GPU overclocking is not dead

[Vishera]

There is a common notion in the community that graphics card overclocking is dead - It's not dead

Overclocking now days is different than the traditional pump more voltage for higher frequency and you are done though you can still do that if you want but it's not the most effective way to do so in the day and age of sophisticated boost algorithms.

To get significant gains you also need to learn how boost works and use that to your advantage,

For example on NVIDIA GPUs the boost clock rises the colder you go as long as there is headroom to the power limit.

Not only the boost clock rises on colder temperatures, but the overclocking potential rises as well on top of the increased boost clocks.

Another thing is to find out the bottleneck on your graphics card - If the VRAM is bottlenecking the GPU you should overclock the VRAM first then the GPU.

 

Here is an example from Cyberpunk 2077:

 

Before:

 

After:

 

 

From 64 FPS to 76 FPS = A performance increase of 18%

 

Notable differences:

Temperature: 59C vs 50C

GPU: 1965MHz vs 2130MHz

VRAM: 4001MHz vs 5000MHz

 

Also i got the highest GTX 1660 Geekbench compute score in the world:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/6238503

 

So no, graphics card overclocking is not dead.

[tikker]

I've always interpreted to more mean the shift in focus. With the advent of boost technologies it is less about "how far out of spec can I push this thing" and more "how cool can I get it such that GPU Boost will boost as high as possible / as high as I want". I guess it took the "over" out of overclocking, since for all intents and purposes it is intended functionality nowadays given power and thermal headroom.

[Vishera]

8 minutes ago, tikker said:

I've always interpreted to more mean the shift in focus. With the advent of boost technologies it is less about "how far out of spec can I push this thing" and more "how cool can I get it such that GPU Boost will boost as high as possible / as high as I want". I guess it took the "over" out of overclocking, since for all intents and purposes it is intended functionality nowadays given power and thermal headroom.

You can overclock on top of the boost to get even better gains...

[Tristerin]

Nice job!  I was once #5 for the R7 1700 OC for a long while when that chip came out, last I looked I was in top 12 but I kind of left OCing behind lol (just ran out of time to really get into the weeds of it).

 

But this post gives me the itch lol.  I havent tried OCing on my RTX 2060 or RX 6700 XT yet at all.

[Vishera]

5 minutes ago, Tristerin said:

Nice job!  I was once #5 for the R7 1700 OC for a long while when that chip came out, last I looked I was in top 12 but I kind of left OCing behind lol (just ran out of time to really get into the weeds of it).

 

But this post gives me the itch lol.  I havent tried OCing on my RTX 2060 or RX 6700 XT yet at all.

I used to be #1 on most GTX 1660 benchmarks, but at some point my competitors found new black magic tricks to boost their scores even at lower clock speeds than i was running -_-

 

[Tristerin]

1 minute ago, Vishera said:

I used to be #1 on most GTX 1660 benchmarks, but at some point my competitors found new black magic tricks to boost their scores even at lower clock speeds than i was running -_-

 

I dont know enough to get further than I did, mine was very shadetree and luck of the lottery (I have 5 1700's overall and 2 of them are just flat out OC performers.  Its like they were intentionally binned as 1700s but could have been 1800x's no problem (at stock voltage I can keep them at 4.0 constant etc)

 

Keep up the lords work!

[johnno23]

I simply undervolted my GPU and got a performance gain of around 9% and a slightly lower power bill. But for the overclockers great post as some people just love to squeeze every drop of perfomance possible.

[RONOTHAN##]

21 minutes ago, Vishera said:

I used to be #1 on most GTX 1660 benchmarks, but at some point my competitors found new black magic tricks to boost their scores even at lower clock speeds than i was running -_-

 

Sounds like AMD GPU overclocking. On there if you run a benchmark 6 months after someone else you get an extra 2% performance for free. 

 

If you know what you're doing you generally can get some pretty good performance increases. I know my 6900 XT on daily stable settings is 12% faster than stock, partially because there was slider headroom, partially because BIOS modding AMD cards to get an unlimited power limit is pretty easy and RDNA2 is very power limited. 

 

There aren't many cards than have headroom that you're likely to notice anymore though. The 6650 XT I messed with recently got an extra 5% performance total from an overclock, the 3080 I used to had even on water was barely 5% faster than at stock. Part of the problem is that AMD and Nvidia have been locking down overclocking so much over recent years, other part is that the boost algs have gotten everything pretty close to maxed out at ambient already that getting an extra 100MHz on the core clock and 500Mbps on the memory is about all you can hope for (at least on high end cards with what I'm used to, not really that sure about mid range). 

 

Still though, good results. I think all that's left to do is take the card colder. LN2 anyone? 

[Vishera]

13 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Still though, good results. I think all that's left to do is take the card colder. LN2 anyone? 

A chiller would be fun to use,

Should give good results and is easier and cheaper than DICE or LN2.

[xAcid9]

1660 is bandwidth starved with it GDDR5, that's why you see significant gain when you overclocked the memory.

The refreshed 1660S with faster GDDR6 able to match 1660 Ti even with lower core count.

[Sir Beregond]

Yep, overclocking is not dead. Pushing the power limit on my FE 3080 Ti and bumping both the core clock and memory clock to something like +120/+1100 works great and at that point I more just hit the power limit. Since its under a water block, the temps are fine. And doing both an OC and an undervolt stabilizes the boost so its not bouncing around so much at the top of the boost.

 

One of these days I'll get brave and try my hand at some shunt modding. Would love to pump some more power into this thing and see what it can do. Right now, very limited by the 400W max.

[Vishera]

1 hour ago, Sir Beregond said:

One of these days I'll get brave and try my hand at some shunt modding.

Just don't do the liquid metal method, the piggyback method is better.

[thrasher_565]

i have 5x 560 rads but dont no how to oc...