How to overclock a graphics card

Your current card may already be faster than you think with many manufacturers releasing special edition and pre-overclocked cards. You may find that you already got more than you bargained for giving you a result from the offset.

To find out how your current card is running, we advise using GPU-Z to get a note of the core clock and memory clock speed as if you are planning to overclock, these are the aspects that you’ll end up changing so it’s always nice to see how far you’ve come from stock.

Like most review sites, we can present you with figures but deep down this only means a handful to certain folk, and our aim is to give this review a simple attitude for even novice users to understand. This leads onto our second pieces of software; Benchmark tools.

Certain games have a benchmark utility built in, this includes the likes of Batman: Arkham Asylum and Dirt 2 which are two common games used for benchmarking at eTeknix. Other utilities include the 3DMark suite’s from Futuremark and more commonly; 3DMark 11 which we use throughout our tests.

If your chosen games don’t have built in benchmark tools, you can use other software to monitor the performance of your graphics card and that leads us onto Fraps. Fraps is a utility that allows you to take pictures, videos and more importantly take note of the frame rate whilst in a game. We use FRAPS to record in game footage when showing off a new game and we also use it to record the FPS which appear in your chosen corner of the screen.