One of the easiest options for overclocking is the software that the immensely popular manufacturers AMD and Nvidia offer themselves for any users that want to overclock their graphics cards. These apps are free, specifically designed for their GPU brands, and include a variety of helpful options for managing performance. Unless you really want to spend time tweaking exactly how your GPU runs, this is probably the best option to start with.
Graphics card overclocking software
With the ongoing slate of Nvidia's Ampere graphics cards, overclocking has changed quite a bit from past generations. You can't expect as much out of it anymore, or at least not so much that you can be a few generations behind and get your card to compete with the latest ones. Now, overclocking lets you pull out a bit more performance to give yourself room to work with, especially if you're trying to hit the demands of a high refresh rate monitor.
That said, it's a smart thing to do if you want to get the most out of graphics card and aren't looking to face the constant supply issues right now. Instead of refreshing inventory pages or paying three times the price for a GPU, you can give your card a solid overclock.
CPU overclocks are nice too, but a good GPU overclock might have a stronger impact on the games you play. The best graphics cards (opens in new tab) still struggle at higher resolutions like 4K and 1440p on monitors pushing refresh rates past 60Hz. There's no real downside to giving it a shot and seeing what your card can do. Take a few hours and set your GPU up to max out its performance and don't look back.
After clean-up is done, update the graphics drivers to make sure all the latest bug fixes and stability enhancements are in place. Occasionally, motherboard firmware updates that further improve stability or performance are also available. Consider installing these as well, to give your system a fresh foundation for your overclocking adventures.
Good news: overclocking your graphics card is actually really easy, and you don't even need to leave Windows to do it! While the motherboard BIOS is where most CPU overclocking takes place, graphics cards are tweaked via desktop software. Manufacturer-specific overclocking software exists, but most veteran PC enthusiasts stick to a few trusted packages that have been around for a while and work on most graphics cards no matter who makes them.
MSI's venerable Afterburner is the best place to start when it comes to overclocking your graphics card. In addition to a long history of stable releases, Afterburner is simple to use and provides a few extras including a built-in temperature graph along with voltage and real time clock speed monitoring tools. EVGA's Precision is another excellent graphics card overclocking suite, if MSI's Afterburner leaves you cold.
Now it's time to test the hardware and see how well your card currently performs. Find a few reliable, easy to use gaming benchmarks to run before, during, and after overclocking, both for stability testing and performance measurement purposes. One synthetic and one or two real-world benchmarks should be plenty. Try to pick real-world benchmarks that use engines relevant to the games you like to play. Our performance analysis articles on recent games can provide additional insight into what performance you should expect.
Nvidia's Ampere architecture, found in the 30-series cards, doesn't offer a ton of room for overclocking. The cards have hard power limits that cause them to drop voltage and therefore clock speeds. It's fairly common to see people argue for undervolting your Nvidia GPU to get a cooler card and slightly better performance.
Practically speaking, this means you can expect around a 10-15 percent boost from an overclock. The good news is all these safeguards make the process painless and reasonably safe. Although your mileage may vary, it's unlikely you'll brick your graphics card under these circumstances. Nevertheless, overclocking always includes risks, so keep that in mind before deciding to go forward.
With your card cleaned up and ready for overclocking, you can typically max out the voltage and power limits on most graphics cards. For Ampere cards, increasing the voltage doesn't seem to have much of an impact. They are power-hungry cards, so increasing the power limit will tax your PSU. Keep an eye on temperatures and clockspeeds when testing.
We recommend modifying your fan speed as well. By default most graphics cards are tuned to run reasonably quiet, but that can lead to uncomfortably high temperatures when overclocking. Depending on your card, you may be okay with maxing out fan speed, or you might want to aim for 40-50 percent fan speed on some blower cards. For the initial overclocking, you can also set a static fan speed with a noise level you find acceptable, like 80 percent. That should keep your GPU as frosty as practically possible, and you can tune the fan speeds later.
As an alternative, EVGA's latest Precision X1 utility supports a "scanner" mode that will attempt to find a stable overclock, using a non-graphics workload so that it can gracefully crash and recover. It tends to err on the side of caution, which isn't a bad idea. It takes about 20 minutes to run and eliminates a lot of the guesswork, though we still typically get better results with manually overclocking.
