Once you notice artifacts, dial it back a bit until they disappear. If all looks good, bump the card up another 10MHz and repeat the process. After you bump it up 10MHz, save the changes, then fire up the Heaven or Valley benchmark and look for system instability or graphical errors-odd color blobs, sparkling flashes of light, or other visual artifacts. Start slowly, increasing the core GPU clock frequency by 10MHz at a time. If you’re extremely risk-averse, you could leave both settings alone and continue with the process using the stock voltage and temperature settings, though that leaves potential performance on the table.ĭuring the actual process of overclocking your graphics card, we recommend altering the GPU and memory clocks individually to isolate any possible instability. A boost of 10% on the power target and a maximum temperature limit in the low- to mid-90’s Celsius should work for most cards. To use MSI Afterburner to overclock your graphics card, launch the utility and first crank up the power and temperature limits, though you may only be able to increase the power limit on a Radeon graphics card. Graphically rich benchmarks like Unigine Heaven, which loops GPU intensive workloads and reports clocks and temperatures, can be useful for testing the stability and performance of an overclocked graphics card. You can also run some in-game benchmarks if you’d like-all of the games tested in PCWorld’s massive roundup of GeForce and Radeon GPUs include automated in-game benchmarks that make capturing repeatable data easy. We recommend Unigine’s Heaven or Valley benchmarking tools. Minor voltage bumps-say in the 1- to 2-millivolt range-are usually safe, but even then there are no guarantees.īefore you start overclocking your graphics card, run some benchmarks to get a baseline for your unaltered system. Pump too much voltage into a GPU and you could damage it irreparably. To enable it, you must enter the Afterburner advanced properties menu by clicking the gear icon visible in the middle of the interface and ticking the boxes to unlock voltage control and monitoring.įor basic overclocking, we wouldn’t recommend messing around with voltages. There’s also a voltage slider for tweaking GPU voltages, but that is disabled by default. When ready, Afterburner will present you with an elaborate interface, featuring a few sliders for altering power targets, fan curves, GPU and memory frequencies, and current clock and temperature data. You’ll need to manually unlock voltage controls and monitoring in MSI Afterburner in order to tweak it. You most likely are-unlike many overclocking tools, Afterburner works with multiple generations of GeForce and Radeon GPUs from any graphics card manufacturers. When the utility is initially launched, it will scan your system and determine if you’re using a compatible graphics card. Using Afterburner is simple and straightforward: Download the utility from MSI’s website, install it, and you’re basically ready to go. This handy-dandy PSU wattage calculator can also help you spitball the approximate power usage of your PC. If your system consumes significantly less than your PSU’s rating, you’ll probably be fine. Cheap power meters that get plugged in between your PSU’s power cable and wall outlet will tell you how much power your rig is using. It’s more likely that you have some headroom, however, because the rest of the components in typical systems shouldn’t consume that much power. If the recommended PSU for your graphics card is 500 watts, for example, and that’s what is installed in your system, you may exceed its capacity while overclocking. As such, if you’re already flirting with the upper limits of your power supply (PSU), overclocking may tip it over the edge and cause system instability, or worse-damage the PSU. Overclocking your graphics card puts more strain on your PC’s power supply.Īs we’ve just mentioned, overclocking a graphics card will result in increased power consumption simply because it requires more juice to run the card’s GPU and memory at higher frequencies. Where the “right” peak temperature lies for each GPU will vary from card to card, but typically, you’ll want to keep it around or below the 90-degree Celsius mark. The GPU-tweaking utilities we mention a little later will all report GPU temps as well. Most motherboard manufacturers have utilities available to read the thermal sensors on their boards, and your system BIOS will report hardware health data. System temperatures can be monitored using any number of tools. The coolers used on most of today’s gaming-oriented cards typically have some built-in headroom to accommodate at least some level of overclocking, but if your card or system already run hot, additional cooling may be required. By definition, overclocking a graphics card means running it above its stock GPU and memory frequencies, which will result in higher power usage and heat output.
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