked speeds could permanently void your warranty (regular overclocking does as well but it can easily be changed before you send in a card that's even semi-working, flashing a bios on a semi-working card is very iffy) and would definitely make it easy for the MFG to reject your RMA/charge you money.


If you are looking for real world performance increases that will make a difference in game play you'll need to do case studies in the games you play to see if OCing is actually necessary for you. Some times cards just don't need that little extra boost to keep you over 30 fps (or 60 or whatever you like). I have a feeling the 670 at stock speeds will be more than enough for you in almost any game that's out now.

 

[Dan]

i want the input from a expert on this too, im still somewhat new