To increase the overall performance of almost any video card, a number of simple tricks can be applied to it. You can configure the registry or BIOS accordingly, change the image quality, or overclock the device. The effectiveness of the latter method is much higher. This article discusses the overclocking option of the GTX 650 Ti (video cards from NVIDIA).
What is overclocking and what is its danger
Overclocking (overclocking) - increasing the frequency of a component of a personal computer in excess of the nominal one laid down by the manufacturer. The overclocked component increases its power consumption and generates more heat.
It can demonstrate unstable operation and often fails. Many manufacturers indicate in the warranty that during overclocking the warranty is void.
What value do you need to overclock the video card
With an increase in the frequency of the memory and the graphics processor of the video card, the period of clock pulses increases. It sounds scary, but in fact it can be done in less than a few minutes. Beginner overclockers are not recommended to increase the frequency by more than 5%. For example, if a video card operates at a frequency of 600 MHz (which is quite common these days), then you should not increase the figure by more than 30-50 MHz.
More advanced users often increase the frequency by much larger values. However, when artifacts, for example, white dots or snow, appear, it is necessary to reduce the frequency by 10-15 MHz. In other words, with excessive overclocking of the video card, artifacts, blank areas of the screen will start to appear, and the video adapter may even freeze. Therefore, to optimally use the capabilities of a video card, it is necessary to experimentally determine the threshold frequency corresponding to the appearance of such problems. Then decrease this value by 20 MHz.
Overclocking an EVGA Graphics Card
To get started, consider overclocking the NVIDIA GTX 650 Ti SSC from EVGA Corporation. The considered video card already has increased parameters for the kernel. For manual overclocking using the EVGA Precision utility, the core voltage is set from 1071 MHz to 1122 MHz. This is just an increase of 5%. However, factory overclocking in itself is of great importance, and the total increase will be 21%. This is a very high rate.
In turn, the memory uses the standard frequency value. We overclock the GTX 650 Ti in memory frequency, for which we increase its value from 1.35 GHz to 1.6 GHz. In this case, the increase in the parameter is 18%. To achieve such characteristics, it is necessary to apply 1163 mV to the video card, which is 50 mV more than the default value. In addition, this is the maximum voltage allowed for use with this type of video adapter.
Overclocking the Zotac Graphics Card
Overclocking the GeForce GTX 650 Ti amp! Zotac's Edition is almost identical to overclocking an EVGA card. Thanks to the use of a maximum voltage of 1163 mV, it was possible to increase the core clock frequency from 1032 MHz to 1114 MHz (an increase of 8%). In turn, the memory clock speed was increased from 1.55 GHz to 1.6 GHz (by 3%).
Thus, the overclocking conditions for both video cards were approximately the same. In the overclocked state, these video cards consume 175 watts. For Zotac, power consumption increased by 14 watts, for EVGA - by 9 watts.
Frequency comparison
Given that the video adapters in question have differences in memory size, we can overclock the GTX 650 Ti under the conditions of the same core frequency and memory. This will determine the effect of additional memory (1 GHz) on the Zotac card.
To ensure that the frequencies of the two video cards coincide, we lower the frequency of the Zotac memory to the standard value, and increase the core frequency to 1071 MHz. Now the core and memory frequencies of the considered video cards are the same. We will re-test video cards with the same overclocking parameters with a resolution of 2560 x 1600. Higher resolution allows better use of the advantages of large memory.
The GTX 650 Ti overclocking results are shown in the figure. In the upper part of the graph, the OC value indicated in brackets corresponds to the overclocked state of the video card. At the bottom of the figure, the CF value corresponds to the changed frequency value.