How to Overclock a Video Card - Beginners Guide

what's up everybody Jase - since you're bringing it another one of those tutorials where you guys like where I show you how to do something that's kind of fun I guess I've not done enough of these and I keep saying that but damn it you guys keep telling me to do them and here we are so today we're going to talk about how I overclocked my graphics cards the tools I use why you should do it you really should be overclocking your GPUs because there's free performance you're just leaving on the table and it's not right because you pay for these amazing graphics cards and you need to get every ounce of performance out of them that you possibly can look at it this way overclocking your graphics card is like getting a free upgrade because often the performance jump that you can get on your graphics card is often very similar to going up to the next tier GPU if you had bought it and maybe you couldn't afford it but now you can get performance that's similar absolutely free so don't go anywhere have you been putting off water cooling your computer because you're afraid that you're a klutz and you're just going to screw it up well that's okay because EK water blocks is launching its brand new line of predator water cooling loops that feature the exact same components that you would find and standalone custom built loops already put together for you so go ahead check out the pre-order link down in the description and while you're there you can buy back your man card trust me you want that man card back do it now okay so it's been nearly three years since I did a GPU overclocking tutorial and I think needless to say it is well overdue so we're going to be using two programs here we're going to be using MSI Afterburner I like MSI because it works with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs not just Nvidia like some of the like EVGA precision only works with NVIDIA GPUs and we're going to be using vally benchmark just to validate our overclock for crashing now what we're going to do here is we're going to install everything and you're going to have to do a system reboot and it's going to say everything's been installed reboot your system for it to take effect do that and then when you open up MSI Afterburner we're going to configure it and we're going to change a couple of settings here so click the Settings button kind of kind of funny how that works you click settings and you get settings oh and also this video is version 4.1.1 if you're watching this in the future make sure you head to msi is website to get afterburner don't do third party like guru 3d or anything like that get the official from msi and you usually will have less issues in the future so hit settings and by the way msi is not sanctioning this video this is just the software that i use because i enjoy it so if you've got an sli config I love your GPS will show up right here obviously I'm on skunkworks and then if you click this button for synchronized it will apply the settings to all of your GPUs if you SLI or crossfire if you only have one GPU only one will show there and that button won't be clickable start with Windows and Start minimize this is to make sure that afterburner is running so that your profiles are always going to be in use although there is another setting to force it to use these profiles even when afterburner is not running I'll mention that in a second so we're going to enable all the buttons here that we possibly can except for force constant voltage force constant voltage is very similar to like K boost on EVGA stuff where it'll just force a maximum voltage no matter what we don't really want that we want the voltage to come down we want the temperatures to come down when we're in between gaming or just sitting idle at the desktop there's no reason to be pumping all that voltage into the GPU not doing anything all it's going to do is wear it down over time these buttons over here for user mode and standard MSI and reference design whatever just leave these at whatever they boot up there's no reason to really change those and then I would check for available updates but I wouldn't use beta versions other than that you can go ahead and hit OK when use when you do the voltage radio buttons there it's going to tell you you have to reboot MSI Afterburner for it to take effect say yes as you can see right there so MSI Afterburner has restarted and there it is these are all the values will be monitoring the only things I'm monitoring in this tutorial are GPU temperatures for all three GPUs in my system GPU usage for our GPU one because that's always going to tell me what the max usage was and the other two GPUs will usually follow suit if there's an sli config and then GPU core clocks for one two and three as you can see right now we're all running at a thousand one megahertz and that's because we are encoding this video using the GPU so they're not sitting idle like they normally would they are encoding this as we do this so they are doing something and then we've got a memory usage I only monitor memory for GPU one because memory usage is going to be the same for all three of them if they're being utilized so there's no reason to monitor them separately as far as I'm concerned that's that's personal though you might want to do if you have it because I've got three graphics cards this thing would be like a mile long if I monitored everything for all three now you can see voltage is not