Let’s now learn the basic procedure of 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, as it is shown in Figure 4.

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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 the system tray. 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, simply reboot your system and you will have your PC running well 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.

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Figure 5: Overclocking your video card

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

The use of a game in 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 in benchmarking mode, we’ve posted some tutorials on that: “How to Use Battlefield 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 frequency supported by the video memory. If you try to set both simultaneously, if the computer crashes you won’t be able to determine 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 and run a 3D game under benchmarking mode. If the system ran without any problems, increase the GPU clock a little more and repeat the process until you find the exact GPU clock under which your system can run without crashing. After determining this, you will need to repeat the same process for the memory clock, followed by the I/O bus if you want to overclock it as well.

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

Here are some tips for improving your overclocking chances.