Overclocking
Since this is a budget build, expectations of dramatic overclocks aren't really reasonable, however there is still plenty of overclocking potential to be had. Since we're working with an i3 processor with a locked multiplier, overclocking via the usual route is out of the question, but I've had some success in the past overclocking locked-multiplier CPUs by increasing the BCLK on the motherboard. Usually, base-clock overclocks don't lead to too much of a performance gain, but anything is better than nothing. Normally, it wouldn't be unreasonable to push a 3.7GHz processor to 3.9 or 4.0, provided you paid attention to what that was doing to the RAM. In this case, it seems like this board doesn't support that feature at all for the i3. I tried flashing the BIOS to several different versions but had no success. In the end, I'm stuck just applying the XMP profile to the RAM to bring its CL11-11-11-28 timings down to the advertised CL9-9-9-24 timings.
Heading on over to the GPU, I was able to find much more success. I gradually increased the clock rate until I ran into visual artifacts, then I backed it down until the artifacts went away. After that, I ran through a Firestrike benchmark for 30 minutes to make sure the settings were stable. I then repeated this with the memory clock. In all, I managed to push out a 9.6 percent core overclock and a 13.1 percent memory overclock, or 95 MHz and 190 MHz, respectively. Ultimately, I ended up with a core clock of 1080MHz and a memory clock of 1640MHz.