showing in here that's because once we enable voltage monitoring here we can go over here to the monitoring tab and then we can scroll down and click voltage control or voltage monitoring now you can monitor anything in your system here GPU usage CPU usage CPU temp so you could turn msi into kind of a one-stop monitoring system for everything in your system but i'm only using it for the GPUs so i've unselected the stuff that I don't want now the other thing we want to do is disable something called on-screen display that's built in with rivatuner which is the server that does all of the overclock monitoring and overclock application here for your graphics cards and we are going to want to make sure that we disable on-screen monitoring which is what we normally have that display that shows you temperature and the speeds and all that stuff usually it's a purple text we want to disable that because that can cause some problems and some overclocking crashing on certain applications and turning that off is actually the most recommended thing to do so hit more it'll bring up this rivatuner statistics screen thingy and then when it says here for global you can turn off application a show on-screen display and then for global makes your application detection level is at none if you're doing your overclocking and you've been getting a lot or you installed msi afterburner you start getting a lot of crashing in your games more than likely it's on screen display so make sure you go into more and then turn that off last but not least because there's a lot of settings here and I can't cover all of it or it would be an hour and 45 minute long video some of you might like that most of you wouldn't I personally wouldn't like a video that long so we can go into user interface make sure these two are checked and then anything that you put your mouse over will bring up a little tool tip pop up that you can read and it will tell you what those settings do so let's go and reset our settings here so now that we've unlocked voltage control we can move this prior to that this was grayed out and we couldn't touch it but we're going to leave that at zero because we have to know what we're starting with before we start changing anything so here's what we're going to do we're going to go ahead and run Valley benchmark just for maybe 60 seconds here I know it's not going to crash because it's that stuck and we want to see what our values are going to so we can see what we had to play with so I'm going to do that and then we'll be right back okay so we had things running here and now we can see a couple of things going on here we can see that my graphics cards jumped up to eleven hundred and ninety megahertz that's about a 190 megahertz boost clock jump which is not bad it's not great but it's not bad and we know that we can get some more out of that which is the whole point of this tutorial temperatures look good the main card here which has the GPU hook are the monitors four of them hooked up to it got up to 48 degrees Celsius and then the other to 44 and 45 so some people might look at this for degree gap here and be like well J obviously your parallel conveying isn't working well you got to keep in mind that the GPU that has the monitors hooked up to it are under it's under a higher load than the other ones so it's something to keep in mind right there that's why there's that gap these GPU two and three aren't doing anything they're just assisting GPU one nothing's hooked up into it there's no actual pixel clock or so engine doing anything so it's running a little bit cooler and then there's our GPU clock and as you can see we're back down to 1001 because we're rendering this video in real time so our GPU memory our GPU voltage you can see our voltage went to 1.17 for on GPU one and then 1.16 two and one six eight of GPU two again the voltage went higher in GPU one it's under a higher load so it got more voltage and now that we know what our settings are doing we can go ahead and start playing around with the core clock now we're going to leave the core voltage alone we don't want to touch core voltage until we find an unstable setting now we're going to do here is our going to click this little arrow next to power limit we are going to prioritize temperature by pointing the arrow down and we're going to drag that all the way up now that's going to freak some people out going why would you let your graphics card go to 91 more than likely it's not going to reach 91 with the fans that are built on the graphics cards today it would probably get up into the 80s it'll never hit 91 and it's better to let the boost clock 2.0 prioritize based on temperature than TDP or power limit because typically there's more Headroom and temperature than there is TDP now we're going to start with something kind of conservative here I I personally already know that my Titans are capable of 1500 megahertz and I know 1190 has a big way to go before 11 are in 1500 but let's just do a 100 megahertz offset now the core clock is not the slider here this is not the clock this is the offset hey guys it's me editing J I'm editing this video right now and I need to correct something I just said what I just said about the offset is absolutely true for Nvidia graphics cards however on AMD graphics cards it will be the clock at least most of the time pretty much all the Radeon r9 stuff is the actual clock that you're entering in there so if you wanted to try twelve hundred megahertz