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General discussionoverclocking memory and gpu (14 posts)(14 posts)
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Posted March 29, 2021
Does it seem sound to overclock those components or is this only slightly beneficial. Personally i did manage to let some games run without any glitches anymore by adjusting some sliders in afterburner. A memory clock gain of 2000 ( actually a 1000 since the clock is registered as 7000 by games but as 14000 in the program ) and removing any restrictions on power use increased the lowest fps number from 7 to 31 in a bench program and seemed to have removed any loading glitches i had a lot in some games.

Also, watching from vidstreams it seems that memory overclocking also has the potential to really upgrade your system for gaming concerns with as much as 30 to 40 fps increase both on the lower and higher end of the spectrum. Personally i consider running a overclock to have as a result a more fluid experience a win, but actually only in that specific case.
Still, it would be nice to see if i can change the 2666 mhz memory speed limit into a winning combination that destroys average taken benches

Are there any guides on the subject worth following ( for intel based overclocking that is ). What are the dangers could be another question and to finish, do you overclock yourself ?
Post edited March 29, 2021 by Zimerius
Posted March 29, 2021
in most cases u could void ur warranty, there r brand/type of name that can be made to overclock but still, u can lessen the life span of the card too

if memory is RAM then u can buy the higher hz, if you're system doesn't support it

also those problem u r having could be the developer end on how they optimise the game, they aren't always the best

there r many tech forum/discord/reddit who focus on overclocking, there's people who do like world record aswell
i won't be overclocking at all
Posted March 29, 2021
My stance has always been that the minor improvements aren't worth the risk to stability. I've also had decades of complaining MUCH less about crashes and such than the average person, which I think is related. But that's just me.
Posted March 29, 2021
A reminder that some new graphics cards have error correcting VRAM so may run at fairly high RAM clocks but performance will be worse if there are errors as it then has to refetch data. Check if you would get better performance at lower VRAM clocks. Back off a bit from your best result for better stability.

For system RAM, have enough of it, make sure the modules (PLURAL or get one more asap!) are in the correct slots and enable XMP. Not enough? Have a LOT of patience? Willing to learn way too much about motherboards, UEFI and RAM? Learn how to and spend many hours tweaking and testing mainly manually and then back off from your best results a bit for stability. I myself back off by a good margin as stability issues is not a game genre I enjoy. Be warned, it really takes many hours even if some tools can help cut it down some.
Post edited March 29, 2021 by Themken
Posted March 29, 2021
Solid advice, be careful in what you do, and of course i will. I'm in no position to warrant a fried piece of hardware
Post edited March 29, 2021 by Zimerius
Posted March 29, 2021
What Themken said, plus let me add that most of the so called "gaming" components are somewhat run closer to the limit. This means that without BIOS mods most modern CPU's and GPU's have 0-10% gains with overclock, except unlocking power, wich can have huge impacts 40%+.

Memory "overclock" is very freaking time consuming for the average Joe and usually just turn XPM on (wich is pretty much a factory overclock tested setting).
Keep in mind that Intel blocks memory "overclock" on most motherboards, say you have a 10600k/H410 combo and despite the CPU having a unlocked multiplier, you can only go up to 2666 JEDEC with low end motherboards, some let you tweak the timings while still being 2666MT/s.
The impact on your games will depend a lot on the game and how you run it, I did a little test a few weeks ago and Cities Skylines saw very little to no gain at higher speeds, while Grid Autosport had something like 20% higher average FPS from 2400MT/s to 3200 with tweaked timings (these numbers may not be 100% since I don't have those notes anymore, both with onlocked FPS). It usually have the higher impact on unlocked FPS games, if you play with V-Sync/locked 60fps, memory overclock will have little impact, maybe on some 1% lows.

However, there are some parts with huge gains with overclock, usually low end parts. The AMD Radeon R7 240 the kids were using a couple of years ago had a 40% fps gain in most games, due the overclock. I had a DDR3 nVidia GT 705 or 710 that end up using for some time and got something like 30% better performance.
The Rx480/580 can get 30% better performance just by unlocking power restrictions.

On the CPU side the iconic Q6600, can get 25% faster with a bit of duct tape (from 2.4 to 3GHz). I used a AMD APU back in the day where I got something like 50% more FPS on many games, with both graphics and CPU overclock (old dual-core Kavery?).
Not exactly a overclock but some older parts, like the Phenom x4 960T can be unlocked to 6 cores instead of 4.
And of course, one of my favorite CPU's ever, the Pentium G3258 (wich I still have but infortunately no motherboard to use it), 60$ Haswell dual-core 3.2 GHz that could be overclocked to 4.2/4.4 GHz on the stock cooler and 50$ boards. It's one of the fastest dual core ever and arguably the best CPU to use on XP retro machine.
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Zimerius: gaming concerns with as much as 30 to 40 fps increase
A 35fps increase on a 70fps average setup is quite a big increase, while on the other end, running Thief (or your favorite E-Sports game) at 500fps, a 35fps increase doesn't look so awesome. For that reason % is a bit better as it gives some context.

