Video Card Overclocking Guide

[Azrael]

Hey guys and gals,

I noticed this board doesn't have the usual Video Card Overclocking Guide. Now, I know I'm stepping a little over the boundaries here, as I'm sure one of the more senior members of this forum has had much more experience overclocking video cards. So, if anything I say is wrong, or needs to be tweaked a little, just post, and it shall be fixed (and of course those wise words will be given proper credit).
So without further "I'm sorry if I suck" .

I'll write this guide in little steps so you can decide to skip them if they seem trivial to you.

**DISCLAIMER**
Any overclocking done to your video card or any piece other hardware in your computer are done at your own risk. I (Azrael / Nick S), 3dacc.net and any of it's personnels take no responsibility for your actions. The following step may cause irreversible damage to your system. Overclocking is never completely safe, you are going over the design specification, and will reduce the lifetime of your hardware.
**DISCLAIMER**

Now, don't run away because of that red text, I'm just warning you that even a 'safe' overclock will reduce you're card's life, the reality is, that if you're smart, you'll never get to the end of your hardware's life. So don't go doing suicide runs just to get some nice benchmark scores. Just use some common sense.

Step 1: Do you really need to overclock?

I think this is one of the most important steps, because for some people overclocking isn't worthwhile. I'm sure there are many who would argue, but it's we are all entitled to our opinions.

One should not overclock if they use their machines as a:
1) Typewriters: such as writing documents, checking e-mail or doing regular work. You won't get any benefit out of the increased clocks and might as well keep the card in the best possible condition.
2) Server: true this may seems stupid to put, but I've had friends who thought it would help them. Don't think I need to explain it more, just don't. (mostly targeted at people using normal PC's as servers, any person who buys a purpose built server and thinks, "I'mma gonna overclock this server's video capabilities", is already a lost cause :P.
3) Legacy gaming machine: playing mostly old games, or windows built in games such as solitaire, you just don't don't need the hassle.

The rest of you folks, just be sensible, you have to think if you really want to push the limits of your hardware. Sure a decent overclock is nice, and it will surely help, but unless you absolutely need it, I'd refrain from overclocking to highest possible. (Oh and those in the previous categories, you can overclock if you want, I would just not)

Step 2: Research your card

I think this step is important, but one can skip this. One should always research their hardware before buying, but say you haven't or you never really looked into the overclockability or gains of overclocking for your card. (a simple way to get info is just to Google "[Card Name] overclocking". Adding the companies name that fabricated your card may also narrow the results. There are often overclocking results on review done on the model of your card, they are also very good to consult.)

This helps in four ways:
1) You'll probably find out how much head room there is to the core and memory of your card.
2) After knowing that, you'll probably find out how much performance was gained from the respective overclocks. This is important and will influence how far you'll want to go. In this category you'll also see how much of an overclock will actually benefit your video card with you other hardware, it would suck to get a great overclock, but be bottlenecked by your CPU or other components.
3) You'll probably stumble on so tricks for the specific card to help you get higher clocks, fix bugs that aren't even related to overclocking, but that might hinder you.
4) You'll probably find what seems to be the best drivers for your card, because the newest driver isn't necessarily the best, especially on older gen video cards.

Step 3: Get all the tools you need.

I probably should have posted this first, or probably second, but the other two steps should be done first. I'll just write three quicks lists for general utilities and then specifics for Nvidia or ATI Cards.

General:
- Pencil & Paper: To help remember set-ups and for recording performance gains for different set-ups.(you can also use Notepad, but you may be rebooting often, so PnP is easier)
- Your Favorite Games: Great for testing stability and noticeable performance gains.
- 3D Mark 2001,03,05,06: Good benchmarks for quick stability testing and performance differences. (any other benchmark will work as well, and you can stick to one or use them all.)
- A Synthetic Artifact Tester: There are a few on the net and they can help as well.
- A Backup of Your Video Card's Bios: Even when not changing the bios, a overclock can go horribly wrong and you can end up damaging your video card's bios. (for this here is a great tutorial for beginners at PCSTAT)
- A PCI video card: Although not essential, an old PCI card can help save you from having to buy a totally new card after ruining the bios of your current one.

