How to Overclock Your Graphics Card (2024)

Just about any graphics card can be overclocked, although you'll have better luck with a well-cooled card in a spacious case. If your card has a sub-par heatsink, or is cramped inside a tiny Mini-ITX build, you'll have less headroom, and overclocking may not be worth your time. As far as software goes, though, you'll only need a few programs:

An overclocking tool:There are multiple overclocking tools out there, most of which come from different video card manufacturers. We'll be usingMSI Afterburnerfor this guide, but if you don't like Afterburner's interface, you can tryEVGA Precision,Asus GPU Tweak, or AMD WattMan. All except WattMan will work on any card, regardless of manufacturer. The settings we'll use should be identical across programs; the interfaces may just look a little different than our screenshots below.

A benchmarking tool: To stress test your card, you'll need to run a benchmarking tool that pushes it to the absolute max. I like to use bothUnigine SuperpositionandUnigine Heaven—the former is newer and stresses recent cards a bit more heavily, while the latter is slightly older but lets you run an infinitely long stress test without paying. It's good to have a few different stress tests, so we'll use both in this guide.

GPU-Z: While this isn't strictly required, I like to useGPU-Zto ensure my clock and voltage changes have actually taken place as I'm stress testing.

Once you've got all three of those installed, it's time to start overclocking.

Before you start, it's a good idea to benchmark your system, so you can ensure it is stable at its out-of-the-box clock speeds. This will also give you an idea of how much performance you gained when all is said and done, which is a nice bonus.

Fire up Superposition and choose an option from the Preset menu. Try to choose something around or above the settings at which you'd run most games. You want Superposition to push your graphics card to 100 percent, without running at a dismally low frame rate—1080p High or Extreme probably isn't a bad choice for most modern cards. Be sure to disable Vsync, since you don't want your frame rate locked to your monitor's refresh rate.

Then, click the big black Run button. It'll play through a series of scenes, which will take about five minutes. You'll see performance information in the corner, including clock speed, frame rate, and temperature.

If you're using a more recent card, you may notice your clock speed fluctuating over the course of the benchmark. Modern AMD and Nvidia cards adjust the boost clock based on the card's temperature and power usage, essentially self-overclocking to a certain degree if they see there is extra headroom.

However, manually overclocking your card can push these boost clocks even higher, pushing performance further than your card’s built-in limits. So don't worry about this too much if you’re a beginner—just know that your clock speeds will fluctuate, and that's okay.

In addition, watch your temperatures as the benchmark runs. You won't necessarily see them get super high on this first pass, but they'll increase as you start overclocking and you don't want it to get too hot. Some auto-boosting cards will gracefully back themselves down from their maximum boost clocks, so I recommend overclocking with your fans at 100% to eliminate temperature as a variable during the process (you can always turn them back down later).

Older cards aren’t quite as smart about throttling down, and you’ll want to overclock with whatever fan control you plan on using long-term, and avoiding overclocks that cause your temperature to reach higher than the mid-80s.

Once the benchmark is finished, you'll see a final scorecard. Write down the minimum, maximum, and average frame rates from that scorecard, as well as the benchmark score if you so desire—and keep an eye on your temperatures as the benchmark runs.

Ready to start pushing? Open MSI Afterburner (or your overclocking tool of choice), and push the Power Limit slider all the way up. Set the Temperature Limit slider to whatever you want (the maximum is usually okay, though if you're particularly cautious, you can move it a little lower).

Then, boost your Core Clock by about 10MHz. Click the Apply button, and run Superposition again. Don't forget to keep an eye on those temperatures, and ensure there aren't any artifacts (weird lines, boxes, or static that flash on the screen) as the benchmark runs. Once it's done, write down your frame rates and bump up the Core by 10MHz again. Keep repeating this process, boosting and benchmarking, until you run into issues.

At a certain point, the benchmark will fail—either it will crash, or you'll see artifacts flash across the screen as it runs. When that happens, reboot your PC. (This is important: after a crash, Superposition will ignore your set clock speeds and return to stock until you reboot.)

If you want, you can stop here: return to your last stable clock speed and move down to Step 4. But if you're willing to push it a little farther, there are a few other things you can do.

If your temperatures are still within the safe range, you may be able to push your card a bit farther by increasing the voltage. This can allow for higher stable clock speeds, depending on the card.

To do this, open Afterburner's settings and, under the General tab, check the Unlock Voltage Control and Unlock Voltage Monitoring boxes. Set the voltage control drop-down to Third Party, and click OK. A new slider should show up in Afterburner's main window: Voltage.

If this slider measures voltage in mV, then you can increase the voltage supplied to the card. If, like on many new Nvidia cards, it shows a percent value, I recommend leaving this alone, as it won’t actually increase the amount of voltage you can access.

For cards that support it, bump this up by 10mV or so, and run your benchmark again. If you don't experience crashes, you can try increasing the Core Clock further. Push the voltage up a bit more every time your Core Clock becomes unstable.

This is where you want to pay especially close attention to those temperatures, since increasing the voltage can produce more heat. Research your card to determine its maximum safe voltage to ensure you don't damage your hardware.

Once you've reached a stable Core Clock, you can also increase your Memory Clock in much the same way. Push it up by 100MHz or so, run your benchmark, and repeat the process like you did with Core Clock.

Overclocking your memory too far may not always produce artifacts or crashes—sometimes, it’ll just decrease performance due to your memory’s error correction. Watch for crashes and a decrease in frames per second, and stop increasing the Memory Clock when that happens.

Once you've found reasonably stable settings, it's time to test your card for a bit longer. Fire up Heaven and dial in your graphics settings—since it's a bit older, you'll probably want to set them as high as you can to ensure it is maxing out your card. Click the Run button to start the stress test.

Unlike Superposition, which only allows you to run one benchmark at a time in the free version, Heaven will run indefinitely, until it crashes or you quit the program. Let it run for a few hours, checking in on your temperatures to make sure they're safe. You should also watch out for any signs of a crash or artifacts. If it does crash, you may have to dial back your clocks just a tad to make sure they're super stable.

Finally, fire up your favorite games and play for a bit! GPU overclocks can be finicky, and sometimes a benchmark will remain stable even if a certain game crashes. You can also use an in-game benchmark—Metro Exodus is a great choice, especially if you have an RTX card, since you can crank ray tracing up, turn DLSS off, and really stress your card to the max.

After a bit of time and tweaking, you should find the ideal settings for your rig, and you can enjoy a small boost in performance.

In the end, I received a similar performance boost in both the GTX 1080 Ti and RX 580. At lower graphics settings with high frame rates (in the hundreds), I saw an increase of 7 to 11fps, on average—not bad if you're using a high refresh rate monitor.

At high graphics settings and lower frame rates (30-60fps), I got 3 to 5 more frames per second. That may not seem to make a huge difference, but if you're using a 60Hz monitor with Vsync turned on, dropping below 60fpsat allcan cut your frame rate in half, due to the way Vsync works.

That means a few frames can actually be the difference between running at 60fps and 30fps in certain high-fidelity scenes, which is nothing to sneeze at. Your mileage may vary, as this will differ from rig to rig—especially if your CPU is bottlenecking the system.

This isn't the end, either. From here, you can adjust Afterburner's fan curve to customize your cooling, play with Nvidia's GPU Boost curve for more fine-grained overclocking, or modify your card's hardware or BIOS to push it even further. Enjoy the ride!