Introduction

You can increase the gaming performance of your computer by overclocking your
video card. Overclocking is a technique that makes a given hardware part to operate
at a clock frequency above its standard frequency, thus increasing its performance.
In this tutorial we will explain in details how to overclock your video card, with
several tips and tricks.

If your PC has a video card embedded on the motherboard (i.e. “on-board video”)
you won’t be able to overclock it, as you PC doesn’t have a real video card installed –
the video is produced by the motherboard chipset. In this tutorial we deal exclusively
with real video cards, the ones that are connected to your PC thru an expansion slot.

To learn how to overclock you video card you need to learn first how a video card
works. On Figure 1 you can see a very basic diagram showing the video card main
components and how they are connected together.

click to enlarge
Figure 1: Anatomy of a video card.

The heart of a video card is its graphics chip, also known as GPU, Graphics
Processing Unit. It works at a certain clock rate, also known as “core clock” or
“engine clock”. When we think of overclocking a video card, usually the first thing
that comes to mind is to increase the GPU core clock.

The new GeForce 8 GPU series from nVidia has two clock signals, one used by its
shader engines and another used by the rest of the chip (the core clock we’ve just
described). So far we don’t know if this second signal (shader clock) can be
overclocked or not, or if it is somehow connected to the core clock. We will update
this tutorial as soon as we get one video card based on this new architecture in order
to clarify this issue.

The GPU is connected to the video memory (which is physically located on the video
card) using a dedicated memory bus (yellow on Figure 1). This bus also works at a
certain clock rate, also known as “memory clock”. We can also increase this clock
rate in order to increase the performance of your video card and of course we will
show you how to do that.
One important thing to keep in mind right now is that the memory bus nowadays
usually works transferring two data per clock cycle, technique known as DDR, Double
Data Rate. Because of this technique the memory clock can sometimes be referred
as the double of its real clock rate, because the transfer rate achieved by DDR
technique is double the transfer rate of a regular memory transferring just one data
per clock cycle. In order to avoid confusion during our tutorial we will add the letters
DDR after clock rates that are “doubled”. For instance 300 MHz and 600 MHz DDR
are the same thing, as this 600 MHz DDR clock rate is really 300 MHz transferring
two data per clock cycle.

The memory bus – which can also be referred to as memory interface – transfers a
certain number of bits per time between the GPU and the video memory – 64 bits,
128 bits, 256 bits, etc. This number is fixed and you cannot change it. In other
words there is no way for you to transform your 128-bit video card into a 256-bit
one. This is a physical limitation: each bit is transferred thru an individual wire on the
video card printed circuit board, so a video card with a 128-bit memory interface has
128 wires connecting the GPU to the memory. So it is impossible to change this
number, as you would need to add 128 more wires between the GPU and the
memory chips (and also probably add or change the memory chips). The same thing
goes for the video memory size: you cannot transform your 128 MB video card into a
256 MB one simply because you would need to add more memory chips to it.

The GPU is connected to the motherboard thru an I/O slot such as PCI Express and
AGP. This connection is also done at a certain clock rate (100 MHz for PCI Express
and 66 MHz for AGP) and some motherboards allow you to increase this clock rate,
giving a third option to overclock your video card. Notice that this option depends on
the motherboard and not on the video card, as it is the motherboard that controls
the I/O slot where the video card is installed. Some overclocking-oriented
motherboards also provide an option for you to increase the I/O slot voltage (i.e. the
video card voltage), which can make your video card to achieve a higher
overclocking.

So we can set up three kinds of overclocking: increasing the clock at which the video
processor runs, increasing the clock the video processor uses to communicate with
the video memory and increasing the clock the motherboard uses to communicate
with the video card. You can even perform these three options at the same time in
order to explore the maximum performance your video card is able to provide you.
The first two overclockings are done configuring the video card and you can change
these two clocks on any video card, while the third one is done on the motherboard
setup and it will depend whether your motherboard provides this configuration option
or not.

