How to overclock a graphics card

Now that you’re aware of the various software used and you know what your stock speeds are, you can continue to start overclocking.

The best way that we find includes taking things quite slowly and constantly testing for stability. This involves leaving every setting along and running FurMark on a stability test at stock speeds. This will show if the card has any underlying issues from the go as you don’t want to find out you have problems and assuming that the overclock was at fault.

Once a stability test has been run for around 45 seconds, you can safely say that things are ready to rock and roll and you can begin pumping up that core clock speed. It’s a personal preference as to if you want to use the slider or manually enter the results, but what you want to aim for is a 10MHz overclock, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but as said this will take some time. Once you have entered your 10MHz overclock, you can apply your changes in MSI Afterburner. A quick reference glance at GPU-Z will confirm the new core clock speed.

You can then continue to run FurMark on another stability test, but this time 20 seconds should be more than sufficient to test stability as graphics cards generally throw up errors or artefacts quite quickly. If you see any bright speckled lights or colours or something that doesn’t quite look right, then this may throw a spanner into the works. If everything looks fine though, you can stop FurMark and refer back to Afterburner to raise the core clock by ANOTHER 10MHz and repeat the stability test. Be sure to make a note of what speed you are at just in case the next raise isn’t stable.

You can continue this by raising the core clock by 10MHz and checking for stability, and repeating the process until an error flags up or the screen freezes. If this happens, you know that you have a 10MHz window between stability and instability. A simple restart of the machine will put the speed back to stock and you can then continue to raise the core clock back to your last stable result + 1MHz. You can then continue to repeat the steps above, but in 1MHz increments until you find the maximum stable overclock for the core clock speed.