TS: Softclocking
Dan Chiappini shows you how to get the most out of your graphics cards, without ever picking up a soldering iron.
Despite overclocking hitting the mainstream, it's still a relatively mysterious art for inexperienced users. While the appeal and thrill of tweaking your aging GeForce 2 into a beefy GeForce 6800 Ultra is not a realistic goal, overclocking can help you squeeze those few extra frames out of your existing hardware, and consequently giving your old cards a new lease on life.
There was a time when overclocking meant physically altering your hardware or BIOS settings, but these days you can find a range of third party applications that will let you tweak your components through a simple software interface. Given there are two major brands of cards, and so many choices of software, we'll be looking primarily at NVTweak, PowerStrip and ATITool.
Graphics nitty gritty
Before we get stuck into it, it's important to understand the two key components of a graphics card. Essentially, there are two scalable components: the GPU core (Graphical Possessing Unit); and memory modules. While software overclocking removes some of the inherent risks of overclocking by not physically changing elements of your card, it isn't completely without risk, as the higher you push your card's memory, the hotter it will run. And, as with all components, heat and system instability go hand-in-hand.
To ensure your card can handle the increases in heat, you may want to install a larger fan and ramsinks to help dissipate the additional heat. Ramsinks cost around $30 for a pack of eight copper sinks, and one packet should give you enough for front and back memory module coverage. Passively cooled overclocking may lead to trouble, so you may like to whack on a fan to ensure you have sufficient ventilation and cooling before attempting any overclocking.
Overclocking
As with overclocking CPUs , you need to ensure your system is overclocked to a stable level -- there's no point running your Pentium III at 4GHz if you can't even browse the web without crashing. For this reason, we recommend you only overclock your graphics memory in 5MHz increments until you've found your card's stable ceiling. You may want to run benchmarks such as 3DMark01 SE, which places an intense workload on your system, and will highlight any artefacts or image distortion. Should any image corruption occur, reduce your memory clock by 1MHz until you find your stability and performance sweet spot.
While PowerStrip gives you plenty of control over your GPU core and memory clock adjustments, applications such as ATITool run a looping strenuous benchmark and monitor the card's performance. It examines looks for image corruption and provides a plain English readout of the card's maximum performance at the end of the cycle.
In cases such as ATI's RADEON 9000, 9200 and 9600 series cards, you may successfully overclock your card, but starting 3D applications such as games may cause the drivers to return to the default values. ATI Softmod contains modified drivers to circumvent the software locking and allow you to get around this issue.
NVTweak, like TweakUI for Windows, unlocks hidden menus and allows you to change settings more freely than you would normally NVIDIA's official ForceWare drivers. Given software overclocking can provide noticeable performance gains provided you keep artefact free and your system stable, it does make for a great first step into overclocking and a safer way to play with your hardware beyond its rated speeds. There are so many applications available, so experiment with a range and find the best one to suit your expertise and needs for overclocking.
This article appeared in the March, 2005 issue of PC Authority.
Thoughts on this article? Add a comment below.
Be the first to comment on this article.