Wanting To Mildly Overclock Graphics Card

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Icaraeus

Icaraeus

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Oct 9, 2013
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I've read a lot about overclocking and the performance benefits that you can get from it in relation to the amount of heat that builds up. My PC performs great when doing whatever I want, though in some demanding games (like Battlefield 4 and Metro: Last Light) I've been noticing that my computer lagged once or twice (very rarely) when I set the in-game settings to the max. I've had my PC for around 3 months and thought that mildly overclocking my GPU would be a safe-ish way to make it run faster.



The above picture I saved from HWMonitor was after I played Battlefield 4 64-player multiplayer. I play at 1080p on a 60hz 32inch monitor.

My PC specs are:

Windows 8.1 Professional Update 1 (64-bit)
Intel Core i5 3570 @ 3.4Ghz (3.8Ghz Turbo)
ASRock Z77 Extreme4-M
Sapphire Radeon R9 270X Dual X OC 2GB
G Skill Ares (2x4) 8GB DDR3-1600mhz running dual-channel
Fractal Design Define R4 w/ stock fan (1 fan is connected, the other is inside but disabled)
Corsair HX650W PSU

I want to target a 10% or so overclock on my GPU but I'm not sure if I'll get anything out of it, or how to really overclock. I have MSI Afterburner which I can use to overclock but I'm not sure how to raise the 'clocks' of my GPU. I also have benchmark software like 3DMark as well as built-in benchmarks in Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs to test my PC, so I guess I could use that to check if my PC is stable.

Any help on how to go about overclocking would be nice.
 
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madcratebuilder

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D/L and install the program and read the help file. It's easy you just move the sliders raising clock and mem speed. Make small changes and test for stability. Depending on the gpu you can see between a 10 and 20% increase. Watch the temps.
 
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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

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Hello, I would personally go in a different direction than madcratebuilder is going. Those tools are great for doing big overclocks, for example using MSI Afterburner I can push my laptop's and desktop's GPUs up past 20% overclock. You are only wanting a minor overclock though.

I advise you remove MSI Afterburner and Sapphire TriXX if you have it. AMD's Catalyst Control Center which comes with the driver are the easiest and most stable I have found for overclocking AMD GPUs. You are capped how far you can overclock, but you should be able to reach around 10% boost.

You should be able to find it under "Catalyst Control Center" then "Performance" tab. To do a fast overclock, push it up about 50Mhz on the GPU then game for at least 15 minutes and watch for anything strange on screen. If nothing happens, quit out and do it again. Eventually you will get an error or hit the max AMD wants you to push it. If you see graphical anomalies, do not increase power. Drop down in intervals of 10Mhz until you no longer see them.

Do the same thing with the GPU RAM and then come back here after if you want to go further. That way we can best direct you to safely increase the GPU.
 
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Icaraeus

Icaraeus

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Okay I'll try changing the clock speeds through the Catalyst software and see if I can get the speed up 10% or so. Seeing as it's AMD's own software I hopefully shouldn't have to open up my computer if something goes wrong like a 'Blue Screen' or something. My computer is primarily for college-work, though I also use it for media stuff, recording, web-browsing, gaming etc.

Would running benchmark-stuff like 3DMark and the ones built-in some games be better for testing stability compared to just playing for some time? I was wondering as those benchmark stuff would be faster than if I was to play for 15-30 minutes every time just to check if everything is running fine.

Also, would I have to raise the power limit in the Catalyst controls before OC'ing or would the stock wattage be fine?
 
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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

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Yes its AMD so its the most compatible in my experience.

I do not recommend those, because once you see glitches you want to stop it. 3DMark I think doesn't do well as a stress test, and some benchmarks you cannot exit. You can try a program like MSI Kombustor or Unique Heaven to stress test. I often do 3 minutes as a minimum and then a longer stress test to be sure when I think I am at the final settings I will leave it at, because as it heats up it can change the result. I was just recommending gaming as it is safer and frankly its less boring.

I recommend only changing clocks, not power limit. Stock is often fine. On my laptop which is Nvidia based I got 20% on the GPU and the RAM without any voltage increase. On my desktop, which is an AMD Radeon 7850, just slightly slower than your own card and actually uses the same GPU core, I went from the default clocks of 860Mhz and 1200Mhz RAM to 1150Mhz and 1375 RAM without increasing voltage or any other power options at all. I advise seeing how far you can go without voltage change.
 
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Icaraeus

Icaraeus

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Okay I started doing some overclocking and ended up with some improvement.

My base clocks of the GPU are 1070mhz and the memory is 1400mhz. I started off by raising the GPU clock by 50mhz to 1120mhz and went for a 15 minute run through Sleeping Dogs. I didn't notice anything wrong so I closed it down and restarted my computer to check if everything was fine. It booted up normally and the clock values had saved. The temperature didn't seem to have raised at all. I then raised the GPU clock up another 50mhz to 1170mhz and two minutes into Sleeping Dogs my computer kind of froze but I was able to enter the start menu by pressing the Windows key.

I shut down my computer and booted it up, though logging in was a bit slow. I dropped the GPU clock down 20mhz to 1150mhz and went through Sleeping Dogs another 10 minutes and everything was running fine. I then started raising the memory clocks where I was able to boost it 100mhz without any problems to 1500mhz (I stopped at 1500mhz and didn't try to increase it further). This left me at the GPU clock of 1150mhz and memory clock of 1500mhz. I then booted up 3DMark but it crashed 3 minutes in, where I then dropped the GPU clock down to 1120mhz, 50mhz above stock. I left the memory clock the same and it went through Sleeping Dogs and 3DMark fine, though my 3DMark score dropped 40 points from when I went through with stock which was a bit strange.

