Overclocking (Main Thread)

Look, you can handle all of that using MSI Afterburner. There are other programs out there, sure, but if you ask me, that's the easiest one to navigate. Just a fair warning though: don't expect any massive jumps in your FPS.

1. You totally can.
2. It’s actually worth the effort.
3. Just head into the NVIDIA control panel to enable overclocking—then you handle the actual heavy lifting, like bumping up the graphics card clock speeds and memory, using MSI Afterburner.
4. As long as your temps stay within a reasonable range, you won't run into any issues.

http://www.overclockersclub.com/revi...770_flex/4.htm

By the way, while you're messing around with MSI Afterburner, you should definitely set up some profiles—it makes life easier when you can just hit an "OC" button to jump into your gaming settings, then switch back to the default profile for everyday tasks so you aren't running your card harder than necessary for no reason. And since you’re already heading over to the MSI website to grab Afterburner, you might as well download MSI Kombustor too. It’s a great little utility for stress-testing the card, which is basically mandatory if you want to make sure your overclock is actually stable. If things start crashing or freezing on you—which happens—just dial the settings back until everything runs smoothly again.

So, I was messing around in the Intel Graphics Control Panel and saw "Enable AMD" was already checked. Then I fired up MSI Afterburner, cranked the fan speed to 100% based on those numbers from the link you posted (945/1374), and hit "test custom clocks" in the control center. My screen went totally haywire—just flashing gray, green, and red with that AMD logo sitting in the corner. About 20 seconds later, it snapped back and said the test failed. So... what now? Did that actually work, or am I just wasting my time? And do I need to keep that fan speed pinned at 100% in Afterburner?

In MSI Afterburner, look over on the left side—you’ll see this little button with a "K" on it. That kicks off the MSI Kombustor. Just let it run and keep a close eye on your graphics card temperatures; you should probably let it churn for at least half an hour... honestly, just forget about that AMD Overdrive thing and its pathetic 10-second test. 🙂 In there, you really just need to "unlock" the OC so the driver doesn't crash on you. As for those clock speeds—well, you're going to have to judge for yourself whether they're actually stable or not. Your card might handle way more than that, or maybe significantly less; there isn't some magical, universal number that works for every single card out there. Regarding the fan... just watch the card temps and you'll figure out if you actually need to crank it up to 100%.

What kind of temps am I looking at after I finish the OC?

It’s all right there in that link I posted above.

I don't even know what counts as idle vs. load anymore—anyway, I'm hitting maybe 68 degrees max while gaming, and it sits around 53-54 when I'm just chilling

Idle basically means you aren't doing anything at all—it's just sitting there—whereas load is what happens when you actually put that card to work... So yeah, temperatures look fine to me.

I fired up San Andreas and let the rig run for about 15 minutes while I played—no issues at all. Temps peaked at 66°C and dipped to 53°C—I just leave the fan pinned at 100%, so yeah, it's pretty loud 😁
The whole profile thing is actually a lifesaver. Now I can set it to overclock when I'm gaming and just stick to defaults while I'm surfing the web. Huge thanks to Benjamin King2—I'll give you an update if any 👍
pop up.

You could always try dialing back the fan speed a bit if the noise is driving you crazy—it won't hurt the card at all if the temps run about 5-6 degrees higher than they are now.

I thought I'd drop by to share some quick praise for my MSI GTX 560 Ti. I've been playing around with the clocks, bumping them up from 880/1760/2100 to 950/1900/2250, which means it’s actually outperforming the Hawk model now. 😛 .

Idle temperatures haven't budged at all, staying right between 32-35°C. Even under a heavy load, it doesn't climb past 60°C. Honestly, that caught me off guard. I was expecting at least a 3-degree jump, but I suppose that’s what happens when you use a Twin Frozr cooler—in my opinion, it's hands down the best on the market.

The fan speeds haven't changed either. Even during intense gaming sessions, they remain virtually silent, just like before.

As for the FPS, it really depends on the specific game. Where I used to get 50, I’m seeing 55 now, and where it was 150, it’s hitting 170 😁.

Bottom line? If you're looking to pick up a card, do yourself a favor and make sure it comes with that Twin Frozr cooling setup.

Hey, does anyone in Indianapolis know their way around overclocking? I’d love to get someone to tune my rig for me—I've been reading up on it, but honestly, I'm too terrified to mess around with it myself since I have no clue what I'm doing. :S

I'm sure there are people out there..

But honestly? You should just list your PC specs first. That way we can actually figure out if it’s even worth your time to try this on your rig. 🙂

It’s not exactly the same thing to overclock a dual or quad-core processor for better gains versus some ancient single-core Pentium... 🙂

Specs:
Motherboard: HP Compaq dx2300
CPU: Intel Pentium Dual Core E2160 @ 1.80 GHz
Chipset: Intel Broadwater i946GZ
Memory: 2048 MB
DIMM1: 1 GB DDR2-667 DDR2 SDRAM
DIMM3: 1 GB DDR2-667 DDR2 SDRAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Radeon HD 4600 Series (1024 MB)
CPU #1: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2160 @ 1.80GHz
CPU #2: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2160 @ 1.80GHz

Motherboard Temp: 38 °C (100 °F)
CPU Temp: 56 °C (133 °F)

If you're dealing with an HP branded machine—meaning the BIOS is locked down tight—you can pretty much kiss overclocking goodbye. Your options? Maybe toss in another 2GB of RAM or swap out the graphics card, but that’s about it...

Hello there... I managed to do a bit of overclocking on my 1154 socket 🙂
I'm using a stock cooler... it actually pushed through a 45-minute stress test at 4GHz, so I wanted to ask a few things...
http://tinypic.com/r/ip7dk7/7
Now I'm wondering about the voltage and temperature levels...
Before this attempt, I had everything set to auto, just keeping the multiplier at 40x...
The temperature shot up past 80 C, so I assume the voltage was too high, erm... I tried using an offset of -0.065v and the temp dropped quite a bit. So, should I keep lowering the voltage until I hit a BSOD, and once that happens, just revert back to the last stable setting? There isn't a graphics card in the mid-tower case right now (which would normally run pretty hot), but I compensated for that by cranking the rear fan, which is really good at pulling out the hot air. The default voltage for Sandy Bridge is 1.2v, right? If that's the case, does it make sense to keep dropping it?
Does a 5C difference between the first and fourth core actually matter?
Sorry if this comes across as a stupid question, but I'm still pretty new to all of this 😁

Look, if you're aiming for a 4 GHz overclock, you don't necessarily need to go messing around with the voltage—you can just leave it on auto. If you run into any issues with Vdrop, just compensate using the Load-Line calibration and tweak those VRM frequency settings. One thing though—don't push it too far if you're still running the stock cooler; just make sure your temps stay under 65 degrees when you're hitting a full load. Every chip is its own little snowflake, obviously, but as a rule of thumb, you're looking at roughly 1.25V for 4.2 GHz and about 1.3V if you want to hit 4.5 GHz.

I've got it clocked at 4GHz running on 1.2V. Under load, the first core stays under 52°C and the second one doesn't cross 56°C.😬(Keep in mind the room temperature was sitting around 90°F)
You absolutely have to set the voltage manually. Why would you trust an auto setting? Motherboards have a nasty habit of pumping in way more voltage than necessary, which just sends your temps skyrocketing. When I left mine on auto, it jumped up to 1.38V, and my temps under load were hitting anywhere from 66 to 72°C.

1.38V??? What kind of motherboard are we talking about here? 😲

Rock P67 Pro3! Best motherboard on the market, hands down. There's nothing even close to it. ♥