Overclocking GeForce GTX 960 (or Any GPU) With MSI’s Afterburner In Easy Steps

When I was first introduced to GPU overclocking in the early days of 3DFX, I stumbled across an article on how to get more juice from my Voodoo 2 graphics card and since then I’ve been hooked with graphics technology. GPU overclocking has gotten more complicated since its early days – but the fundamentals are the same as ever. In this article, we will explore how to overclock MSI’s GeForce GTX 960 Gaming 2G graphics card (review here), using the free and well-known AfterBurner utility. While this article focuses on the GeForce GTX 960, this guide can be used for almost any modern graphics card, whether it’s an Nvidia or even AMD card. run the latest drivers – if not go to your GPU vendor and get the appropriate drivers for your operating system for best performance. We’re running Windows 10, so we pointed our browser to topqa.info and downloaded the 353.64 driver (latest as of the time I’m writing this) for Windows 10 64-bit. To start from scratch, we decided to do an advanced install and checked the “clean install” checkbox. Be warned that it will erase all your settings, but since we were previously using the Beta drivers we wanted to start with an obvious means of blocking. After rebooting the machine, go to the official MSI Afterburner website and download its latest version (4.1.1 as of the time I am writing) and do the installation. download GPU-Z (we’re running version 0.7.9 for what it’s worth). This app is not critical, but will help you keep track of how fast your card is going up, heat and even how much RAM you are reaching. You can also run multiple instances of GPU-Z to monitor different things. That’s right, now that you’ve done the basics, you’re ready to begin your journey to overclocking your GeForce GTX 960. A little word of caution – if you just need to install the card, make sure you run and test. in stock for the first few hours. This helps you ensure that everything is working properly and your system is stable before you run higher clocks into the mix, and thus helps you diagnose potential problems.The image above is what you’ll see when you first load Afterburner, the app tells you we’re actually running a GeForce GTX 960 (good thing to know!) and also confirms their driver versions I. If you don’t see the option “Core voltage (mV)” click the settings button and under the “general” tab make sure you have “Unlock voltage control” and while you are there, Please check. box marked “Unlock voltage monitoring”. We recommend leaving the “Force Constant Voltage” option in Afterburner alone – it will only put more voltage through your card while in standby and usually won’t really help with overclocking. slide on both Core Clock and Memory Clock to the right (increase them) – but do so gradually. Unfortunately the term “Silicone Lottery” exists for a reason and you might get really lucky and get an extra 200MHz out of your core clock, while your friend with the same GPU might just get it. get 120MHz. For this reason, we want to make sure that you also don’t tick “apply overclock at system startup”. If your system has a locking issue, a simple reset will solve the problem – usually the Nvidia Drivers will stop working and Windows will automatically restore it (and generally the problem of the 3d application you are running).Step one:vidia’s Maxwell architecture is very thermally efficient, releasing significantly less heat than Kepler and older generations of GeForce graphics cards. But for step one, we will increase the fan speed to about 85 percent. MSI’s GeForce GTX 960 Gaming 2G has a fairly silent cooler, and it barely catches the eye even at these high fan speeds, even though our test rig had the sides open. Uncheck “Auto” to the right of Fan Speed (%) and then simply move the slider up as desired and click “apply” this eliminates excess heat that is the cause of overclocking fails and we can say with more confidence that you have reached the limit of your hardware instead. This is especially important for situations with poor airflow (and a good reason for good cable management).Step two.Upload to GPU-Z (we’ll assume you’re running it for this tutorial) and click the “sensors” tab at the top. There is a down arrow next to the different things being monitored, we want to select both the core clock and memory clock of the GTX 960 and have them monitor the “highest” reads. You may also want to do the same for “Power Consumption”.Third step.Now we’re going to start overclocking the GeForce GTX 960 using Afterburner, so let’s bring the app back to the foreground and slightly increase the clock speeds for both core and memory clocks. Usually you can increase both clocks to about 50MHz without much trouble (but your mileage can be very high), so start with that, leave the voltage and other controls at default (other than fan as we adjusted earlier).Step four.Upload a game or app to benchmark with – GTA5, Tomb Raider, Metro (both final and 2033), Sleeping Dogs are just a few titles with their own benchmarking modes – or you can can upload a required application and play for about 10-15 minutes. You’re looking for problems (obviously), weird colored pixels, black bars on the screen, garbled images – basically the image wouldn’t look like it would if the overclock was pushed too high.Step 5.Increase the clock speed more – but this time stick to just one clock – memory or cores. Keep increasing that clock until you notice one of the ‘problems’ above. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume you’re overclocking the GTX 960’s Core Clock first. Increase it to 15-20MHz, test again, increase it another 15-20MHz, test again and repeat until you have problems and then back up to the last ‘good’ setting. Repeat now for the memory of the GTX 960 (or whatever GPU you’re using) with the same care. Step 6.Read more: how to boost your interior design business You are now free to leave the tag ‘as is’ or if you feel confident and want to try to achieve even more performance you can try adjusting both Core Voltage and Power Limit. While I have personally never harmed a graphics card because of this, neither me nor anyone here at RGT accepts responsibility if you damage your card in any way. Different manufacturers and board partners set different maximum values. You can flash your bios or increase these limits, but this is a basic guide and we won’t cover it here. For our MSI GeForce GTX 960 Gaming 2G, the maximum available was 100 Mv and set the power limit to 108%. Core Voltage is pretty simple – increase the voltage received by the GPU (it’s the GPU chip itself, NOT the memory/other parts of the card. It’s like increasing the voltage on your CPU while leaving your Memory alone. saddle). Higher voltages allow for higher or more stable overclocks. The Power Limit is a bit more complicated, but effectively increases the maximum TDP (Power draw) the card can have. Increasing this power draw means your card draws more power and can help again in situations where you are pushing the limits of your card.Step 7.Increase clock speed – like last time, overclock even more Core Clock of GTX 960 first, 10 – 20MHz this time and repeat until you get screen junk or crash. Revert to your last good setting, then increase your RAM’s clock. Again – overclocking almost any modern GPU is very similar – whether it’s a GTX 960, GTX 980, Radeon R9 290X or Titan.Step 8.Now that you’ve found your ‘max’ clock, you can then leave the fan on auto (or set the fan to a lower speed manually, such as 50 percent) and see if slightly warmer temperatures affect the card’s ability to overclock. We recommend playing a graphically intensive game (or leaving the benchmark looping – Metro is perfect for this) and using GPUZ to monitor the TDP/core clock by asking it to follow track ‘average’. If you want, you can also have it “log to file” (found under sensors). This can be useful if you notice your framerates dropping sometimes – as it’s possible your card is being throttling or reaching your card’s Power Limit.Step 9.If you want, you can save your settings as a profile. Just click the “save” button at the bottom of Afterburner and the numbers next to Profile will flash green, just click on one of them (I chose “1”) and it will remember those settings . If you then reset your clock (by clicking reset…) for less taxing games, you can simply click “1” and it will load the high performance overclock settings. your. Simple isn’t it? If you’re curious about our max overclock for the GeForce GTX 960, we managed to add 170MHz to the Core and 300Mhz to the RAM, pushing the memory bandwidth up from 112GB/s to about 122GB/s… No… a little too shabby. The GPU will now also increase to a minimum of 1423MHZ, a nice improvement over the standard 1253MHZ boost. Read more: How to fix profsvc service can’t login on windows 10