Overclocking NVIDIA GeForce

If you are a gaming fan, you probably have the latest hardware installed on your PC already to get high performance from the system, but sometimes you need more from your machine. It is not always possible to upgrade your hardware.

Behold Overclocking. Overclocking is a process in which the graphics quality settings are increased via certain procedural steps without any up-gradation in hardware. Overclocking not only allows a computer to operate faster but also provide pleasure for dedicated and intoxicated gamers.

Overclocking is risky, but it provides the easiest solution to provide enhanced graphics quality without hardware modifications. It allows you to extract more out of a product rather spending money.

Overclocking is quite simple and here, we’ll teach you how to successfully overclock an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card is mentioned as under.

A few important things should be kept in mind prior while overclocking. First, the SLL sets should never be overclocked altogether. It is recommended to remove one card from the sets while overclocking and testing on the other. As a result each video card becomes stress tested for vaults instability before they are combined into a multi card array. Point should be noted that overclocking video cards generate greater heat than normal resulting in reduced stability.

For initiating overclocking, some software needs to be installed. These are available as freeware. Some of them are-

Riva tuner – It is an application for low level hardware tuning.

Nibitor – application for editing BIOS for NVIDIA products.

nVFlash – Application for flashing BIOS for NVIDIA products.

GPU-Z – Product information and monitoring application.

These are really very good overclocking applications but none of them are easier to use than the NVIDIA system tools. This application gets integrated with the NVIDIA control panel during installation. NVIDIA system tools provides the feature to increase the core frequency as high as 1900 Mhz while the memory can be pushed as high as 2560 MHz.

Now the following are steps to successful overclocking using NVIDIA system tools.

STEP 1: Start NVIDIA system tools and navigate to the “Performance” menu. Then click “Device Settings” menu. Here the user can switch from default frequencies to a custom setting where fine tuning of the GPU and memory clock speed can be done.

STEP 2: Adjusting the manual fan speed option. During the overclocking process, the temperature increases and hence manual tuning of the fan speed is required to maintain an equilibrium.

STEP 3: When a graphics card is overclocked for the firsrt time, it is recommended to start with the core to find the sweet spot. Initially we can start with 20-30 MHz steps and then fine tune it to 5-10 MHz steps. After achieving the limit, it should be backed off a few MHz to avoid any stability problems.

STEP 4: After a certain time the graphics card would cause the system to crash/lock up or there might be random errors. But the user should not panic as this is normal during overclocking process. Whenever the system crashes, the system forces to reboot and then it re-enables the last successful settings.

STEP 5: The core should be pushed as far as possible and then it should be backed off to about 10 MHz. By this procedure, a stable overclocking frequency of approximately 1000 Mhz is attained. Although most of the time during the overclocking process, impressive frequencies are not achieved.

STEP 6: Graphical faults can be witnessed while running the graphics card in a 3D environment such as FurMark. They are signs for very high and aggresssive overclocking. In this situation the frequency should be backed off by roughly 10 MHz and should be continued till glitches disappear.

Thus overclocking a graphics card is a quick and easy way to get a little extra bit of boosted up performance from the system without any expenditure. So gamers can enjoy performance gain as high as 20%.