ATI:
- ATItool: Great utility for overclocking, has many options and a built-in artifact tester that works really well.

Nvidia:
- ATItool: Yes, you heard it, this little tool works great for both companies' video cards, it's great and should be a staple for overclocking video cards.
- Rivatunner: This is a powerful tool and is great for setting the final overclock or tweaking other options, it's a crazy program.

Step 4: Overclocking!

This is the step you've all been waiting for, or not. This is the most exciting and annoying part of overclocking. either you find out your video card is a dud (cause even if other get an average of so and so, all cards overclock differently), you may get a crazy good overclock and it's stable, or you may damage your card, either reversibly or irreversibly.

Since video cards tend to be one of the most expensive parts of your build, it's good to take it slow. There are a few ways to go about overclocking. Before you start changing clock speeds, it a good idea to have all you utilities and such close at hand, ATItool open, and if you have an Nvidia card, to have the hardware monitor open to keep an eye on all settings.

A little note before choosing the final settings. An overclock on the core is many times better than an overclock on the memory. This is just like the difference between overclocking your CPU and your ram, you'll get a much great increase if you overclock your CPU than overclocking your ram.

To give an example, I can safely overclock my core to 642mhz and my memory to about 970mhz (1940 effective) on my EVGA 8800gts. With that I get just over 11,000 on 3DMark06, now if I leave my memory at about stock (800 mhz/1600 effective) I get about 10,500). When everything is stock (Besides my CPU and system memory overclocks), I get roughly 9,250~9,500. This doesn't mean sacrificing a lot on the memory side for 3-5 mhz on the core, but just keep it in mind.

You can let ATItool find the max core and max memory for you, by clicking on the little buttons on the left side of the window. ATItool is pretty good at that, and if you're new, this might be an easy way. Since once it has found it for you, you just need to lower it by about 5% to make sure you don't kill your card. Remember, to optimize your core overclock to memory overclock for best results.

You can manually find the Max core and memory speeds by doing little increments, you do this separately like when ATItool does it for you. Now you should go up in small increments such as 3-5 Mhz for the core and 5-10mhz for the memory. Every time you up the clocks make sure to at least let ATItool run it's artifact checker. After 15-20 Mhz on the core and 20-30 mhz on the memory, please run a benchmark, or plat a game for a few minutes. If you're fine, continue these steps till you get artifacts (showing up as green/yellow or white replacing the usual skins - usually means to high core) or tearing (when the polygons go all over the place and it looks like some one is stretching part of the game usually to high memory). Once you find one, please dial back the clocks till the last safe increase and increase by less then previously. Once the maxes are found, make sure to dial back the clocks by about 5% and play with them to get the best combination for performance between core and memory clocks.

Lastly you can do it the way I usually do, using the manual increase technique, but instead of finding the max core and max memory clocks you increase one after another evenly. You still end up having to play with them, but I find this is the best way to increase clocks.

Once this is all done, a burn in is necessary to really find the if your clocks are stable. This can be a benchmark left on overnight (8h is a good amount of time) on loop. and if no restarts happen or when you come back to your computer and everything looks fine, you have it sable. If your computer restarted or there is tearing or artifacts, lower the overclock yet again and test again. Between burn-ins I like to shut my computer off to give the video card a rest. You don't want to ruin your card. This is just a precaution I take.

Step 5: Setting the overclock.

Now that you've found your clock rates, there are two options, either set the clocks by software or hardware. The easiest and safest is using Rivatunner or ATItool to set them at windows start up, but for those who don't want the hassle of added start-up applications, you can flash your card with the new clocks. For the second one, a whole tutorial could be written, so I'll link you back to the good tutorial on PCSTAT.

Step 6: Enjoy!

Please enjoy your new performance gain, and have fun gaming, or 3dmoddeling, or even playing solitaire with your newly increased speeds.

**You can copy this Guide all you want, just please give me credit. (And to those whom I've given credit)**

[Tefra]

Thanks for your contribution Nick, a great guide for beginners

(sticky and rep for you sir)