Overclocking Your Video Card

Let’s now explain the basic procedure on 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, like shown on 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 system tray. So 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, just reboot your system and you will have your PC running just fine 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 can work or not. After adjusting the clock, run a 3D game on its benchmarking mode (Quake 4, for instance) and check whether the computer freezes or restarts on its own. If this happens, it means that you have set a clock beyond the capability supported by the video card.

The use of a game on 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 on benchmarking mode, we’ve posted some tutorials on that: How to Use Battefield 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 supported by the video memory. If you try to set both at the same time, when the computer crashes you won’t be able to find out 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 bit and run a 3D game under benchmarking mode. If the system ran fine, increase the GPU clock a little bit more and repeat the process, until you find the exact GPU clock that your system can run without crashing. After finding this out, you will need to repeat the same process for the memory clock. And then with the I/O bus, if you want to overclock it as well.

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

There are some tips on improving your overclocking chances. Let's talk about this.

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