The first thing you need to do is to discover the core clock and the memory clock
your video card is currently using. The best way to check this is using a program
called PowerStrip. This is also the program we will use to overclock the video card.
Depending on the version of the video driver you are using, it can provide the same
functionalities of PowerStrip – including overclocking. Since we cannot tell for sure if
your video driver has this feature, we prefer to use PowerStrip.

Running this software for the first time you will see the clocks your video card is
really using right away. From the second time on, PowerStrip will start minimized on
System Tray and you will need to right click on its icon and choose Performance
Profiles, Configure.

Pay attention as for ATI-based video cards PowerStrip will report the real memory
clock but for nVidia-based video cards it will report the DDR clock (real clock x 2).

Let’s see two examples. On Figure 2 you can see the clocks used by our Radeon
9800 Pro: 378 MHz for video processor ("core clock") and 337 MHz for memory. And
on Figure 3 you can see the clocks used by our GeForce 6800 GS: 425 MHz core and
1,000 MHz DDR memory.

click to enlarge
Figure 2: Clocks used by a Radeon 9800 Pro.

click to enlarge
Figure 3: Clocks used by a GeForce 6800 GS.

You can compare the clocks your video card uses with the manufacturer’s default
clock for your video card. Please notice that the memory clock rates on these two
tables are “doubled” (i.e. DDR).
As you can see on our table, Radeon 9800 Pro has default clocks of 380 MHz for core
and 680 MHz DDR (340 MHz x 2) for memory, and GeForce 6800 GS has default
clocks of 425 MHz core and 1,000 MHz DDR (500 MHz x 2) for memory. As you can
see, our two video cards were using the default clock rates set by the chip
manufacturer. Small differences below 5 MHz are normal and that doesn’t mean that
your video card is running at a “wrong” clock rate.

Sometimes you will find that your video card is factory-overclocked, meaning that
the manufacturer has already set it to run at a higher clock rate. Even if this is your
case, you can try to overclock your video card even more.

Overclocking Your Video Card

Let’s now explain the basic procedure on how to overclock your video card.

After installing PowerStrip, it will be launched every time you turn on your computer
and will be available as an icon on the task bar, near the system clock (system tray).
To overclock your video card, right click on the program’s small icon and select
Performance Profiles, Configure, like shown on Figure 4.

click to enlarge
Figure 4: Opening the overclocking screen on PowerStrip.

It is very important to notice that the changes made to your video card using
PowerStrip aren’t permanent and are available only when PowerStrip is minimized on
system tray. So if you disable PowerStrip (for example, by running Msconfig utility)
or uninstall it your video card won’t be overclocked anymore.

This also means that if your system freezes or something goes wrong while you are
overclocking your video card, just reboot your system and you will have your PC
running just fine again.

On the screen that will be displayed you can freely set the GPU clock and the
memory clock using the available sliders, see Figure 5.
 click to enlarge
Figure 5: Overclocking your video card.

Note that overclocking can work or not. After adjusting the clock, run a 3D game on
its benchmarking mode (Quake 4, for instance) and check whether the computer
freezes or restarts on its own. If this happens, it means that you have set a clock
beyond the capability supported by the video card.

The use of a game on its benchmarking mode is also good for you to see how much
performance you are gaining with your overclocking: first run the game with your
video card running without any overclocking, then you can compare the results with
the score achieved under overclocking. If you don’t know how to use a 3D game on
benchmarking mode, we’ve posted some tutorials on that: How to Use Battefield
2142 to Benchmark your PC, Testing the 3D Performance of Your PC With Quake 4
and Testing the 3D Performance of Your PC with Doom 3 and Far Cry.

Ideally, you should first find the maximum clock frequency supported by the GPU (i.
e., the clock you can set without the computer freezing in a 3D game) and then the
maximum clock supported by the video memory. If you try to set both at the same
time, when the computer crashes you won’t be able to find out which clock is wrong,
the GPU’s or the memory’s.

Overclocking is a boring trial-and-error process. Raise the GPU clock a little bit and
run a 3D game under benchmarking mode. If the system ran fine, increase the GPU
clock a little bit more and repeat the process, until you find the exact GPU clock that
your system can run without crashing. After finding this out, you will need to repeat
the same process for the memory clock. And then with the I/O bus, if you want to
overclock it as well.

