10/5/2020 How to Overclock Your GPU to Boost Your Games’ FPS | Avast

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Avast Academy Performance Gaming How to Overclock Your GPU to Boost Your Games’ FPS

GAMING

How to Overclock Your

GPU to Boost Your
Games’ FPS
There’s nothing more depressing than starting a brand new game
on launch day, only to suffer through constant stuttering or poor
quality. If your games run at lower FPS or your multimedia apps
run slow, don’t fiddle with lower settings and make sacrifices just
yet. Instead, try pushing it to its absolute limit. Enter GPU
overclocking.
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What exactly is GPU overclocking?

GPU overclocking means pushing the speed of your graphics card beyond its
default to squeeze out more speed for your games! It’s a bit like pouring fire

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accelerant on the grill… it helps you get your steak a bit faster, but it’s a force to
be reckoned with. Here’s the deal: Every graphics card runs at a certain standard
frequency. For example, my NVIDIA Titan Xp (2017) runs at a maximum clock of
1,582 MHz on its GPU chip while the 12GB of memory runs at 5,505 MHz.
NVIDIA has opted for a rather conservative approach on this as the silicon is
capable of handling higher frequencies, which allows for more operations per
second. At any rate, you can expect a small bump in performance.

This article contains:

What exactly is GPU overclocking?

How safe is overclocking?
Before you overlock, optimize your software
Your overclocking checklist, or what you need to set your PC on fire (not
literally!)
How to overclock your GPU: Step-by-step instructions
Can I overclock every graphics card? Can I overclock my laptop?
Time to play
Next step: Speed up your PC

In other cases, an overclock could give you an edge when cranking up the visual
details. For example, only an overclock allows me to play Nier: Automata at 4K
resolution, with maximum details at a rock solid 60 FPS. Without that overclock,
I’d have to dial back some visual settings and make sacrifices. Note that other
GPU-dependent tasks might also benefit from an overclock, including
multimedia rendering which is done mostly by the GPU.

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Before you overlock, optimize your

software
Overclocking is a hardware-based approach to optimizing your PC. It’s only
worth doing if your PC is already optimized on a software level, otherwise you’d
be negating the improvements you’ve made by overclocking. To create a solid
basis for overclocking, you should first optimize your PC software for gaming
and consider using Avast Cleanup to reduce the impact of 3rd-party processes
on your computer. The combination of optimized hardware and software will
give you the best possible performance.

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Free Trial

Get it for Android , Mac

Your overclocking checklist, or

what you need to set your PC on
fire (not literally!)
Overclocking is a straightforward way to improve your PC’s or laptop’s gaming
or multimedia performance. A few things you’ll need:

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1. An overclocking tool — my personal preference and possibly the leader

of them all is MSI Afterburner which works for most AMD and NVIDIA
GeForce chips. Note that newer versions of MSI Afterburner also feature
an “OC Scan”, initially developed for NVIDIA's latest GeForce RTX series
(2070, 2080, 2080 Ti) that automatically overclocks your GPU — a nice
feature to have. More on that later. You can download MSI Afterburner
and its latest beta versions (which I’d actually recommend, especially for
newer generation GPUs) from this page.

MSI Afterburning overclocking utility

If MSI doesn’t work for you, EVGAs Precision XOC is a good alternative
that works perfectly fine on non-EVGA cards. However, EVGA requires
you to sign up for an account before you can download the (otherwise)
free and great tool.

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How safe is overclocking?

Overclocking is relatively safe these days. If anything goes wrong, the laptop or
PC will crash or produce visual artifacts (which is a good warning that your game
is about to crash, too), but chances are slim you’ll actually damage your
hardware. Damaging the GPU will occur, however, if you decide to become a
professional GPU overclocker, using LN2 or “shunt mods” to remove voltage
limitations so you can feed more power to the GPU… but I wouldn’t touch that
with a ten-foot pole! It’s not sustainable and gives you marginal benefits at high
risk. It’s up to you, but you can obviously kiss that guarantee goodbye!

RTX 2080 meets DRY ICE

If you want to know how the pros push their GPUs to the limits, check out the
channels of German overclocking champions Der8auer, GamersNexus and
JayzTwoCents — my personal favorites.

