Does anyone here overclock their video cards? Is it really worth it?

[Frick]

The last time I properly overclocked a GPU was when I was playing Word of Warcraft (Draenor, so modern WoW) on a Intel E8400 and a Nvidia GT520. There I gained some FPS, and every frame was noticed. These days ... naaah, I just want it to work. I tried the undervolting song and dance on my 6950XT but it just wasn't worth the hassle, not when I realized game stable is not the same thing as HW accelerated paint.net stable and I lost like 2 hours of work. I did some minor fiddling after that but it just wasn't worth it, so now everything is on default (because a driver update resetted everything, from the Quiet Preset).

 

[Steevo]

I do when new drivers are out, but I usually set a slight OC that gets negated by using a frame limiter.

 

[INSTG8R]

Nope. Just a custom fan curve and a slight UV.

 

[dirtyferret]

I haven't done it in well over a decade if not longer, maybe the 8800GT was the last card I played around with it. The extra 5% in FPS isn't worth it

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

Isn't 6700 XT faster than 3070?

Only when 8 GB VRAM is too scuffed but for some obscure reason, 6700 XT's calculating power is plenty. About 10 to 50 percent slower in other cases (50 is heavy RT; 10 is no RT whatsoever).

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

And they told me in the end you would get like 3 fps more. Is that worth it to you. And the premature hardware failure you may get?

I wanted to do it then thought freak that. 3fps is completely not worth it.

That's BS! You'll get closer to 10 FPS!

Also, on Nvidia, especially GTX 16 series, just OC'ing the VRAM, gets impressive results!

 

[Shrek]

I have had to reflow non-overclocked video cards and would hate to lose an expensive one.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I have had to reflow non-overclocked video cards and would hate to lose an expensive one.
View attachment 346592 View attachment 346593

I never had to reflow any recent ones. OTOH, there are some older ones (<2013) that have solder issues and/or substrate issues.

 

[GhostRyder]

I do my cards, I spent alot of time playing with it to get the max performance I could out of the card and that is my 24/7 setting. I also am aggressive with my fans to make sure I don't hurt the card. However, I do not flash my cards and just do this with MSI afterburner.

 

[Chrispy_]

Modern GPUs with boost algorithms are self-overclocking out of the box. Unless you've paid extra for a flagship, factory-OC card with Nvidia's blessing to exceed their strict power limits, there's not a lot of headroom in 30-series and 40-series GPUs.

Undervolting is what you want to do - getting more boost headroom out of the same power/VRM/cooling headroom. Realistically, you're only going to get a 3-4% gain doing that, which isn't enough for most people to notice. You can go the other way though and get 100% stock performance at 25% less power draw if you play with undervolting. The 4080 is pretty power-hungry, so you might be able to shave 50-75W off the power draw and still hit the default clocks.

 

[dirtyferret]

Modern GPUs with boost algorithms are self-overclocking out of the box. Unless you've paid extra for a flagship, factory-OC card with Nvidia's blessing to exceed their strict power limits, there's not a lot of headroom in 30-series and 40-series GPUs.

Let's not neglect the impact of RGB on OC a video card

 

[Zach_01]

Dunno what my 6700 XT OC compares to?

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Specs

AMD Navi 22, 2581 MHz, 2560 Cores, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 12288 MB GDDR6, 2000 MHz, 192 bit

www.techpowerup.com

 

[oxrufiioxo]

The last gpu I ran overclocked was a strix 2080ti which gained about 10% with a heavy core/mem overclock it would sit around 330w with decent temps in the high 60 celcius range. My two most recent cards and the ones I'm still using in my primary systems a 3080ti ftw and 4090 gaming OC can both gain about 5% but power gets out of control with the 4090 nearly hitting 600w in synthetics and mid 500s in games. IMHO it's more beneficial to undervolt and lose a negligible amount of perfomance for a large power savings.

Just like with anything both undervolting and overclocking ymmv and the card might just be better left stock.

 

[cvaldes]

Short answer: not worth it anymore. Ever since GPU manufacturers moved their silicon to variable frequency clocks, they've put the OC headroom in the boost clock.

Longer answer: I tried five years ago. I had an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition and followed this detailed FPS Review article:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER FE Overclocking

We take the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition and overclock it to the max so that we can compare retail custom video cards overclocking.

www.thefpsreview.com

using the Unigine Heaven benchmark plus monitoring tools MSI Afterburner + RTSS. After a couple of hours of experimenting I ended up with a stable OC profile that gave me a 6-7% uplift in Unigine Heaven with a noticeably larger power draw.

I then fired up Shadows of the Tomb Raider to run the in-game benchmark and was immediately rewarded graphical artifacts including a large polygonal spike coming out of Lara's forehead in the initial Mexican town square scene.

