Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and today we're going to be looking at overclocking your GPU using software specifically EVGA is precision although you can also use MSI Afterburner and other utilities check the description of this video for links to those programs and also check the link for the highly detailed overview of overclocking where we give a primer of what exactly overclocking is and why you can do it this also covers CPU overclocking in a separate video so we see here in EVGA is precision X utility that I have a GTX 580 from last generation and there are a few quick things to understand before we start actually tweaking these settings GPU overclocking as a whole is very simple compared to other forms of overclocking every microprocessor which includes CPUs and GPUs has a base clock or core clock for us today this is also referred to as the GPU clock for the GPU we have additionally a memory clock and some GPUs will have shader clocks as well we will go over these more in the following minutes first let's define the GPU clock the GPU clock itself or the base clock in this case is the frequency at which the GPU is operating more frequency means a hotter chip but it also works harder than the stock settings so it will be faster but it will be hotter as a whole the graphics processing units clock speed will dictate the speed with which the video card can handle requests and commands that are thrown at it it's the overall speed of the microprocessor and the faster it is the faster it can handle those requests and move on to the next one some video rendering software will take advantage of graphics cards for their computational power so it is always beneficial to overclock your GPU and especially if you're gaming you will normally see a couple FPS maybe 10 FPS if you really push it hard I really push it as far as you can but please be careful with that you might see a 10 FPS improvement for the most part there's small improvements here and there the memory clock on the other hand is the second stat you'll see the memory clock is fairly straightforward it's the operating frequency of the GPUs onboard memory and the memory clock can be utilized to calculate the memory bandwidth which is the most important factor a lot of the time on a GPU think of it sort of like a highway the more lanes on the highway the more the cars can fit through it at once it's no good to have a ton of memory on your GPU if you don't have the bandwidth to actually push data to it quickly games that utilize post-processing ambient occlusion or other filtration based effects will benefit more directly from memory clock increases and more noticeably than those that do not have those effects Metro 2033 is a good example of this if your card has a low memory bandwidth overclocking the memory clock will help compensate for this detriment with that said we have found that overclocking the GPUs core clock is normally the most immediately noticeable and leaving the memory clock you can definitely get away with so I leave that memory clock alone and start with the core clock and log those incrementally log your performance increases incrementally and log the FPS in your utilities a GPU that is pumped up a bit through precision or afterburner or other programs may help push your graphics settings from medium high to high ish if you've been on the razor's edge so that's about the performance you can expect to gain not a whole lot it will keep you in the 30 FPS range if you find yourself waning below it though the next step is for you to actually get out there and do it to overclock your video card I would first highly recommend enabling any form of login and either precision or afterburner and definitely enable FPS logging so you can check that and it will temperature logging the RPM of the fan the tachometer and anything else that seems relevant definitely logged the course speed of the GPU or anything else you've overclocked more data is always better just cap those logs so that they don't get too big for notepad to open this will allow you to check the logs in the event of a catastrophic failure so you can see what exactly went wrong you should also enable automatic fan control so that the card will modulate its own fan speeds thus helping keep things cool and under serious pressure you can manually set the fan speed curve if that is more your style we'd also advise running heaven of the benchmarking utility or other video card bench markers or a games even to really stress out that card and test for stability because just running it in Windows won't really test gonna crash or not so if you do experience crashing with your overclocked settings keep in mind that you can increase the voltage to increase the stability this will also increase heat though and is generally not very good for the chips lifespan so try to keep that voltage as low as you can don't increase it too much be very careful when you're changing all of these settings and always research your specific cards overclocked optimization settings online before doing it and ask us in our forums if you need specific help from us so with that that is pretty pretty much everything you need to know about video card overclocking check our other video for CPU overclocking and check our primer guide it is a big guy that took a lot of time to write so please check that out below it will give you an overview of everything about overclocking and please like this video if you liked it comment and subscribe as always we'll see you guys next time peace