After finding the maximum overclocking spot of your video card, we recommend you
to run more than one game on its benchmarking mode, at least three times each, so
check if your video card overclocking is really stable.

There are some tips on improving your overclocking chances. Let's talk about this.

Memory Overclocking
Sometimes the video card's memory chips are running at speed lower than their
maximum. For example, you have a video card with a memory chip capable of
running up to 500 MHz but the memory is being accessed at 450 MHz.

If you were lucky to get one card like this you will find that the memory is highly
overclockable. This happens because you will be able to put the memory running at a
higher clock rate but still under its specs, and then push the memory over its specs.

First you need to know the maximum clock rate of the memory chips of your video
card. You can find this out by taking a close look on the chips. The speed grade is
marked on the chip's body after a dash (ex: -40, -50, -5, etc) as a number. This
number is the memory clock, in nanoseconds. To find out the maximum clock rate in
megahertz, divide one thousand by this number. In case of a two-digit number like
40, 45, 50, use a decimal dot between the two digits. So, for the calculation you
would use 4.0, 4.5 and 5.0, respectively. There is one exception: memory chips from
Samsung labeled as 2A actually are 2.8 ns chips, not 2 ns chips.

Pay attention because the number you will find is the real memory clock, not its DDR
speed, which is the double of the number you will find.

Let's give you a couple of examples to clarify this. On Figure 6 you see two of the
memory chips used on our GeForce 6800 GS. They are labeled as 2 ns, so their
maximum labeled clock rate is 500 MHz (1,000 / 2). As we discussed before, on this
video card the memory was accessed at 500 MHz, so in this case the memory was
already working at its maximum labeled speed. Of course we can try to put it to work
above its specs.

click to enlarge
Figure 6: 2 ns (500 MHz) chips from Samsung.

On Figure 7 you see one of the memory chips from a GeForce 7900 GT. As you can
see, it is a 1.4 ns chip, meaning that it can officially run up to 715 MHz. Since on our
GeForce 7900 GT the memory was accessed at 660 MHz, we know that we can push
the memory clock at least up to 715 MHz that the video card will still work just fine,
as the memory clock will still be inside the chips’ official specs. Of course we can still
try pushing the memory clock even higher for a real overclocking.
 click to enlarge
Figure 7: 1.4 ns (715 MHz) chip from Samsung.

On the next page we will present some tricks that can help you to achieve a higher
memory clock.

Memory Overclocking (Cont’d)

A way to increase the video memory overclocking potential is checking the cooling
system used by the memory chips. If you improve the memory chips cooling system
you will probably achieve a higher memory overclocking. You can find three
situations here:

• The memory chips are cooled down by the same cooler used by the GPU;
• The memory chips use an independent passive heatsink;
• The memory chips don’t use any cooling device at all.

If your memory chips already use passive heatsinks on them, great. You have
already a good cooling solution for your memory chips. See an example on Figure 8.
 click to enlarge
Figure 8: This video card came with passive heatsinks on its memory chips.

If the memory chips from your video card don’t come with any cooling device, you
can buy memory heatsinks and install on them (Zalman ZMHRS1 and Thermaltake
CL-C0025 are good examples of this kind of product). The installation process if very
simple.

click to enlarge
Figure 9: The memory chips from this video card don’t come with any cooling device
at all.

If on your video card the cooler used by the GPU is also used to cool down the
memory chips, you can improve the video card cooling by installing a better GPU
cooler, like the ones from Artic Cooling. These high-end coolers will help you to
increase both the GPU and the video memory overclocking potential. Read our first
look article on Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 to see the step by step installation of this
cooler on our GeForce 6800 GS.
Memory Overclocking (Cont’d)
As you could see on Figure 10, the memory chips from our video card were under
the GPU cooler. The problem is that on some video cards the GPU cooler seems to be
used to cool down the memory chips but actually they don’t even touch them. So
pay close attention on video cards where the GPU cooler covers the memory chips to
check whether it touches the memory chips or not. You can see an example of that
on Figures 11 and 12. The GPU cooler appears to be used to cool down the memory
chips but when you take a closer look, it doesn’t touch the chips! In cases like this
the best solution is to replace the GPU cooler with a high-end GPU cooler that
touches the memory chips, so you will be improving both GPU and memory chips
cooling.

click to enlarge
Figure 11: On this video card the cooler seems to be cooling the memory chips…
 click to enlarge
Figure 12: But it isn’t!