you would type 1200 it works a little bit differently than Nvidia so before I get flamed and tons of people eating confusion I thought I would go and people potentially underclocking the GPU I figured I would go ahead and chime in right now and and say that recording Jai was stupid and editing Jai needs to tell you that AMD cards are a little different with the way that slider works and it will be the actual clock in most cases there's always exceptions except for the times when there's not but usually there is are you confused yet alright go back to the show go so if I said that two plus one thousand then that means we're gonna try and run 1190 megahertz and that's obviously not going to work because that would be a world record so what you're going to do is you're going to start with a number plus which is the offset additional to what you just saw so because I know that I was running 1190 megahertz plus 100 will get me 1290 megahertz so it's an offset or in addition to whatever the bios boosts clock setting is i hope that makes sense and memory clock we're going to leave that at zero right now so if i apply these settings we're going to save them to a profile now so you hit save these are going to start flashing and then you can save it to whatever profile you want so we'll save it to profile one there so now if we hit one and apply you can see everything is where we left it if you were to hit reset that puts it all back to the factory BIOS settings hit number one and apply you can see our overclock settings just took effect now if we want to make sure those take effect every time we start the computer check this box it says apply overclocking at system startup that's going to put a profile into the system startup so that even if MSI Afterburner isn't running then the overclock will still take effect another thing you can do is you can control which profiles take effect based on this profile manager in the settings so for 3d profile we could say okay if it's running a game that has a 3d profile then run this profile if it's got a 2d profile maybe something that's not is I'm trying to think of a 2-d game maybe like a side scroller or something then you could tell it to do something else even like watching movies and videos would be a 2d profile so you can control that now I like to let 2d and 3d both run at my overclock so I applied that profile to both hit ok startup Valley and do it again okay so I only ran valley for a few seconds here obviously because I want to make sure the core clock has taken effect so now you can see that +100 is getting us a twelve hundred and seventy eight megahertz boost but anyway we can start playing with this now and bumping it up and up and up until we get a crash now here's where I'm going to explain the methodology and the rest of the work is up to you leave the stock voltage leave it at zero and then increment Li increase your core until you get an instant crash and what I mean by that is you hit run on valley benchmark and then it tries to load up the scene and it just crashes it might go to a gray screen it might go to a lock screen the system might hang all all together simply reboot your machine and then bump down that overclock until you can get the scene to load once the scene loads then you're going to let it run and see if it can do loops for let's say a half-hour if it can complete a half-hour chances are then that you probably are stable and you can leave it there if you want to see if you can get more core clock out of your graphics card then you would go back to that value that crashed and start bumping up voltage incrementally and see if you get stable it's just like CPU overclocking so if you get if you become stable with more voltage then you can start bumping up the core clock some more because sometimes bringing up the voltage will bring where your crash was stable and more Headroom so you you're kind of doing this leapfrog thing once you get your core clock stabilized then you can start playing with memory overclock and believe it or not memory overclocks tend to have a pretty big impact on how far your system can actually overclock and have a performance actually as I know a lot of people think that on Maxwell you don't touch the memory that's not true you can get a huge gain in performance by overclocking the memory as well as the GPU so here's what we're going to do right now I'm going to find the max over clocks on my Titans I'm going to tell you about them how I got those settings and then I'm going to cut you guys loose and let you determine what your settings are now remember you can't really hurt your GPUs using MSI Afterburner unless you have a non factory BIOS that gives it too much voltage control then you could damage your GPU by doing too much voltage control and too much heat remember your V RMS are another factor you have to take into account when you're doing your overclocking because as you bump up voltage you're putting a big stress on that vrm as well and those can often die before the GPU does especially if you don't have good adequate vrm cooling on the air coolers which a lot of companies are not doing adequately fortunately since I'm on water blocks I've got much better temperature control of the VRMs all right so I'm going to find my max overclock on the Titans and then I'll show you where we were okay so here's where my overclocks on the three Titan X is pretty much landed now the overclocking here the stability is only going to be as