Safely overclocking your CPU and GPU used to be a task reserved for only those techies who live and breathe static. In 2020, however, overclocking is pretty straightforward. It might seem daunting at first, but advancements in technology have allowed for higher-level and more user-friendly overclocking experiences, making for a beginner-friendly process. Learning how to overclock your CPU and GPU, and how to do it safely, is a great way to gain extra performance from your components completely for free.
Learning how to overclock is potentially your best bet for getting higher gaming frame rates out of your existing PC. The argument for overclocking your AMD CPU, Intel processor, or Nvidia graphics card is stronger than ever right now: it’s just too easy not to. Just follow the simple steps below to get up and running. No soldering required. Or maths. Well… ok, there’s a little bit of maths.
You’ll have seen liquid nitrogen splashed liberally across the floor, pouring clouds of vapour up into the air, and serious-looking guys in logo’d t-shirts either high-fiving each other or frantically prodding at keyboards and strange contraptions atop test benches. It would be very easy to look at all that and conclude overclocking is something best left to the experts.
But that’s not really overclocking – at least, it’s not the true spirit of overclocking. Overclocking is a way for us to squeeze as much performance as we can from the existing components in our PCs when we can’t afford to go out and buy something newer or faster.
- Sep 21, 2019 If we have to manually input numbers into Precision X1 even when using the advertised automatic overclock feature, I'm just going to go back to MSI afterburner. Additionally, I may straight up stop buying EVGA cards until EVGA can demonstrate they know how to write logically usable software with adequate documentation.
- Sep 24, 2018 Today we’re going to be diving a little deeper into overclocking the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080, covering a whole range of things from how to overclock these cards, to typical.
MSI Afterburner. The world’s most recognized and widely used graphics card overclocking utility which gives you full control of your graphics cards. It provides an incredibly detailed overview of your hardware and comes with some additional features such as customizing fan profiles, benchmarking and video recording.
Where once it was a question of replacing crystals, swapping silicon, or drawing lines on your CPU with a pencil (honest), now all you need is some overclocking software, a smidge of BIOS-fu, and a little bit of patience.
Super-serious disclaimer time: Overclocking is far less dangerous to the health of your components than it used to be – with fail-safes built into modern silicon – but you will still be running your hardware outside its officially rated parameters. That means you’ll likely invalidate any warranty your hardware might still have and there is a slight risk that any extra stress might just push it over the edge and brick it. That’s why, historically, overclocking is done on ageing components. You have been warned…
Now the official warning is out of the way let’s get down to business. The business of making your gaming PC even more awesome, that is, starting with how to overclock your graphics card.
How to overclock – GPU
1. Overclocking software
One-click overclocking
If you really want to take any of the tinkering (and most of the fun) out of overclocking your Nvidia GPU, you can instead opt for Nvidia's Scanner functionality. This handy tool, found within various overclocking apps including EVGA Precision and MSI Afterburner, sets and validates your GPU overclock for you. Leaving only memory clocks down to the user.
The first step is to make sure your PC is completely up to date. That ought to either flag up any gremlins lurking in your system or help get rid of them before they become an issue. Check Windows Update to get your OS up to date and ensure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card, whether it’s an AMD or Nvidia GPU.
Next, grab some overclocking software. My personal choice for perking up your graphics card is MSI’s Afterburner software. It uses the classic Rivatuner backend (like Asus’s GPU Tweak and EVGA’s Precision apps), but comes with an easy-to-use interface and a handy on-screen display to keep track of things in-game. It’s a free download, takes only a few minutes to install, and can be used on any GPU, not just those from MSI.
As well as the software for enacting any overclock you want to achieve you should get yourself some benchmarking applications too. Have a look in your Steam library; you will find some of the games you already own have built-in benchmarks – I mean, everyone’s got a copy of GTA V, right? But, while games are great for giving you a tangible before and after shot of your PC’s performance, they’re a bit awkward to use when you’re trying to find the limits of your hardware.