Crap, got carried away and wrote a little too much :)
Post edited March 29, 2021 by Dark_art_
Posted March 30, 2021
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Dark_art_: What Themken said, plus let me add that most of the so called "gaming" components are somewhat run closer to the limit. This means that without BIOS mods most modern CPU's and GPU's have 0-10% gains with overclock, except unlocking power, wich can have huge impacts 40%+.

Memory "overclock" is very freaking time consuming for the average Joe and usually just turn XPM on (wich is pretty much a factory overclock tested setting).
Keep in mind that Intel blocks memory "overclock" on most motherboards, say you have a 10600k/H410 combo and despite the CPU having a unlocked multiplier, you can only go up to 2666 JEDEC with low end motherboards, some let you tweak the timings while still being 2666MT/s.
The impact on your games will depend a lot on the game and how you run it, I did a little test a few weeks ago and Cities Skylines saw very little to no gain at higher speeds, while Grid Autosport had something like 20% higher average FPS from 2400MT/s to 3200 with tweaked timings (these numbers may not be 100% since I don't have those notes anymore, both with onlocked FPS). It usually have the higher impact on unlocked FPS games, if you play with V-Sync/locked 60fps, memory overclock will have little impact, maybe on some 1% lows.

However, there are some parts with huge gains with overclock, usually low end parts. The AMD Radeon R7 240 the kids were using a couple of years ago had a 40% fps gain in most games, due the overclock. I had a DDR3 nVidia GT 705 or 710 that end up using for some time and got something like 30% better performance.
The Rx480/580 can get 30% better performance just by unlocking power restrictions.

On the CPU side the iconic Q6600, can get 25% faster with a bit of duct tape (from 2.4 to 3GHz). I used a AMD APU back in the day where I got something like 50% more FPS on many games, with both graphics and CPU overclock (old dual-core Kavery?).
Not exactly a overclock but some older parts, like the Phenom x4 960T can be unlocked to 6 cores instead of 4.
And of course, one of my favorite CPU's ever, the Pentium G3258 (wich I still have but infortunately no motherboard to use it), 60$ Haswell dual-core 3.2 GHz that could be overclocked to 4.2/4.4 GHz on the stock cooler and 50$ boards. It's one of the fastest dual core ever and arguably the best CPU to use on XP retro machine.
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Zimerius: gaming concerns with as much as 30 to 40 fps increase
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Dark_art_: A 35fps increase on a 70fps average setup is quite a big increase, while on the other end, running Thief (or your favorite E-Sports game) at 500fps, a 35fps increase doesn't look so awesome. For that reason % is a bit better as it gives some context.

Crap, got carried away and wrote a little too much :)
The example i had in mind was someone who's indeed expert tweaking memory to insane levels tinkering with all the values provided for memory overclocking. I forgot in which % he managed to gain such an increase in fps but i found it pretty much earthshaking ;-)
I was both curious to see if gog'rs do oc and in what measure if they oc.
As in my example i have a 22 fps gain in the low fps which i apparently needed in some games. ( see screenshots ) though overall the gains are only 2 fps, the getting rid of the very low numbers seemed important. I do have to say that i'm curious if the first run was just a fluke for whatever reason possible so i will be testing that value again.
Both very demanding games such as ' jedi fallen order ' and Cyberpunk 2077 which both had some ' lag ' during play seemed to work better with the vram oc and given access to full power. I will use the rest of the coming wkend deciding if this statement hold any merit.
You are right btw, i have the cpu coupled to a non overclockeable motherboard so memory speed can't allow about 2666 mhz and tinkering with clock speeds are certainly off limit. I do am able to control the timers and duration for the second boost mode for the cpu but i think i stay away from those considering the huge increase in powerdraw that comes with maintaining those P1 or maybe P2 cpu states
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Posted March 30, 2021
I thought that Graphics cards (at least since Kepler on the nVidia side) pretty much boosted their own clock speed when there was some overhead (within certain safety limits) - so, to overclock, you'd need to exceed those limits. Given chip binning is a lot better now than it was 15 years ago, personally, I think the risk-return on a GPU overclock isn't worth it.