Another case that you might want to replace the GPU cooler that comes with the
video card with a high-end GPU cooler that touches the memory chips is when the
GPU cooler prevents you from installing passive heatsinks on the memory chips. Take
a look on Figure 13. On this video card the GPU cooler covers part of the memory
chips without touching them, so the GPU cooler doesn’t cool down the memory chips
and at the same time prevents you from installing passive heatsinks on the them.

click to enlarge
Figure 13: The cooler that came with this video card doesn’t allow you to install
passive heatsinks on the memory chips.

Another trick advanced overclockers do is to play with memory timings. Usually

increasing timings reduce the memory performance but allow you to achieve higher
clocks. The trick is to check whether the higher clock rate you will be able to
configure will really deliver a higher 3D performance or not – because of the
increased timings, you may actually see loss of performance. Memory timing
adjustment is done by editing the video card BIOS. We will discuss later how to edit
your video card BIOS, however we won’t go into the details on how to change
memory timings.
GPU Overclocking
The main trick to increase the GPU overclocking capability is also improving its
cooling. GPUs can come with passive or active heatsinks, i.e. with or without a fan.

If you video card uses a passive heatsink, like the one portrayed on Figure 14,
consider replacing it with a good VGA cooler. Take a look on our first look articles
about Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 6 and Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 for a better idea on
what we are talking about. Or if you don’t want to spend money, you can at least
mod the heatsink to add a fan to it.

click to enlarge
Figure 14: Example of a video card with passive heatsink.

But even if your video card already uses an active heatsink, you may want to
consider replacing it with a better cooling solution, like the Artic Cooling products
we’ve mentioned.

Another trick advanced overclockers do is to increase the GPU voltage. Increasing

the GPU voltage usually helps the GPU to achieve a higher clock rate. One way of
increasing the GPU voltage is by editing the video card BIOS. We will discuss later
how to edit your video card BIOS, however we won’t go into the details on how to
change the GPU voltage.

Tweaking the I/O Bus

As we mentioned, another option you have is to overclock the bus where the video
card is connected to – AGP or PCI Express, depending on your motherboard.

Before going further, an important remark. Depending on your video card, you may
not notice any performance gain by overclocking the I/O bus. This happens because
you may have already enough free bandwidth on the I/O bus and it is not being a
bottleneck for your 3D performance. So it is very important that you run games on
their benchmarking modes before and after playing with the I/O bus in order to
check whether you had any real performance gain by overclocking it. If you don’t get
any performance improvement by tweaking the I/O bus, it makes no sense in
keeping it overclocked. In this case, leave it back on its default configuration.

We, however, encourage you to at least try playing with the I/O bus if you want to
extract the maximum performance your video card can give you and then, at the
end, see if it was worthwhile of not.

Here the options you will have will depend on your motherboard model. We will
explore all possible options, however your motherboard may not have all of them
available.

The main problem here is that only overclocking-oriented motherboards will have a
separated clock generator for the AGP or PCI Express x16 bus. On simpler
motherboards, a single clock generator is used by all devices found on the
motherboard and if you want to increase the AGP or PCI Express x16 clock rate you
will have to increase the master clock generator rate, which will automatically
increase the clock rate used by all other devices.

The problem with this setup is that everything will work overclocked as well, not only
your video card. Thus you may face a situation where you won’t be able to pass a
certain clock level not because your video card can’t go over it, but because some
other devices on your system that is also overclocked has reached its clock limit.

Anyway, let’s see some examples on how to overclock your AGP or PCI Express x16
bus.

First you will need to enter your motherboard setup utility, which is done by pressing
the Del key right after your turn you PC on. Inside the setup you will need to find
where the overclocking options are located. The exact location varies accordingly to
the motherboard model. Please note that on some motherboard you need to change
some configuration from “auto” to “manual” in order to see the overclocking options.