I suggest downloading the Unigine Heaven benchmark. It’s a GPU-intensive 3D rendering test that will stress your card with a continuous loop you can run in a window on your desktop. And it looks kinda purty, too…
2. Benchmark baseline performance
You need to get some baseline performance numbers for how your rig currently performs. Benchmarking is a rather dry, tedious process (welcome to my world), but it’ll allow you to feel warm and fuzzy inside after you’ve nailed your extra GPU performance, because you can see in black and white what all that overclocking effort has afforded you.
Grab one of your favourite games with a built-in benchmark – we use the likes of GTA V, the Total War games, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hitman, and Far Cry 5 – and then run the test (usually found in the graphics options) at your current settings, noting down the final average and minimum frame rate scores. It’s also worth benchmarking the Heaven test at your monitor’s native resolution too (hit F9 and sit back). You could also download the free version of 3DMark and run the basic FireStrike test to get a reliable index score.
3. Fun with frequencies
I can’t stress this enough – be patient. That’s the key to getting the most out of your GPU with the basic overclocking we’re doing here. You’re very unlikely to do any damage to your graphics card while you’re testing its limits, but if you go in heavy-handed, pushing the clocks up as high as the sliders allow, the minimal risks are definitely increased.
First, boot up Afterburner and make sure the little Windows logo isn’t lit up – clicking that button ensures the current boosted settings are applied when the system boots up. You don’t want that happening when you’re trying to find the limits, only when you’re sure the system is stable.
Next, boot up Heaven in a window, one that’s small enough so you can view and access the Afterburner control panel while Heaven is looping through its floating medieval village scenery. On a native 1080p screen, run it at 1280 x 720, and then, with a 1440p or 4K panel, run the test at 1920 x 1080.
We cannot stress this enough: be patient
Now you’re ready to start tweaking and the best place to start is with the memory clocks. Start shifting the memory slider to the right in 5-10 MHz increments, hitting the tick button to apply the boost each time. After each step, check the looping Heaven run for visual artefacts appearing on-screen. Memory glitches will manifest themselves as either solid blocks, blobs of colour, or pin-sharp stars. Keep pushing the memory slider up in small increments until you start to see those telltale signs of failing memory… or until the card or system crashes.
Once you get to that stage, dial back the clockspeed by either one or two steps, apply the new memory clock, and leave Heaven running for a longer period to make sure it remains stable at the new speed. If you see more memory artifacts, drop down another 5-10 MHz increment, and test again.
Now that you’ve found the memory limits, note down the stable clockspeed offset, and reset the card to its default settings.
4. GPU overclocking
This is where the real performance-changing work goes down and also where you’re going to start generating the most heat. Before you start upping the GPU clockspeed, push the power limit slider up to max – allowing the graphics card to deliver more power to the silicon if it can – and also push up the temperature limit a little higher to account for the increased heat generation.
Using the same process we used when overclocking the video memory, push the GPU clockspeed up by 5-10 MHz increments, checking the game window for artefacts as you apply each step change.
Processor artefacts manifest themselves in different ways to memory issues. Keep an eye out for pixel-sized dots of different colours appearing around the screen, random shards of colour, or bright and coloured full-screen flashes. As soon as you see anything like that it’s time to dial back the GPU clockspeed in the same way you did with the memory to find the stable boosted clockspeed.
5. The full GPU overclocking package
Now you want to see how everything looks with both the GPU and memory clocks set to the peak levels you discovered individually. Don’t be surprised if, when putting both sliders up to where they operated stably earlier, you now get lots of artefacts or crashes. If that happens (and it probably will), take note of whether the glitches you see relate to either GPU or VRAM, and knock back the relevant slider by one 5 MHz notch.
If you get a system crash, on the other hand, simply reboot and set both memory and processors speeds back one step, and test again. When you feel confident about your settings it’s time to stress test.
6. Test and test again
Close down Heaven in windowed form and restart it fullscreen at your native resolution and leave it looping for a good ten minutes to make sure it remains fully stable at your new clocks. When you are positive it is stable, hit F9 to benchmark, and see what performance increase your efforts have afforded you. Now replicate your earlier gaming and 3DMark tests to see what else you’ve gained.
Finally, hit that little Windows logo on Afterburner and light it up so that every time you boot you’re running at your newly discovered, overclocked settings.