Overclocking your graphics card can be a good way to improve performance, especially if you're running a card that didn't come with a factory overclock. A lot of current cards come modestly overclocked, but you can often squeeze out a bit more performance with a few tweaks.
One final caution is that just because an overclock appears to be stable during your initial testing and overclocking does not mean it will never cause problems. Hell, we've even seen factory overclocked cards have problems at their default settings, requiring a boost in fan speeds or even a drop of GPU clocks. It's a good idea to monitor your graphics card temperatures over the coming months.
MSI Afterburner 4.6.5 Beta 4 download - Guru3D and MSI have been working hard on AfterBurner, today we release an updated revision of Afterburner; this application successfully secured the leading position on graphics card utilities.
Here you can download RTSS Rivatuner Statistics Server. This is the official homepage for Rivatuner. Initially designed as a small helper application for RivaTuner graphics card utility, RivaTuner Statistics Server became de-facto framerate monitoring, On-Screen Display and high-performance video capture service provider for other graphics card utilities.
Download NVFlash. NVFlash os the official NVIDIA utility to flash the graphics card BIOS (firmware) on GeForce RTX 2070, 2080, 2080 Ti, Titan V, GeForce 1080 Ti, 1080, 1070, 1060, 1050 and older cards.
Download ClockBlocker - a GPU power-management control software designed for AMD graphics cards. It started as a tool entirely designed for the Radeon R9 Fury series, yet many people have had success with the tool on a whole slew of different graphics hardware. While there may be other tools that already work on your hardware to stop downclocking, this is potentially another option available to you.
Download ZOTAC FireStorm. FireStorm includes GPU monitoring capabilities to let users keep an eye on GPU temperatures and fan speed of their ZOTAC GeForce series graphics card. Advanced users can monitor the GPU load, voltages and available GPU memory of their ZOTAC GeForce series graphics card with FireStorm as well.
Download EVGA Precision 4.2.1 - it you to fine tune your GeForce graphics card for the maximum performance possible, with Core/Shader/Memory clock tuning, real time monitoring support including in-game, Logitech Keyboard LCD Display support, and compatibility with almost all EVGA (and other) graphics cards.
Radeon Profile Tool, or RadeonPro for short, is a free, user friendly utility designed to unleash the power of AMD Radeon video graphics cards. RadeonPro applies user defined profiles upon game start, just define once the desired 3D settings for each game and have all those settings applied every time you play, automatically
You might not know that SAPPHIRE's TriXX software is the key to unlocking their power. With SAPPHIRE TriXX you can tune your card's performance to the max and save custom settings for your favourite games. SAPPHIRE TriXX has been redesigned with a deceptively-simple interface featuring the New TriXX Boost, NITRO GLOW, and Software BIOS Switch.
Overclocking comes in handy when running particularly demanding programs. On the other hand, overclocking your GPU comes in handy when gaming. An overclocked GPU can help yield smoother action and produce better graphics much more reliably.
For instance, it provides an incredibly detailed report of the hardware. It is compatible with most of the graphics cards out on the market. Moreover, this free overclocking program gives users full control of their graphics card via a user-friendly UX interface.
AMD Overdrive is arguably one of the best overclocking software available today. With the capability to overclock and fine-tune your CPU and memory, the software takes a comprehensive approach to overclocking systems.
The 129 KB software features all the necessary functionality that GPU users need to track the performance of their Nvidia GPUs. For instance, within its three tabs, users can track the performance of the GPUs and their fans and also manage their GPU overclocking and fan speed.
The software automatically detects the graphics card you are using and create an in-depth profile of your GPU and its current configuration. Users can set the GPU frequencies according to their needs. Additionally, users can set the fan speed or use the automatic mode available.
The Ryzen Master is a performance tuning and overclocking software designed by AMD specifically for their products. Given that every AMD CPUs and GPU is multiplier enabled by default, AMD products users can use this software to fine-tune the performance of their AMD CPUs, GPUs, and memory. 2ff7e9595c
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