Simple general guide to video card overclocking

Hello everybody, this post is a simple and short step-by-step tutorial on how to overclock your video card aka GPU.

Step 1: You need to download two tools. MSI Afterburner and GPU-Z by TechPowerUp

MSI Afterburner is the overclocking utility used to tweak your graphics card. GPU-Z is for monitoring the clock speeds between the overclocked one from the default out of the box one.

Step 2: After downloading MSI Afterburner, extract the .rar file and you will end up with two applications. MSI Afterburner and MSI Kombustor. MSI Kombustor is for stress testing your video card after overclocking to ensure stability.

MSI Afterburner interface:

GPU-Z interface: it will look something like that depending on what video card you are using

Step 3: On the picture above, you can see the core clock and the memory clock. Depending on how much you want to overclock it, you have to move the throttle up to add more speed and the number beside it shows you how many MHz have you gone. I highly recommend increasing the the core/memory clock about 20-30 MHz at a time and test for stability after that. If you notice anything looking strange like weird lines affecting image quality, your games crashing or the stress test crashing, that means the overclock isn’t stable and you have to bump up the voltage a little bit until you get stability or if things doesn’t get better, revert back to default settings.

Step 4: If you are planning to do a big overclock, you would have to bump up the voltage a little bit like +1 or slightly more but not too much or else you might short out your video card.  In MSI Afterburner, you have to unlock voltage settings if you want to tweak the voltage. Go to Settings –> Under the general tab –> Tick ‘Unlock voltage control’ and ‘Unlock voltage monitoring’. Press 'Ok' when you are done.

Step 5: After you have done your overclocking, click on the button that i circled red on the image below to test for stability.  Note: This is a stress test

Note: You can monitor your temperature change and GPU usage at the right hand side of MSI Afterburner called ‘MSI Afterburner Hardware Monitor’. note that during stress test… you will notice a drastic increase in GPU usage, temperatures and fan speeds. Don’t worry. You could also use GPU-Z to monitor these statistics. Happy Overclocking 

Note: I am not responsible for any damages done from overclocking on your graphics cards. If you have any questions, please send me an email at mikeviews@gmail.com or leave a comment. Voltage change is only needed to be tweaked if you are going for a big overclock. Warranty of the graphics card will also be voided if you attempt overclocking.

Configuring Fan Speeds with MSI Afterburner

This method allows you to control the fan speed of your video card depending on the temperature in MSI Afterburner.

Step 1: Open MSI Afterburner

Step 2: Click on Settings --> Fan tab (it will look something like this)

             

As you see there is a graph under the Fan tab. You can adjust the fan speed depending on the temperature by dragging the white pointers on the graph. This is my configuration for fan speeds for my video card. From here it is very self explanatory because it is your choice on what do you want for the fan speeds at a certain temperature. You could run the stress test to check out whether your configuration has worked or not.

Step 3: After configuration, tick Force fan speed update on each period and hit OK.

Note: Safe temperatures depending on what video card you use is about 80-90 degrees celsius on full load. Idle temperatures should be around 30-50 degrees celsius depending on what kind of video card you are using. High end video cards will usually run warmer.