Or you have one of the best gaming monitors with a heightened refresh rate, and want to extract full value from your fast display. For modest speed boosts, overclocking your GPU is a freebie alternative to upgrading your CPU or RAM, and is handy if you’re falling just short of a target FPS in a particular game. Hopefully, then, this guide can at least provide guidance on how to handle the tricky bits – and once you’ve got the fundamentals down, it’s not too hard to make future tweaks, or apply the same techniques to future GPU upgrades. Arguably not to the extent of CPU overclocking, but if we’re all being honest with each other here, wrangling a meaningful performance boost out of your card will almost definitely require some trial and error. However, there is one caveat, even if you get everything right: GPU overclocking is a faff.
Even the best graphics cards that come with factory overclocks will leave headroom for additional gains to unlock yourself. And why not? Coaxing extra performance out of a component will get you more frames-per-second at no additional charge, and you can do it with just about every gaming card under the sun. Learning how to overclock your GPU sounds like it should be one of gaming PC ownership’s essential skills, like knowing how to clean your PC or how to check CPU temperature.