On Figures 15 and 16 you see two motherboards based on the AGP bus. The AGP bus
runs at a default clock rate of 66 MHz.

The first motherboard (Figure 15) uses a single clock generator, and to overclock the
AGP bus you need to increase the CPU external bus. Increasing the CPU external bus
you will overclock not only the AGP bus but also the CPU, the PCI bus and all other
devices found on the motherboard. On this motherboard you need to change the
“CPU Host Clock Control” option to “Enabled” in order to have access to the external
clock rate configuration (“CPU Host Frequency”). Note how you don’t have access to
the option “PCI/AGP Frequency”, this option only displays the new PCI/AGP clock
rates based on the new external bus configuration you entered.
 click to enlarge
Figure 15: On this motherboard you can’t configure the AGP bus clock rate
separately.

But on the second motherboard (Figure 16) there is a separated clock generator for
the AGP bus. We know that because there is an option called “Adjust AGP
Frequency”, which defaults to 66 MHz.

click to enlarge
Figure 16: On this motherboard you can configure the AGP bus clock rate
separately.
The same idea goes for the PCI Express bus. This bus uses a default clock rate of
100 MHz. If your motherboard doesn’t have a separated clock generator for this bus,
you will have to increase the motherboard master clock generator, which will increase
all clock rates used by all devices on the motherboard.

On Figure 17 you can see a motherboard without a separated clock generator for the
PCI Express bus. The only possibility here is to increase the motherboard master
clock generator, which will overclock everything connected to the motherboard.

click to enlarge
Figure 17: On this motherboard you can’t configure the PCI Express clock rate
separately.

Some motherboards have a separate configuration for the PCI Express bus, but they
don’t have a separated clock generator for the PCI Express x16 slot, which is the one
used by the video card. They have instead a single clock generator for all PCI
Express slots and connections, so when you increase the PCI Express clock rate, you
will also overclock all devices that use this bus, including the ones connected directly
on the motherboard, such as the SATA ports – and hard disk drives are very sensitive
to any increase on the SATA clock. This is the case of the motherboard shown on
Figure 18. It has a separated clock configuration for the PCI Express bus (“PCIE
Clock” option), but this configuration will increase the clock rate of all PCI Express
connections, not only the one used by the x16 slot.
 click to enlarge
Figure 18: This motherboard has a separated clock generator for all PCI Express
connections.

The best option is to have a motherboard with a separated clock configuration for the
PCI Express x16 slot, like the one shown on Figure 19. On this motherboard the
clock configuration for the main PCI Express x16 slot is called “C51 PCI-Express
Frequency”. The clock that will be used by the other PCI Express connections is called
“MCP55 PCI-Express Frequency” and should be left at 100 MHz.

click to enlarge
Figure 19: Motherboard with separated clock configuration for the PCI Express x16
slot.

So, how to find out the maximum clock rate your AGP or PCI Express x16 bus will
support? Like everything related to overclocking, by trial-and-error. Increase the
clock rate a little bit, save the changes and exit setup, load Windows, run a 3D game
like Quake 4 on its benchmarking mode and see if the system stays stable. If it does,
go back and increase a little bit more and repeat all the process, until you find the
maximum clock rate your I/O bus will run without crashing the system.
Besides increasing the I/O bus clock rate, you can also increase its voltage. Usually
by increasing its voltage you will be able to set it at higher clock rates without
making the system to crash. But we recommend you to first find out the maximum
clock rate the I/O bus will run with stability (i.e. without crashing), and only then
increase the I/O bus voltage to see if your system will run without crashing with a
higher clock rate. Keep in mind that sometimes you won’t be able to increase the
clock rate even increasing the bus voltage.

Not all motherboards provide this option. But from all the motherboards we shown
above, only the one portrayed on Figure 17 didn’t provide it. On the motherboard on
Figure 15 it was called “AGP OverVoltage Control”, on Figure 16 it was called “AGP
Voltage”, on Figures 18 and 19 you would have to select “Advanced Voltage Control”
and then would see this option as “NB Core/PCI-E Voltage” (see Figure 20) or “NB to
PCIE VGA Voltage” (see Figure 21).

click to enlarge
Figure 20: Option for increasing the PCI Express x16 voltage.

click to enlarge
Figure 21: Option for increasing the PCI Express x16 voltage.