7. It’s not as fast as I’d hoped…
Not all graphics cards are created equal and neither are the chips inside them. You cannot be guaranteed of a particular overclock (or indeed any overclock at all) as every GPU will have a different limit because of vagaries in the manufacturing process. We’ve also heard of issues with later GTX 1070 cards, using Micron instead of Samsung memory, that limits their memory overclocking performance compared with the original memory modules of the Founders Editions.
You might get lucky and find your GPU will boost like a beast. Similarly, you might not be able to get much extra performance at all. But as certain accidental horse-meat suppliers are wont to say: every little helps.
There are other things you can do to help, however. If your card is a reference version, using either a standard Nvidia or AMD cooler design, you can buy relatively cheap third-party coolers to replace them and potentially deliver higher overclocking performance. Corsair even offers adapters so you can attach one of their closed-loop CPU water coolers to your graphics card, though that is probably going too far if you’re just trying to eke out another few months of gaming from your ageing GPU.
8. AMD WattMan
Using Afterburner, or other Rivatuner-based applications, isn’t the only option. With AMD Radeon cards you can simply use the new WattMan tool that now comes as part of the Radeon Settings driver software.
It’s a dedicated option for modern AMD cards and allows you to do per-application overclocking for individual games. Below the latest 400-series cards you won’t have full access to everything that WattMan can offer, though you will still be able to play with some sliders.
The overclocking process is similar to the one I detailed earlier – patiently pushing up clockspeeds while checking Heaven in a separate window – but there are a few, slightly different steps. First you need to raise the minimum and target fan speeds, then switch from auto to manual and increase the temperature targets. Again, though, you’ll need to push the power limit to maximum before you tweak the clocks.
For the memory, you need to raise ‘State 1’ in small increments and hit apply to check stability while the GPU slider needs to be raised in 0.5% steps instead of the 5-10 MHz jumps we used in Afterburner.
Once more, it’s all about patience and vigilance.
How to overclock – CPU
1. Prep work
Overclocking your processor is a slightly different bag of chips to boosting the performance of your GPU. Though the basic principles remain the same: be patient and take it steady.
There’s one other thing to remember and that’s to pick your battles. Not every processor can be overclocked these days. Intel put the brakes on that a while back by locking down the clockspeed multipliers on all but their most expensive SKUs. You need to make sure your CPU has an unlocked multiplier to be able to get serious performance boosts. For Intel, that means picking a K-series chip, and for AMD any of its latest Ryzen CPUs or older Black Edition parts. You can hit the Win+Pause/Break keys together to display what’s in your current rig if you can’t quite remember.
Check out our guide to the best CPUs for gaming for our take on the top processors around right now. They just happen to also be the ones that are most comfortable with having the clocks tweaked, too…
You’ll also need some other software to help you out, but once more, it’s all available for free. First, you’ll need more monitoring software, and I’d suggest picking out CPU-Z to keep an eye on the real-time CPU clockspeed and multipliers, and also Real Temp to keep track of the temperatures inside the processor package.
The simplest CPU benchmarking tool is Cinebench; it’s a multi-threaded processor-based rendering test which will stress your silicon and spit out an index score at the end to help gauge relative performance. Finally, download Prime95 to stress test your CPU once you’re happy with the final clockspeed.
AMD’s Ryzen CPUs even have their own Ryzen Master software specifically designed for use with the chips. Though you will have greater access to the different settings of your AM4 board going through the BIOS rather than the more basic software.
When you come to testing, it’s worth remembering that using the Ryzen Master application takes up around 10% of your CPU’s resources, so always shut it down if you’re benchmarking how well your overclock has taken.
But, personally, I always find it just as easy to do everything from within the old-school confines of your motherboard’s BIOS. And also, because it’s mostly keyboard-based, you can pretend you’re a hacker out of a mid-’90s TV show or clueless Hollywood blockbuster.
2. Stay fresh, stay frosty
Once again, you need to make sure your PC is fully up to date. That doesn’t just mean Windows Update and your drivers – you also want to make sure your motherboard BIOS is the latest firmware. To do this, you’ll need to find out the exact make and model of your current motherboard, as well as what BIOS version you’re currently running. Handily, the CPU-Z app you’ve just downloaded will help if you don’t know off the top of your head.
