You don’t buy one of the best gaming PCs because you just want to plug it in and have it run your games. That goes double if you built it yourself. You want it to put the pedal to the metal and give you the most for your money, letting you dial every possible graphics setting to the max and squeeze out every extra frame you can for those buttery smooth gaming visuals. That push to get ever more performance out of the best graphics cards is where overclocking comes in.
You can overclock a lot of components. Your CPU is a big one, and you’ll definitely want to look into enabling XMP or EXPO for your RAM. Fortunately, when it comes to overclocking your GPU, it’s become very easy to do with tools coming directly from GPU manufacturers. That said, there’s a limit to how much you can overclock this way. If you want to go further than these limits, you can use third-party tools or the tools of your graphics card maker (e.g., Gigabyte, Asus, PNY as opposed to AMD or Nvidia), but some of these could push past the limits of your card and cause damage. Since we can’t cover the various tools of every graphics card maker here, we’re going to focus on the quick and easy tools from the GPU makers themselves to help you get an easy boost to your system’s performance.
How to overclock your Nvidia GPU
For Nvidia overclocking, download and install Nvidia’s GeForce Experience utility. Not only does this provide a lot of useful tools, like video capture, easy driver updates, and game optimizations based on your PC hardware, but it also lets you quickly overclock your GPU.
Once the software is set up, here’s how you can overclock your GPU:
- In the GeForce Experience settings menu, ensure In-Game Overlay is enabled
- Press Alt+Z on your keyboard to open the GeForce Experience overlay
- Select Performance from the overlay menus
Here, you’ll have a couple of options. You can get an automatic overclock with Nvidia’s tools analyzing and optimizing performance, or you can manually tweak performance.
For automatic overclocking, simply select Enable automatic tuning. It will take some time for the tool to analyze performance and make its adjustments, but it saves you any effort
To manually overclock, you can instead adjust the sliders below the automatic tuning tool.
- Drag the Voltage Maximum and Power Maximum sliders all the way to the right to allow for maximum overclocking
- Set your Temperature Target to your desired maximum level
- You can leave your Fan Speed Target set to “Automatic” or adjust it to your desired level based on noise
With manual overclocking, you’ll want to pay attention to heat and ensure your graphics card isn’t getting too hot (though GeForce Experience caps things at 90 C to be safe), which can see it throttle back down to a lower performance level and ultimately give you less overall speed than you might get if you dialed it back a little to a level it could maintain consistently.
How to overclock your AMD GPU
For AMD graphics cards, grab the AMD Radeon Software utility, which offers a performance tuning tool among many other features.
With the utility installed and running, here’s how to overclock your AMD GPU:
- Select Performance from the top row of menus
- Select Tuning from the next row of menus
- Find the Tuning Control menu and select Automatic or Manual depending on your preference
If you select Automatic Tuning Control, you’ll have a few additional options. You can run the GPU at its default settings. If you want to lower power consumption without reducing performance, you can select ‘Undervolt GPU’. To increase performance (likely what you’re after), you can select ‘Overclock GPU’ or ‘Overclock VRAM’.
If you select Manual Tuning Control, you’ll have options for adjusting the GPU and VRAM frequencies, the fan speeds, and the power limit. Your options will vary depending on the graphics card you have. For more performance, you’ll likely want to increase the max frequency of the GPU and VRAM and max out the Power Tuning option. You’ll want to pay close attention to power consumption and heat with the new settings, adjusting your fan speeds as needed to keep the GPU cool enough to sustain its peak speed.
AMD’s Radeon Software allows you to save different overclock settings and apply them depending on what programs you have running, as you may not want the same overclock settings running while playing Hades as you would while running Cyberpunk 2077 with ray-tracing maxed out.
