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A good majority of the people who overclock their computers are doing so to gain better performance for gaming. The advantage here is the overclocking your GPU is actually a very easy and fairly safe way to take your first step into overclocking. Your graphics card, unless it is very old, will have it’s own onboard fan. Not only that, but many cases have an additional fan, or at least a spot for an additional fan, directly next to the GPU. So with cooling relatively under control, you can actually jump right into overclocking your GPU by following this straight forward and easy to follow guide.

You’ll want to start by downloading either RivaTuner or Powerstrip as they’ll be the tools you use to monitor your temperatures and fan speed, along with overclocking your GPU. Once you’ve loaded up the program, you’ll notice that it plenty of options for you to manipulate. For overclocking your GPU we’ll be focusing on the ones labeled core clock, memory clock, and fan speed.

Start by raising your core clock by about 10 MHz and click apply. Wait for a moment before you raise it again to see if there are any artifacts left on your screen. Random lines, colors, static, or other garbling of the graphics on your screen are all considered to be artifacts. Continue the process of raising your core clock by about 10 MHz and applying it until you wind up with artifacts on your screen or your system reboots. When you find the number that did that, find the most stable core clock speed between that last 10 MHz you added and the previously stable speed. This is your max core clock speed. To test it’s stability out, run a game to see if you end up with any artifacts or if the computer crashes. If it doesn’t, you’re set to increase your memory clock.

With the memory clock, you’ll essentially be working through testing it in the same fashion you did the core clock. Once you find the most stable max speed, load up a game and play it for at least 30 minutes or until you see and artifact. If after 30 minutes you’re artifact free, congratulations, you’ve just overclocked your GPU.

But as heat is always an issue when it comes to overclocking, you’ll need to increase the speed at which your GPU fan operates. Increasing the fan to 100% does get noisy in most systems, but unless you’ve purchased additional cooling devices, you’ll need all the cooling you can get. Those two programs do offer the ability to set a profile that you can access through hot keys. It’s recommended that you keep your GPU running at it’s default, and set a hot key enabled profile up that handles your core clock, memory clock, and GPU fan when you turn it on or off.

With additional cooling, you’ll most likely find that you can achieve higher core clock and memory clock speeds, but you should be able to get a noticeable performance increase out of it with no additional equipment.

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Make sure to check out our other posts on Overclocking Software and Video Card Overclocking

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