Custom PC – October 2019

FEATURE / CUSTOMISATION

Overclock your graphics card

The Nvidia RTX 2060 Super Founders

Edition is an excellent overclocker, and it’s

simple to get some extra performance.

Download GPU-Z (techpowerup.com) and

MSI Afterburner (guru3d.com), increase the

temperature and power limits to maximum in

the latter, and then locate the small three-bar

button next to Core Clock.

In the window that appears, hit OC

Scanner in the top right, then select Scan.

This will begin to automatically overclock

and test your graphics card and is normally

fairly accurate in obtaining a core frequency

reasonably close to what you’d achieve

manually.You’llseethecorefrequencyin

GPU-Zleaparoundastheprogramsruns.

Whenthetesthasfinished,closethe

windowandclicktheoptionthatsays

CurvetotherightofCoreClock.Thiswill

applythebeststablefrequencyfromthe

scanner.Finally,add800MHztothememory

frequency.Thefruitsofoureffortsincreased

theGPUboostfrequencyfrom1650MHz

to1813MHz,andthememoryfrom14GHz

(effective)to15.6GHz(effective).These

figuresshouldbestableonanRTX 2060

Supercard,buttobesure,headintosome

gamesandwatchforscreenartefactsor

stabilityissues.If anyappear,dialbackthe

memoryby50MHzandthecoreby25MHz,

thentryagain.

Setupyourmemory

StartbyapplyingthememoryXMP

profileintheEFI,whichwillsetthecorrect

speed,timingsandvoltage.If you’reupfor

overclockingyourmemoryto3600MHz,

doit nowandheadintoWindowsfora

stresstest– don’tperforma memoryand

CPUoverclockatthesametime,asit can

makestabilitytestingharder.Tooverclock

yourmemory,applytheXMPprofile,head

downtotheDRAMFrequencyoptionand

select3600MHzfromthelist.Nowgrabthe

latestversionofPrime95(mersenne.org)

inWindowsandrunthelargeFFTstest.If all

iswellaftertenminutes,youcanconsider

yourmemoryoverclocka success.

CPUoverclocking

AMD’slatestCPUsaren’t

straightforwardwhenit

comes to overclocking. Their

all-core overclock headroom

is fairly limited, sitting at

just 4.3GHz on our Ryzen 7

3700X despite its 4.4GHz

maximum boost frequency.

While you’ll gain a couple of

hundred megahertz in an all-

core boost from around 4GHz

at stock speed, you’ll lose the

ability for the CPU to drop

backunderlowloads.You’llalso reduce its

lightlythreadedperformance, as its stock

speedboostingwillbedisabled too.

Peoplewhoprioritisemulti-threaded

contentcreationperformance are better-

suitedtoa manualoverclock to 4.3GHz.

Todothat,dialina vcoreof1.425V and

multiplierof43x,thenreduce the voltage

untila runthroughPrime95’s smallfft test

becomesunstable(besureto disable AVX

instructionsintheprogram).

However,forourgamingsystem, we’ve

gonewithmaximumsingle-threaded

performanceandusedAMD’s Precision

BoostOverdrivefeaturetoincrease boost

frequencies,whileretainingthe maximum

FINAL SETUP

In Afterburner, locate the small three-bar

button next to Core Clock

Apply the memory XMP profile in the EFI to

set the correct speed, timings and voltage

MSI’s OC Scanner is great for finding a stable overclocked core frequency