OVER

CLOCK

YOUR

VIDEOCARD

You’ve already pushed your CPU to the edge and

taken your RAM to its outer limits. Now it’s time to

put the screws to your videocard

E

very company that sells videocards based on an AMD

or Nvidia GPU starts out on fairly equal footing: When

building their products, all companies follow the same

reference designs and clock-speed guidance that AMD and

Nvidia provide.

One of the oldest and easiest ways for these vendors to

differentiate their products from the competition is to drop

a free game in the box. Another popular tactic is to offer

a more generous (or more fault-tolerant) warranty. But the

sexiest way to stand out from the crowd is to overclock the

card’s GPU and memory. AMD and Nvidia both frequently

sandbag their reference designs, leaving headroom for

third-party manufacturers to goose the components’ clocks,

which can easily wring more performance from a stock card.

Many board manufacturers offer the same GPU and

memory confi guration in more than one SKU, tacking a

premium to the price tag of cards that feature higher clock

speeds. But consumers can play the overclocking game,

too—without having to pay a penny in premiums. We’ll show

you how to use a free utility to easily squeeze more frames

per second out of just about any videocard on the market.

But keep these facts in mind: Not every GPU is over-

clockable to the same degree. AMD and Nvidia intentionally

segregate parts that exhibit a propensity for overclocking

and then sell these for a higher price than less-pedigreed

cards. As you push your GPU to the edge, variables ranging

from the quality of your power supply to the build quality of

your motherboard and the ambient temperature of your envi-

ronment also come into play. Refer to the benchmark charts

in this article to see how far we were able to push our cards

but know that your mileage may vary.

BY MICHAEL BROWN

http://www.maximumpc.com | MAR 08 | MAXIMUMPC 37