So in a year, where graphics card launches have been somewhat
disappointing to say the least and kind of unnoteworthy you might be thinking to
yourself that you should hold off until they actually try and make an abundantly
better graphics card but that means sticking to the card you already have
and some of the games are getting more demanding can you push the juice even
further on the card you already have well today I'm gonna show you how hold
ad Micah isn't that risky can't you damage your graphics card by
overclocking it I mean potentially you could but typically it'll never get to
that in fact graphics cards are probably one of the harder to kill components in
your PC and with the proper software you can do so easily and with little to no
risk well then Micah what did they have
overclocked it already if it was capable well I mean kind of silicon's a weird
thing and anyone else who's familiar with silicon would know that will tell
you that it's kind of unpredictable sometimes you know they make chips that
didn't perform a whole lot better then they you know send it off in a package
it's complicated but yes you can usually draw a little more power out of the cars
I'm gonna teach you how to see how much you can actually get out of your card
because the chances are it's a whole lot more than you think so it's time to take
you to computer Lee
okay so the first thing that you're gonna want to do is download MSI
Afterburner and then the second thing you're going
to want to do is download msi kombustor now afterburner is what's actually going
to be overclocking your GPU and you don't have to worry too much because it
won't really allow you to do anything that's gonna harm your GPU it's gonna be
all within fairly safe parameters but it will have a box for the core voltage
they'll be locked down and then you'll have to go into the settings and remove
that restriction because the voltage is where you start playing in tricky
territory now they're not going to allow you to do anything too crazy but it will
shorten the life if you are putting a lot more energy through it and that's
kind of a natural thing so you shouldn't worry about it too much I mean if you
plan on keeping your graphics card for ten years I mean you probably don't want
to be pushing this anyway but anyway let's get into the functionality of this
thing so over on the top you'll see the core voltage and you can adjust that to
your choosing now adjusting the core voltage will give you a little more
power to your resources are limited 100 temperature limit how hot you will allow
this card to get before it starts throttling the core clock in megahertz
and the memory clock in megahertz and then of course you can change the fan
speed from automatic to manual then you will actually be able to keep it at a
constant pace I personally like to leave it at automatic so that it can adjust to
whatever it needs to to keep it under a good load but that's up to you so right
now these are the base settings it's at a hundred percent power limit the
temperature is set to eighty-three degrees maximum the core core clock here
is at plus zero now +0 means that it is not pushing it any further than the
factory limits you can actually downgrade your card from here which I
would be more for testing things rather than you actually wanting to have a
crappier card and then you can slide these to how
you choose you can even boost your memory clock of full gigahertz and the
same with your core clock but I recommend tweaking the memory clock a
little bit more so than the core clock if the core clock is too high it tends
to get very unstable I found my sweet spot to be around 200 or so anything
higher than that then after a little while the games tend to crash so around
200 or 175 for the core clock I found on my car to be stable now it's gonna vary
from your card to another due to the quality of the silicon and the binning
and all that fun stuff so you're gonna have to find out which one is going to
work better for you now to do that to find out where the sweet spot for the
settings for your graphics card that's where combustor comes in because that is
a joke a benchmarking application that you can run and test all that's going on
on the card before you actually jump into a game and know where its staple if
it starts stuttering or freezing then you know you need to lower some settings
but if it runs for a little while and it's nice and smooth and you know you're
probably good to go at that setting now I boosted the memory clock a full
gigahertz and that I found shows a lot more results than trying to go for a
higher core clock in comparison I'm able to boost this and still have extremely
stable gameplay and see a lot better performance and then once you found what
it is that is good you can save it under one of these profiles you can even name
them if you want but so I have this on number one alright now I showed you the
parameters you're gonna have to figure out which settings work best on your GPU
but these are the settings that work good on mine and I am running with a
1050 Ti which is a very very common and affordable card that a lot of you can
get now how well does this run well let's run into some gaming and see how
well it performs with it off vs. with it on so four days benchmark I'm using
rocket League and we're gonna go in the settings and look at the video settings
and I've got every at 1080p at the absolute max settings
and even for a 1050 t hi this game runs great look at that we're getting close
to a hundred frames a second sometimes more but on average is probably around
100 frames a second or so which is very respectable
I chose rocket League because it's a very stable game it relies more on the
graphics card than the CPU so we know that that is what is being tested and it
is still a visually nice-looking game and most graphics cards can't run it
easily so it'll give us a nice accurate look at how well the benchmark is again
it before and keep in mind this is also without the overclocking this is just
straight up the 1050 Ti no overclocking here so look at that even hit 125 frames
a second that's that's pretty good now let's see what it will do once we
overclock it
okay I restarted the game we are still at 1080p with max settings no settings
in the game has changed the only thing I changed was the overclocking in
afterburner so already the standard frame rate is around at least 120 frames
a second even 125 frames a second and look at 142 158 frames a second that is
a massive boost from what we were just seeing without the overclocking it is
dipping up and down a bit but it seems if I were to pick an average probably
about 125 frames a second not bad at all definitely a notable increase alright
guys we're gonna take things up level we're gonna go and kick things up to
1440p yes that's right we're gonna play 1440p on a 1050 TI which is not usually
something you do but rocket league is pretty forgiving with that we're gonna
leave everything on max settings and see how well we do okay so even at 1440p at
max settings it's still doing pretty well even on a 1050 Ti it seems like
we're averaging somewhere in the mid 70s to low 70s or so it will go up even to
the 80s but it fluctuates because it goes back down to the 60s as well so
somewhere in the mid 70s seems to be where it likes to hang out the most okay
now to test the overclocking to see how Euler does once it's over clocked at
1440p now again with all of them keep everything at max settings nothing's
changing except that we have it overclocked now alright already a change
so now the lows seem to be in the mid 70s
and the average seems to be somewhere around the mid 80s or so Oh even 93
three frames a second that's very good 98 whoo all right so definitely an
increase there oh we even hit 103 frames a second with an overclocked 1050 Ti at
1440 not bad definitely an increase
that's it a simple way to get a little extra juice out of your card while you
wait for something a little better or wait for an upgrade or maybe you can't
afford an upgrade and you just want to get a little bit more out of way yeah it
already well now you know how