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EVGA Precision X overclocking utility

2. AMD users might want to look at AMD Overdrive, specifically aimed at

AMD GPUs. If either of the above tools don’t work, this will help you push
your hardware to its limits — and beyond.

3. A GPU stress test — Overclocking a GPU works fine at first glance, or

even for a few minutes or hours when you’re gaming. However, in my
experience, an overclock shows its true effects after a few hours of real
gaming. Just a while ago, I thought I’d found the perfect overclock
settings for my Titan Xp GPU(s), only to realize that those settings would
cause a crash 1-2 hours into gameplay. That’s why you need a good GPU
stress testing utility — run it for a few hours to find your personal settings.
I personally use two tools for that: 3DMark and Unigine Valley.

Run this test and get a baseline of the framerate, stability, clock speeds and
temperatures of your GPU. Repeat it multiple times to get a sense of your
GPU’s capability.

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DMarks Stress Test provide a lot of detailed analysis and is easy to automate, but
it requires you to have the “Professional” (paid) version.

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Unigine Valley renders a highly complex forest, pushing your CPU/GPU combo to its
limits.

How to overclock your GPU: Step-

by-step instructions
Overclocking sounds dangerous, but it’s really not if you follow the steps below
to the detail.

Before you start with step 1, make sure that you benchmark your default
performance (see section above) to determine the baseline performance. That
way, you’ll get an idea of how much you’ll achieve!

Step 1: Launch your overclocking tool

I’m going to show you how to overclock using the MSI Afterburner tool, as that’s
my preferred way of OC-ing my graphics card, but the method is very similar for
other tools. Ready? Cool. First, let’s launch MSI Afterburner.

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MSI Afterburner overclocking settings

Let me explain what you’re looking at:

1. Your current GPU and memory clock — The number goes up and down
based on the current GPU needs, so if there’s no GPU load running, you
shouldn’t see too many fluctuations here.

2. The current voltage — Note that most modern GPUs prevent you from
changing the voltage, as it could harm the hardware. There are
workarounds (such as flashing the BIOS and other ways), but we don’t
recommend this as it gives you only negligible benefits.

3. GPU temperature — Usually anything around 80-85° is a good maximum.

Beyond that, things might get too hot and the graphics card could throttle
itself.

4. Power Limit — Here’s where you can usually increase the draw by up to
20%, giving you extra headroom for overclocking. If your card has a limit
of 250 watts, you can increase it to 300 watts by moving the slider to the
right. Watch the temperatures and noise level, though. The higher the
limit, the hotter things get.

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5. Temp Limit — This increases the temperature limit before the GPU starts
to throttle things down too much.

6. Core Clock — Magic button number 1! This increases your GPU clock and
is one of the key measures to improve performance.

7. Memory clock — Magic button number 2! This one increases the

frequency of its memory, which increases bandwidth — another key
factor to get more FPS.

8. Startup — This button enables you to launch Afterburner every time your
PC boots.

9. OK — The “Let’s fire this up” button, which applies the overclocking
button.

Step 2: Overclock the GPU clock

Now let’s get working. First, increase the temperature limit to its maximum and
increase the Power Limit by 10%. This will give you some headroom for the first
big step of overclocking. Now, move the GPU slider to the right by +50 MHz. Hit
the OK button (9). Usually, any overclock between 5-50 Mhz shouldn’t cause any
issues, so this is more or less to see whether the overclock works at all. If it
doesn’t… well, time for a new graphics card, as your current GPU can’t handle
any OC.

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MSI Afterburner step by step overclocking

Is everything running ok? Then let’s stress test the GPU at this point. Run
3DMark and Unigine Valley. Seeing no artifacts or crashes? Fantastic. Then let’s
up the clock speed in steps of 10 MHz. Hit OK. Test again. If it works, repeat it
again and again and again until you hit the limit where the game crashes or the
PC/laptop reboots. Then, reduce that by 10 MHz to give you some headroom. In
my case, I was able to get my Titan Xp up to 170 MHz (stable).