Boot up CPU-Z and click the Mainboard tab across the top. The manufacturer and model of your board will be listed in the window that pops up, as well as what BIOS version is currently installed. Armed with this knowledge, you can head off to the manufacturer’s website, search for your board, and download the latest firmware BIOS update.
It’s not worth messing around here – you need to find the EXACT match between BIOS and board. Simply downloading one that looks about right won’t be enough. Chances are the BIOS will reject it. But, at worst, it could brick your motherboard completely. Beware. Once downloaded, unzip the BIOS update to a USB stick, and reboot with your pendrive in place.
Hitting either F2 or Del when the PC POST screen appears (before the Windows loading screen loads up) will take you into your BIOS screen. From there you’ll likely have to go into the Tools tab. What BIOS you see will differ on a manufacturer-to-manufacturer basis, but they’re all broadly similar. You should find a BIOS update utility that will take your downloaded firmware update and guide you through the process.
3. Completely automatic
Once your BIOS is updated you’ll want to reboot back into it from fresh and find the option to load the optimised settings. This is essentially a factory reset for your motherboard, but it’ll be tied to the latest firmware you’ve just installed, so it’s worth doing before you start anything. Check the boot settings afterwards to make sure it hasn’t changed which of your storage drives the PC boots from.
You may also find your BIOS has a handy auto-overclocking function – many of the modern boards will come with such features. They can, however, be a bit hit and miss, but it’s worth giving it a go first to see what your motherboard can do on its own. If nothing else, it’ll give you a better platform to continue overclocking manually.
4. Long multiplication
Your processor’s clockspeed is worked out by multiplying the baseclock (BCLK) by the CPU multiplier. The BCLK will likely be set at 100 MHz by default, so for a Core i5 6600K, for example, the multiplier will be set at 35 out of the box producing a final clockspeed of 3.5 GHz.
Boosting your CPU’s clockspeed, then, is simply a matter of stepping the processor’s clockspeed multiplier up by one, testing whether the machine still boots, and then running a quick Cinebench test to check stability. You will need to set the CPU multiplier/ratio setting to Manual/Sync All Cores and enter the desired number. You should then see a calculation of the final clockspeed somewhere on the page. Then save the settings and restart your machine, booting into Windows.
Once on your Windows desktop, start up CPU-Z and Real Temp, then run the CPU test in Cinebench to make sure your processor is operating stably. Keep an eye on CPU-Z to check whether the chip is running at the expected speed and check the processor’s temperature in Real Temp to make sure it’s not running insanely hot.
Then, if everything works as it should, reboot into the BIOS and rinse and repeat until either the machine refuses to boot (why, hello Mrs. Bluescreen of Death, how nice to see you…) or it falls over part way through your stability benchmark.
When that happens, simply reboot into your BIOS again to change the settings. Chances are the POST screen will lock when you restart, with a message saying ‘overclocking has failed’, immediately giving you the option to jump into the BIOS screen. From here, knock the multiplier down by one, save, and reboot testing for stability in Windows.
If you get into a horrible boot cycle where your machine freezes before you can get into your BIOS, don’t panic – all is not lost. You may need to delve into your machine and get a look at your motherboard, though. This is because you probably have to hard reset your motherboard’s BIOS. The method can differ from manufacturer to manufacturer – Google is your friend here. It will either be a little button on the back panel of your board (if you’re lucky), a button on the motherboard inside your case (if you’re not quite so lucky), or a jumper switch you need to short on the PCB itself (if you smashed a mirror over a black cat).
4. Double check
When you’ve reached the limits of what boosting the multiplier can get you then it’s time to make sure your machine is still 100% stable. Prime95 is a great stress-testing tool for CPUs – if your overclock can survive ten minutes running Prime95, chances are your new clockspeed is pretty damn solid. Boot up both CPU-Z (to check the clockspeed stays constant) and Prime95, selecting the small FFTs when the torture test screen pops up.
Run the torture test for at least ten minutes, and then, when you’re happy with the chip’s stability, you’ll need to make sure to click the Test tab in the Prime95 window and stop the test manually. Just shutting the window down won’t necessarily do the job.
