The main trick to increase the GPU overclocking capability is also improving its cooling. GPUs can come with passive or active heatsinks, i.e. with or without a fan.

If you video card uses a passive heatsink, like the one portrayed on Figure 14, consider replacing it with a good VGA cooler. Take a look on our first look articles about Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 6 and Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 for a better idea on what we are talking about. Or if you don’t want to spend money, you can at least mod the heatsink to add a fan to it.

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Figure 14: Example of a video card with passive heatsink.

But even if your video card already uses an active heatsink, you may want to consider replacing it with a better cooling solution, like the Artic Cooling products we’ve mentioned.

Another trick advanced overclockers do is to increase the GPU voltage. Increasing the GPU voltage usually helps the GPU to achieve a higher clock rate. One way of increasing the GPU voltage is by editing the video card BIOS. We will discuss later how to edit your video card BIOS, however we won’t go into the details on how to change the GPU voltage.