Step 3: Overclock your memory

Usually you can overclock memory (Video RAM/VRAM) between 10-15% to get a
drastic performance boost in games that rely heavily on it, especially ones with
lots of textures to load. In the case of our Titan Xp, its memory runs at 5,505
MHz, so I was easily able to push it by 400-500 MHz. My advice is to start lower,
go with increments of 50 MHz, and work your way up until you hit a limit. Note
that games react very differently to a high memory clock. Some will run
significantly faster with no problem, others might shows artifacts. I initially had a
memory overclock of +700 MHz in place, which worked fine for all games except
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my two favorites, The Witcher 3 and Nier: Automata. Had to dial back. (Sad
trombone.)

Step 4: Increase power & temp limit

If you hit a limit and you haven’t done so already, set the temp and power limit to
the max. Then try again! You will likely be able to push the clocks of both the
GPU and the memory a bit further, but it won’t be much, and it will likely be too
noisy. I personally settled at +114% for the power limit.

Now, one final word of advice: You have to figure out the maximum overclock
yourself. There’s no guide that says “Got a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti? Then your
maximum setting is +200 MHz GPU and 800 MHz VRAM!” I wish. The thing is,
every chip is manufactured differently on a chemical level. Every silicone
composition is a bit different, and there are variations, so one chip might not
sustain heat and stress as much as another.

Can I overclock every graphics

card? Can I overclock my laptop?
Most GPUs should be overclockable, though you might see some incompatibility
issues — especially with laptop GPUs and Intel’s HD graphics processor — but
overall it should work flawlessly. Regarding laptops specifically, most of their
GPUs can be overclocked, but you will hit thermal limits.

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Overclocking laptops, such as this GeForce 965M GTX on a Surface Book: Possible, but
please be cautious!

You see, most laptops feature high-power components squeezed inside a tiny
chassis with limited amounts of airflow. Overclocking the GPU would lead to an
increase in heat (more operations = higher temperature) so you would hit
thermal limits. During gameplay sessions, your laptop might turn off and reboot.
However, even with limited overclocking ability, you can achieve some boost on
laptops. Take the Surface Book, for example: Before the overclock, the
framerate in Far Cry Primal dropped to 44 FPS...

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...while an overclock raised the minimum FPS to 52! That’s a noticeable

improvement for a laptop. Note, though, that some laptops aren’t built for
overclocking and might crash at even the slightest OC setting. That’s when you
should use alternative methods for optimizing performance, either manually or
via PC optimization software that helps reduce background activity. Plus, you

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might need to look at updating GPU drivers and CPU overclocking for additional
boosts in performance.

Save some time: Get an overclocked card!

To avoid some of this experimentation above, you could always buy a factory-
overclocked card — such as the EVGA FTW3 or the MSI Lightning Z models —
which go beyond the factory clock of the original NVIDIA reference models.

To put things into perspective: While the default 2080 TI boosts up to 1635 MHz,
the Lightning Z goes up to 1770 by default, and you can boost this even higher
thanks to beefier power supplies and PCBs.

Time to play

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So what did we get out of all this overclocking? Well, we performed benchmarks
with some of the latest games and 3DMark. The results are quite nice.

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On the left, we have last years Assassins Creed Odysseys, which struggles to
reach a solid 60 FPS on even high-end hardware at 4K resolution. Overclocking
took it a bit closer to that magic number. On the right, Shadow of the Tomb
Raider benefitted quite noticeably from overclocking, managing to boost the FPS
from 91 to 110 in SLI mode.

In all cases, we were able to get a noticeable increase in performance that

sometimes made the difference between stuttering and butter-smooth 60 FPS
(or more). Now stop fiddling with clocks and just enjoy your games — that’s what
it’s about! Don’t be me, wasting hours and hours finding the PERFECT clock
down to the last MHz. (You won’t feel the difference between 175 and 170 MHz
of frequency.)

Next step: Speed up your PC

Once you’re done optimizing the hardware, take care of your software by going
through steps to reduce background activity that could slow down gaming PCs.

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Avast Cleanup can help you by putting performance draining apps to sleep,
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by Sandro Villinger on
September 29, 2019
Updated on March 23, 2020

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