Now you should have a rock-solid CPU overclock, hopefully at least boosting the minimum frame rates in-game, and potentially freeing up a little extra performance from your graphics cards as a whole.
5. There must be more to it than that….
Of course there is. If you want to go even further with your expensive silicon then there’s a rabbit hole to jump down. Get up to your elbow in CPU overclocking and you can start messing around with the voltages and baseclock settings, but that way lies greater long-term risk to your hardware, and a lot more intricate fiddling in various BIOS settings, too. Besides, fiddling with voltages also increases the heat output and may only get you a little higher clockspeed. You can also increase the BCLK of some processors but doing that is more prone to failure.
Msi Afterburner Auto Overclock Nvidia
You can improve the cooling of your CPU and your PC as a whole, which may help net you a higher final clockspeed. If you’re running the same stock cooler that came boxed up with your processor then your chip is likely to be getting more toasty than it needs. A good third-party cooler can be surprisingly cheap and can help improve overclocking scores by a long way, as well as ensure that an overclocked CPU keeps on trucking without falling over a little while down the line.
Today we’re going to be diving a little deeper into overclocking the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080, covering a whole range of things from how to overclock these cards, to typical achievable clock speeds, to performance and power consumption.
To start off this guide we’ll be going through our standard methodology for overclocking Nvidia graphics cards and specifically the new RTX series. We’ll also be showing you how Nvidia’s new Scanner API works and just how good their one-click overclocking can be, comparing to a manual overclock, while also showing you how to do said manual overclock.
The cards we’re using today are the Founders Edition RTX 2080 Ti and Founders Edition RTX 2080. Both come ‘factory overclocked’ in some sense compared to base-level board partner models, but that OC is quite small at just 90 MHz on the core, and nothing on the memory. But the card we’re using doesn’t really matter, the steps you see here will apply to all RTX cards.
The first thing we’ll be doing is going through what's potentially the easiest method of overclocking your RTX card: using Nvidia’s Scanner. One-click overclocking has been around for a while, but this time Nvidia has built a framework for doing it rather than letting board partners create their own algorithms, which the chip maker says is better tuned for their GPUs, more accurate, and more reliable.
To use Nvidia Scanner, you’ll need to grab the latest versions of any overclocking utility. We tried EVGA Precision X1 and MSI Afterburner, both beta versions, and for the Scanner functionality we found Afterburner to be more reliable.
Autotune Free Download
Had a few crash issues with the early version of Precision X1 which we assume will get fixed, whereas Afterburner seemed to work every time. It’s a bit disappointing as Precision has a much nicer interface than Afterburner, but we’ll get back to using Precision a bit later.
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After you’ve installed and opened Afterburner you’ll see a bunch of dials and sliders, bit of a cluttered interface but that’s fine. What we’re interested in is the small bar graph icon to the left of the core clock slider. At this stage it’s not necessary to touch anything else in the app. Simply click on the bar graph icon, then click OC Scanner, and then in that window hit 'Scan'. Now you can sit back and wait a while because the one-click overclock process takes around 15 to 20 minutes.
What the Scanner is doing is basically running a bunch of clock speed tests at a range of voltages to find the exact voltage-frequency curve for your graphics card. It has its own test algorithm built-in to stress the GPU with the ability to recover from any hangs or crashes if the GPU is being pushed a bit too hard. It’s basically simulating what we’d do with a manual overclock, but doing it faster and potentially more accurately.
Don’t worry if the application hangs or your screen goes black temporarily during the process, that’s normal. At the end, you’ll be given an average overclock, but crucially you’ll get a full frequency curve, which potentially is a bit more efficient than a simple core frequency offset. You can see at the lower end of the voltage curve, we’re getting slightly higher overclocks than at the top.
For the RTX 2080 Ti on average we achieved +181 MHz, but at the top end our OC is just +150 MHz. With the RTX 2080, we achieved an average of +113 MHz and a top-end OC of around +90 MHz
At this point, we’d recommend heading back into the Afterburner main application and cranking up the power and temperature limits to the maximum. We’ve never benchmarked a card, even a last-generation Pascal card, that didn’t like having these limits raised all the way, so with these RTX cards it just makes sense to crank it up. This will allow Nvidia’s GPU boost algorithm to push as high as possible on top of the frequency curve we’ve already set, going beyond the old limit.