My clocks are now (GPU) 1120mhz (+50mhz) and (memory) 1500mhz (+100). I'm targeting a GPU clock of at least 1150mhz but hopefully 1200mhz with a memory clock of 1500mhz. Does anyone know how I can probably do this?
 
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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

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Sorry I should of been a little more specific here. You wanted to game on something like BF4. Sleeping dogs is a good game but it doesn't push the graphics card as hard as it possibly can. So it is a bad stress test. My bad, should of made that clear.

Anyways seems that the max it can go is a bit less than the 7850 unfortunately, but you can still go higher. That is just the limit without boosting the power. Now the best thing to do is go up to 1150Mhz and increase the "Power Limit" 1% at a time, because every percentage adds more heat, more danger but others have taken this chip really high on power so you should be fine. Just go slow. Go 1% at a time, and stop at a max of 5%. I am assuming unless your card is just a really bad sample or its overheating that it will become stable in there, and probably be able to get up to 1200Mhz within 5%.

As for the 3DMark score, remember that is a benchmark which can vary between different runs on the same system without changing anything. It is only meant for a very general since of performance. Its better to rely on actual FPS in games or benchmarks built into games than 3DMark to judge the performance increase. Right now you should be sitting around 5% increase in performance overall which isn't huge but its something. Use the "Power Limit" and you should be able to get more without too much trouble, just make sure you watch the temps and it doesn't get too hot. Anything over 80C is when to start thinking carefully about temps.
 
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Icaraeus

Icaraeus

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Battlefield 4 worked fine as well as 3DMark on 1120mhz and 1500mhz memory so I go to increase the power limit incrementally as I targeted 1150mhz...and my computer spazzes out. I got some kind of red screen followed by a reboot twice, once a short while after it rebooted while I was doing nothing. I increase the power limit all the way up to 110% (+10%) and 3DMark crashes not even one third through. I then reduce it back to 1120mhz and 1500mhz memory and my display spazzes out with all these colours starting at the same point in the benchmark. The same happens when I reduced it to stock GPU clock and 1500mhz memory, and even back to stock clocks!

Not sure if I screwed up my graphics card from the +10% power limit or something. Going to completely shut down, wait a min, and reboot and see if I can get through without any "artefacts"' on stock clocks. Any help on how to get rid of this colour spaz thing and start raising the clocks again (if rebooting doesn't fix the issue) would be greatly appreciated!

Okay shutting down and restarting my computer seems to have fixed the colour spaz out ('artefacts'?) issue. Any help on how I could start overclocking again?
 
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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

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It is possible you have damaged your card. Really 5% boost is high, but 10% is extremely high. I have seen people push the Pitcairn GPU core higher than a 10% boost but they were getting more than 150% performance out of their cards.

Unless your card is overheating terribly, I would say your card is just not particularly a good quality unit. To explain what I mean, is not all GPU cores are made equal so the company sets them at a speed that the vast majority can reach. Take the 7850 as an example. The entire group is made of defective Pitcairn cores with the two worst functioning compute units working. That is why the card only has 1024 pixel shaders as opposed to 1280 pixel shaders like your card has.

For a 7850 an average quality core can only reach 860Mhz and that is why that is the default speed setting used. For a good core, 1050Mhz is possible. For a very good core 1150Mhz is possible. For an Excellent quality core 1300Mhz is possible. So while some can reach 1300Mhz, not all can. Your card unfortunately falls into the average category and is only about to reach 1120Mhz, a minor 5% boost in performance. Its unfortunate, but again unless your card is over heating, you should be able to hit 1200Mhz with less than 5% increase in power. Since you cannot, I don't advise you continue trying to overclock past this point as your card is simply not capable of handling it.
 
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Icaraeus

Icaraeus

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I'm able to boost the memory clocks up quite far. I'm now sitting at GPU 1120mhz (+50mhz) and memory 1550 (+150mhz). I haven't tried pushing the memory further though I think I've reached the limits of what my GPU can do. Pushing [the GPU clock] back up to 1150mhz an hour ago just resulted in more Red Screens.

So I got from (GPU Clock) 1070 to 1120 (+50mhz) and (Memory Clock) from 1400 to 1550 (+150mhz). How much of an increase in performance would this be?
 
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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

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You might try getting 1130 or 1140Mhz on the GPU if you still want to go higher but thats just a small bump up.

Anyways the improvement estimates are 4.7% currently on your GPU core, and 10.7% boost on your RAM. Your total increase in performance should be somewhere around 6% or 7% since the GPU core makes a bigger difference at this point. To know for sure you will need to turn to benchmarks. Preferably the ones built into games. Run the benchmark they have at default settings, then put in your overclock again and run it again. Divide the average FPS of the overclocked benchmark by the score of the default benchmarks and that will tell you how much more performance you are gaining.
 
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Icaraeus

Icaraeus

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My PC keeps freezing and rebooting. I checked what kind of speed my GPU was at and at 1550mhz memory it was running at a continuous 1400mhz on idle. When I dropped it to 1500mhz it went down to 150mhz on idle. Not sure if that will fix the issue but would that be related to the problem or would it be something else?

EDIT: Increasing it back up to 1550mhz didn't change memory speed at all; it now stays at 150mhz on idle usage.
 
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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

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That is idle usage, not what is used in games. Don't worry about idle speeds at all.
 
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Icaraeus

Icaraeus

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Are there any other safe-ish ways I can boost the GPU clock core speed above 1120mhz without wrecking the GPU? The temperatures seem to be safe at 100% load (high 50s to high 60s) and my computer isn't crashing anymore w/ a 5% power limit.
 
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