As you may have noticed, the exact name of each option varies a lot, and we tried to
give some examples, but of course it is impossible to cover all motherboard models
available at the market and tell you how each option will be called on your
motherboard in particular. We hope that with our examples you at least got a clue on
how to identify these options.

Making Changes Permanent (nVidia-Based Cards)

As we mentioned before, all changes made to your video card aren’t permanent. This
happens because the video card's BIOS will instruct the VGA to run on its default
configuration every time you reboot your PC. That’s why you need to keep
PowerStrip loaded: it will load your personalized configurations and reconfigure your
video card every time you load Windows. If you shut down PowerStrip your video
card will use the BIOS default configuration again.

You can edit the video card BIOS and make your overclocking permanent, if you
want to. With this option, you won’t need to load PowerStrip anymore and the video
card will always work under the clocks you programmed at its BIOS.

But don’t worry: in the future you can revert this change and make your video card
to run back on its original configuration.

For doing this you will need two programs, a BIOS editor (used to edit the BIOS
contents, i.e. to change your video card clock rates) and a BIOS programmer (used
to save the new modified BIOS to the video card). The programs you will need
depends if your video card is based on an nVidia or on an ATI chip. Below we will
show you how to modify your nVidia-based video card BIOS, and on next page we
will talk about on how to do the same thing on an ATI-based video card.

For your nVidia-based card you will need two programs: NiBiTor, which is a BIOS
editor, and nvFlash, which is a BIOS programmer. Both can be downloaded from our
download section. Please download the latest version available.

Run NiBiTor and first backup the BIOS your video card is currently using. So if in the
future you want to restore your video card original BIOS, just update your video card
BIOS this file.

Go to Tools, Read BIOS, Select device and select your video card. Then go to Tools,
Read BIOS, Read into File. Give a name for your file. This will backup your video card
BIOS to a file.

Then go to File, Open BIOS and load the BIOS file you’ve just saved. You will see a
screen similar to Figure 22.
 click to enlarge
Figure 22: Editing your nVidia-based video card BIOS.

As you can see, there are two places you will want to change, “Core” and “Memory”.
Just type in the maximum core and memory clocks you know your video card can
run stable.

After editing these two fields, save the BIOS into a new file, by going to File, Save
BIOS. Now you have a BIOS file with your overclocked settings.

The next step is to create a bootable floppy disk. Go to http://www.bootdisk.com,

select a DOS boot disk, download the .exe file and run it to create your bootable
floppy. Copy nvFlash.exe and your overclocked BIOS file to the floppy disk. Then
boot your PC using this floppy (you may need to enter the motherboard setup and
change the boot order).

At the command prompt, type:

nvflash file_name_of_your_overclocked_bios

Restart your computer and your work is done.

Making Changes Permanent (ATI-Based Cards

The process for ATI-based cards is similar but you will need to use different
programs: RaBiT, which is a BIOS editor, and ATIWinFlash, which is a BIOS
programmer. Both can be downloaded from our download section. Please download
the latest version available.
Run ATIWinFlash and first backup the BIOS your video card is currently using. So if
in the future you want to restore your video card original BIOS, just update your
video card BIOS this file. Just click on Save to save your video card BIOS to a file.

click to enlarge
Figure 23: ATIWinFlash.

Then run RaBiT and open the BIOS file by going to Open, BIOS file. Then click on the
Clocking tab to edit the core and memory clocks. After editing these two fields, save
the BIOS into a new file, by clicking on Save as. Now you have your overclocked
BIOS saved to a file.

click to enlarge
Figure 24: Editing your ATI-based card BIOS.

Run ATIWinFlash again and click on Load Image and select your overclocked BIOS
file. Click on Program and ATIWinFlash will save your overclocked BIOS to your video
card.

Restart your computer and your work is done.