One thing to note here is that we’ve set the power and temperature limit after running Nvidia Scanner. Nvidia says the Scanner only modifies the core clock, so if you change the power and temperature limits before hand, the Scanner might find different and potentially higher core clocks. However in our experience, we actually achieved lower clocks in the Scanner setting the power limit beforehand, so we’d recommend cranking it up after the Scanner is complete.
The other obvious limitation is the lack of memory clock gains, Nvidia Scanner only handles the GPU core and doesn’t touch memory. So if you’re after that simple, one-click overclock solution, you’ll be missing out on any gains you’d get from tweaking memory. Core overclocking is much more important for getting performance gains, but a boost to memory can help out in some situations.
We’ve got the Scanner OC results now in the bag. Now let’s see how to perform a manual overclock, and after we’ll compare the manual overclock to the Scanner results.
For this we’re switching to EVGA Precision X1 because it has a much nicer and more intuitive interface.
For a manual overclock we want to start from a decent point, so again we’re going to crank the power limit and temperature limit to the maximum. We’re also going to scroll the bottom section across to the Temp Tuner, and adjust the curve so we’re getting the maximum clock speed at all possible temperatures. For our reference card this isn’t a big deal as we’re not reaching up to those highest temperatures, but if you are running above 84C, you’ll want to adjust this curve for maximum performance.
From here, it’s all about adjusting the two main sliders for memory and core frequency. The basic steps are we want to increase each value by a reasonable amount, apply the overclock, then validate it in a program like 3DMark to ensure we’re not getting crashes at those settings.
The amount you increase the values is up to you, but note that you’re not going to damage your card by choosing a value that’s too high; instead you’ll just crash your system and have to reset it. No big deal.
So for the RTX 2080 Ti we started with around a +150 MHz offset on the core and +500 on the memory, those are fairly conservative figures for this card. That worked in 3DMark, so we pushed the core up to +200 and memory up to +650. If you want to play it safer we’d recommend only changing one of those values per test run, but the more you become familiar with the process, the more you can adjust at once.
With +200 on the core our 2080 Ti crashed in 3DMark, so now it’s a process of finding the exact limit. We stepped down in 10 MHz increments, eventually discovering that +180 was unstable, but +170 was perfectly fine. From here we can try to push up the memory even further using a similar sort of process, and for our model we settled on +700 being the sweet spot.
The final stable overclocks for this card were +170 MHz on the core and +700 MHz on the memory, and that’s a fairly typical figure going on what we’ve seen from others. Note that if you have a non-FE or non factory-OC card, the core offset you’ll need will be higher as you’re coming from a lower starting point.
The vanilla RTX 2080 comes factory clocked a bit higher than the 2080 Ti, so we started with +100 MHz on the core and followed the same process. Eventually we settled on +110 MHz on the core and +700 MHz again on the memory for the RTX 2080.
Msi Afterburner Auto Overclock
Once you find what you think are stable overclocks it’s always a good idea to validate them further in a game running for several hours, something very GPU intensive. While 3DMark’s Time Spy gives a good indication of whether a card will work at a certain frequency, sometimes it will only crash under a longer test, so it’s good to test both.
A quick note on voltage, Nvidia’s Turing cards are voltage locked. In other words, Nvidia does not expose proper voltage controls to the user like you might get with overclocking a CPU on a motherboard. Instead we have a voltage slider, but it’s not really an offset, what it theoretically does is raise the voltage limit by a few steps, but still within what Nvidia deems safe. And that comes at the expense of lifespan: Nvidia claims you should get 5 years out of stock voltage and just 1 year with the voltage limit raised slightly, so keep that in mind.
In practice, raising the voltage slider did absolutely nothing for our overclock, so it’s not worth thinking about.
So on a pure clock offset basis, the Scanner OC coming in around +150 MHz at the top voltage range is lower than our +170 MHz manual offset for the 2080 Ti, with a similar gap for the 2080. Plus, of course, with manual overclocking we increased the memory frequency as well.
This indicates manual overclocking remains the way to go for many, and you can see that is the case when looking at our Shadow of the Tomb Raider results next..