stable as the least overclocking card at least when you have them all linked together you could do individual overclocking where each card has its own overclocking profile but that takes a lot more time it's much more difficult because the top slotted card typically has more typically should be where the better overclocking card is placed and when you're in a hard piped water cold loop like I am it's not easy to just swap those around like you could if they were air cooled cards now I am I'm running here of the plus 112 volt because my cards loved extra voltage power limits at 110 with the max of 91 prioritized on the temps which is obvious how my cards did reach over 60 degrees like 65 degrees Celsius because this room is closed it's hot I've been benchmarking for a couple of hours in here now and as the temperature in the room rises so does the water cooler parts in a water-cooled loop so it's one of those things where it's a trade-off yeah 65 degrees Celsius is not exactly the coolest water-cooled setup but when you've got three cards being water-cooled together in the same loop and they're tight Nexes which get really hot it's actually not a bad temper it's about 20 degrees Celsius cooler than one card was in there and if I had three of them sandwiched together with reference coolers they would have been thermal throttling so I'll take it trust me but as you can see here I got what I was like clicking away like a clicking monster so I've got plus 250 on the core which give me give me about fourteen hundred and ninety eight megahertz overclock on these cards all three of them but a plus 400 on the memory so nine or 800 megahertz extra on the RAM made a big difference in the overclocking as well so when I did my Valley benchmarks this was my base run right here 1440p keep in mind these scores were at 1440 as you can see right here because at 1080p skunkworks does get it does get bottlenecked actually where it doesn't matter if it's overclocked or not the score is the same because while overclocking it it can't take advantage of the extra Headroom and even stock was creating a bit of a bottleneck on the cards with the 5960 exits overclocked so I'm looking forward to all this stuff being updated with Windows or DirectX 12 and going with Windows 10 maybe in the near future but not yet anyway so we got a 5701 score on valley benchmark with an average FPS of 136 point 3 minimum of 40 and a max of 223 fps so the overclocked score here is a 60 170 with an average FPS of 147 point 5 so our average jump from 136 to 147 a 10 FPS jump on average and a minimum FPS of 44 point two versus a forty point four so a 10% improvement once again on minimum fps and maximum FPS actually went down ever so slightly or no went up I'm sorry apparently numbers are hard for me but that went up for FPS also but the point of that is we got that for free that didn't cost us anything and doesn't matter if your air cooled or water cooled overclocking will give you gains that are measurable for zero cost and pretty much negligible difference in terms of degradation or longevity changes over the lifespan of the card you are going to replace this card long before overclocking with msi afterburner whatever caused any damage and it's unlikely that any damage you ever happen I've never had msi afterburner damage a card and I've been using MSI Afterburner as long as it's been around so there you go guys it's been a fairly in-depth how to overclock your GPU remember baby steps small increments at a time stock voltage do your core clocks first then when it starts to crash back your core clock off slightly like maybe 10 megahertz and then bump up voltage slightly and see if you gain stability if you do once you're stable on the voltage start bumping up your core clocks again and leapfrog it till you find that balance of where your CPU or your GPU likes core versus voltage and then start playing with your memory as well alright guys time to get out of here I hope this videos helped let everyone know down in the comments how you are doing on your over clocks how much did you gain what graphics card are you using and what drivers you're using drivers actually make a difference for overclocking as well so I'm going to get the heck on out of here I hope you guys have enjoyed today's long tutorial and as always don't forget to subscribe and we will see you in the next one

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 1,600,609

Rating: 4.9236746 out of 5

Keywords: EKWB Preroll, overclocking guide, overclocking, guide, video card, gpu, graphics card, msi afterburner, how to overclock video card, how to overclock gpu, how to overclock, Jayztwocents, tech talk, jays two cents, jay2cents, jayztwocents post malone, pc building simulator, jay z two cents, budget build, water cooling, pc build, pc, budget buildoverclock

Id: vUEMS-B1Siw

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/TH3xR34P3R]

Forgot I wanted to post this up earlier for those just starting out with their builds and want to get into some GPU overclocking.

[u/thereddarren]

Any advice for improving the cooling on a reference GTX760? The only ideas I have so far without spending much is to ghetto rig a cardboard tube to force-feed it with a bigger fan.

[u/[deleted]]

Is it hard to get it at stable temps like i hear it is with processors?

[u/Legendary_Forgers]

Do you guys think a R9 390 could do this under max temps? Its got a Tri-X cooler so I think I'm good, just want to be extra careful.