That, plus if you fry the GPU, good luck finding a replacement...
Posted March 30, 2021
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Zimerius: What are the dangers could be another question and to finish, do you overclock yourself ?
Most RAM needs to be overclocked to get a decent speed, since Intel sets the "guaranteed" safe default speed at a ludicrously low-balled number versus the much higher number that RAM can actually handle safely.

As for overclocking GPUs or CPUs that's much more dicey. That will shorten their lifespans quite a lot, and/or outright destroy them if you go overboard. But there may be exceptions for safe overclocks that don't do any damage, if it's only a tiny amount over the stock speeds.

The danger is that overclocking can wreck your hardware, either slowly or instantly.

And it also can easily cause BSODs and thus potentially render your system unbootable, unless perhaps you are able to access your BIOS and undo the hardware settings and hope your hardware hasn't been damaged too much from the overclock settings whilst they were set to high.

In general, I'd say that other than RAM, it's not worth the trouble for the average user to overclock anything...unless perhaps it's on a very old system that you don't care if it dies or not because you are going to buy a new one soon in any case, and presuming you've already backed up all your data on it.
Post edited March 30, 2021 by Ancient-Red-Dragon
Posted March 30, 2021
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Zimerius: Does it seem sound to overclock those components or is this only slightly beneficial.
Depends a lot on what you are trying to overclock and what combination of hardware you have.

Memory overclocking? Worth it on a Ryzen perhaps. On Intel not as much. At least not for gaming. There are the oddball exceptions out there, games that react well to increased memory bandwidth, but they're not that common.

GPU overclocking? Why? Unless you also plan on water-cooling it, do you want more heat & noise? When buying partner cards, you can straight up go for factory OC models rather than test your luck, since those are mostly binned GPUs that can maintain a stable overclock without issues.

And last, but not least, do it only if you're having fun or want to squeeze something out of old hardware and you have nothing to lose. The improvements are usually mostly marginal and not worth the time IMHO.
Post edited March 30, 2021 by WinterSnowfall
Posted March 30, 2021
I like overclocking, it's like tuning a car for faster laptimes but unlike tuning a car with computercomponents results can be rather erratic.
If you have XMP memory and you do not enable it you most likely run it at the lowest speed, which is just a waste of money and performance.
Also undervolting can sometimes have interesting results, especially with some of AMD's gpu's.

As for risking your warranty, just do it when the stuff you have is out of warranty (mostly 2 years from purchase) or buy used components. Except for running XMP memory speeds as that is the speed at which it was advertized.
When your pc is still new you'll probably don't need overclocking as it will run most games fine. It is when it gets older and games tend to run slow but you don't want to upgrade yet things become interesting.

Overclocking is made a lot easier today with the UEFI letting handle the overclocktuning automatically, which in most cases will result in a safe stable overclock.
Post edited March 30, 2021 by Strijkbout
Posted March 30, 2021
Maybe I am mistaken, but I think alot of people here are misunderstanding the OP's question.

GPU overclocking, using MSI Afterburner or alike, involves moving a slider to adjust the GPU Core clock and the GPU Memory clock separately. OP is not asking about CPU and northbridge or on die memory controller XMP profiles.

Basically, GPUS are "binned" much like CPUS, so that the chips most free of defects end up as high end SKUS and defective cores are disabled and these chips go to intermediary and lower end SKUS. From here these bins have a "hardware lottery" of which some cards have better stability at higher clocks.

The best of the best cards end up going to OEMS who sell factory OC models at higher cost. However, the factory OC and the factory clock cards can all be tweaked to raise or lower core clock and memory clocks (effectively adjusting voltage). In this way, cards that use a ton of power can be downvolted so they can operate with lower power consumption. The reverse is true where the cards can be OC to allow extra MHz on the clocks which improves FPS for gaming. The only time you really want to do this is if you are playing a demanding game and only getting say 42 fps and you want to get 49 fps for a bit more smoothness.

Otherwise you are wasting power and there is no benefit.
Post edited March 30, 2021 by DesmondOC
Posted March 30, 2021
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Strijkbout: I like overclocking, it's like tuning a car for faster laptimes but unlike tuning a car with computercomponents results can be rather erratic.
Car tuning can be way more erratic than computers :D
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Strijkbout: Also undervolting can sometimes have interesting results, especially with some of AMD's gpu's.
"Both" AMD, nVidia and Intel can benefit from undervolting. Nowadays most parts are power limited instead of clock limited, with the increased bonus most modern parts seem to take temps in account as well.
Post edited March 30, 2021 by Dark_art_
Posted March 30, 2021
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionoverclocking memory and gpu (14 posts)(14 posts)
(14 posts)