So I headed back to MSI Afterburner, backed off my overclock and ended up with a more modest +4% OC profile that removed Lara's unicorn spike and other graphical issues. I tried another game and didn't see any performance issues so I applied the original 6-7% OC profile. Problems returned and at that point I decided it wasn't worth figuring out the threshold for each game where I could safely boost the GPU. So I threw everything into the rubbish bin and uninstalled MSI Afterburner and RTSS.

Later I acquired third-party graphics cards. Today I'll just use the manufacturer's own GPU tool, apply their standard overclock and not worry about it anymore. For ASUS GPUTweak it’s like a +3% uplift and I didn’t do any work, I left that to ASUS engineers.

My best GPU is currently the Nvidia RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition. I don't bother OC-ing this card, I just run it at the default settings. I'm not going to notice 103 fps versus 100 fps anyhow and I really don't need a larger electricity bill.

If someone is a score chaser or a tinkerer, maybe diddling with OC settings is fun. Great for those people. It's up to you to decide whether or not the time (and possibly extra power usage) is worth it.

Summary: there are modest performance gains by overclocking graphics cards. It is up to each person to decide whether or not those gains are worth the configuration time and whether or not those gains are actually noticeable during gameplay without the RTSS performance overlay running on your screen. After my own investigation and real world attempts I voted NO.

 

[Zach_01]

In fact if a GPU is power limited, doing undervolt up to a certain point can benefit performance while power stays the same.
Less volts, less heat/power, more clocks within the same power budget. As long as it doesn’t affects stability.

 

[Chrispy_]

Let's not neglect the impact of RGB on OC a video card

It's like spoilers and tailpipes on a car. The more wing and tailpipe you have, the faster your 1996 1.6L Toyota Corolla will go!

 

[mxthunder]

I still overclock my cards. Not to the extent I used to but still.
Why not max out power slider and throw a +50 offset on the core frequency? Test for stability and back of if need be. Small gain is better than no gain.
VRAM also has some headroom. I think I am running ~+800 on my 4080 and 4090

 

[Lew Zealand]

I want my computer investment to last.

Undervolt to find stability, then increase clocks and monitor power to find reasonable balance. Overclock VRAM about 75% of the way to its tolerances but only in games that are GPU memory-sensitive. Usually I'm running close to stock clocks with undervolt so no performance loss and lower stress on all components. Heh except VRAM.

 

[AVATARAT]

If we clock GPU, we get a few FPS, same with CPU, RAM, optimize Windows, and get faster NVME. In the end, we have some FPS more not only on AVG but in 1.0% / 0.1% Low and the gameplay are a lot more flawless.

 

[AusWolf]

Any OC you get these days is only detectable in a benchmark, and adds nothing to your gameplay experience. Sometimes it even takes away from it due to more heat and noise.

 

[Tropick]

If someone is a score chaser or a tinkerer, maybe diddling with OC settings is fun. Great for those people. It's up to you to decide whether or not the time (and possibly extra power usage) is worth it.

This is pretty much the distillation of this whole thread. Will GPU overclocking net you significant gains comparable to purchasing a higher tier card? Nope. Will GPU overclocking satisfy the performance tweaker's "I bought the whole damn card I'm going to use the whole damn card" itch? Absolutely yes.

For me, it just comes down to fun. I like messing with all the settings in my downtime just to try and see how much extra juice I can eek out of the silicon. Absolutely not necessary and everything combined I'm probably at most getting an extra 5% out of the thing over standard boost algos but that's not the whole story. I'm a performance geek, I like seeing the thing go fast. The smile on my face seeing my card just barely snag a higher position on the 3DMark boards after trying a new OC profile makes it worth it to me.

 

[Fouquin]

Architectures are also getting very strict and limiting in regards to gains.

It's more that they removed the limits right out of the gate. What was a 200W card 10 years ago is now a 300W+ card because they simply max out the headroom in binning and ship it at the highest power it can sustain. Look back at cards like the GTX 680 and HD 7970 with 25-30% headroom if you unlocked their power limits and pushed a bit more voltage. You could get a launch-day HD 7970 from 925MHz to 1220-1270MHz with 350W if you took the 10 minutes to unlock the soft limits and cranked it up. Now, they don't even leave that on the table. That card today would just be sold as a 300W card with 1200MHz as the target boost, and the end user might be able to squeeze the extra 20-70MHz out of it with that extra 50W. All the advanced turbo algorithms and clock domain segregation allows cards to boost themselves up to within a just a couple percent of the maximum that the silicon can endure.

 

[freeagent]

This is stock clocks with F@H, gotta say I am a little surprised..