GRAPHICS CARD OVERCLOCKING (Nvidia cards)

[d3M0n]

For a downloadable pdf version of this guide please click here .

So you think you're ready to start seeing what your Nvidia graphics card can really do beyond the way it came?

 

I decided to compile this guide from available resources and my own experience so that everyone here at the street can see exactly how to get the most out of your GPU and vRAM. I don't have much experience with ATI graphics cards, so this guide will be geared toward Nvidia cards, but the difference is very little. Of course, before I begin, all of the usual disclaimers apply. That means that you overclock any component at your own risk, if you do anything in this guide you have probably voided your warranty, and if it breaks, well, sorry, but I took that risk to learn all I have as well. So lets get to the fun part!! There will be 3 sections to this guide.

 

1) The limit finding GFX overclocking section including coolbits, rivatuner and other such software overclocking tools.

 

2) The definite warranty voiding bios flash GFX overclocking section including the how to's and the don't do's and the tools you'll need to accomplish these things.

 

3) The hard volt mod "you'll probably kill your card without good cooling" GFX overclocking section.

 

 

SECTION 1 - Finding the limits of your graphics card

 

The first step to any good overclock is to find the limit of your hardware. Of course, in order to do this you must have the software to be able to overclock your video card. This can be accomplished with a few different programs that I will outline.

 

1) The first thing that you can do is to use the coolbits registry hack. By doing so, it will open up a few new settings in your display settings. You can go in and edit your registry manually, but I find it is much easier just to download the auto registry editor so I won't go into the where and how to edit the registry. Once this is done, you can open your settings and go to the clock frequency settings. Click on manual overclocking, scroll down through the disclaimer to the bottom (hopefully while reading it, heh), and click accept. Make sure that in the settings tab it reads "Performance(3D)". It should then list your default core clock frequency and memory clock frequency. At this point you should start with your GPU. Raise the clock by 5MHz, click the "test changes" button, make sure it passes, click apply, then repeat until the test fails. When the test fails you can try setting it only 2-3MHz higher and test again. Once you've found the max GPU, then restore the default setting by clicking on the "restore default" button and then apply. Do the same thing for your memory to see what the maximum it will pass at will be. Once you've found the max on both, then set both to their max and re-test. Don't worry if it fails this test because it very likely will. If it does, then set you memory back to the default and do the max test for the GPU and apply. Then with your GPU maxed, find the max clock for your memory with a maxed out GPU. Run 3DMark05 or 06 to see if there are any artifacts (artifacting is when there are lines or blocks or discolorations in the graphics being rendered). If there are, then you may need to back off the GPU or memory clock a bit to find the no artifact maximum. Some will run benchmarks with artifacts, but there is a higher risk of damaging your card if you do so. Also, there is a throttle built in to your card, so if you overclock it too high, then you may actually see a drastic DECREASE in your FPS during benchies.

 

You can download the coolbits auto registry edits here .

 

2) Another program you can use (which is essentially the same thing) is called Rivatuner. Because this is basically the same sort of thing I won't go into the how to for rivatuner, but there is the added feature of being able to save your overclocks as profiles for easy access later on.

 

You can download Rivatuner here .

 

3) Yet another program you can use that has an advantage over the other two is called Powerstrip. It has an advantage because you can set your GPU and RAM clocks as high as you like without having to run a test first. The drawback to it is that it is shareware. You can try it free for 30 days, but after that you must pay the $29.95 fee for registration. This is actually (in my opinion) the BEST tool for overclocking and settings for your graphics because it has many other settings and performance tweaks within it, as well as hotkey binds, desktop settings and icon placement, color tweaking, etc. I highly recommend at least trying out the 30-day trial for it to see what you think.

 

You can download Powerstrip here.

 

_______________________________________________________________________

 

SECTION 2 - Modding and flashing your graphics card bios

 

The graphics card bios, like the motherboard bios, is where you will find all the settings for your graphics card such as GPU clock frequency, RAM clock frequency, RAM timings, voltages, temperature settings, and boot message settings. This can be edited and flashed to your video card via a couple handy freeware programs. This requires a little more in depth study and patience to do correctly, and as I have some good experience modding bioses, I will tell you exactly how to go about this task. The first thing to do is to download a little program called nvflash.

 

You can get the latest version of nvflash here.

 

Once this is done you can use this program by making a bootable floppy using the windows command. Make a new folder called NVflash on the floppy, then unzip the contents of the zip file to the NVflash folder. Now you are ready to make a backup of your bios.

 

*PLEASE MAKE A BACKUP FIRST AS YOU WILL NEED IT IF YOUR FLASH EVER GOES BAD.*

 

Reboot your computer and boot to your NVflash disk into DOS. Go into the NVflash folder and use the command

 

NVflash -b backup.rom

 

It should tell you that it saved the file. Then boot back into Windows and save our backup to your hard drive somewhere. We will use this next.

 

Next, we must download a bios reader/editor. Although there are others, my personal favorite is a program called Nibitor.

 

You can download the latest version of Nibitor here.

 

Once you have unzipped this file to your computer you can open the Nibitor program. Go to the File tab and click on "Open BIOS...". Find your backup bios and open it.

 

Above the tabs you will see the file pathway and name, the card you are using, the bios version, the vendor, the date, and the product code. The first tab that is displayed is the clockrates tab. I'm not going to go too in depth about this because you can always play with this later. If you search the internet or other overclocking forums, then you will most likely be able to find other bioses that people have tried available for download.

 

Clockrates tab:

On this tab you will see the memory clocks for the 3D (3D acceleration for gfx apps) setting, Throttle setting, and 2D (Windows) setting. You will also see something called the Geometric delta clock (GDC). The 3D core speed is self explanatory. This is how fast your card will run its GPU at the default settings.

The throttle setting is a safety net for your card. The throttle will kick in to slow down the 3D performance clocks for 2 reasons. A) Your card gets too hot, or B) You set the core clock too high. However, you CAN eliminate the throttle altogether.

 

If you tick the box that says "Change amount of active performance levels", then a little box will pop up with a number. Set this number to 2 and the throttle should

come up with little dashes across all of it. Then you can untick the box again. WARNING: Getting rid of the throttle will force your card to run at the 3D setting no matter how hot your card gets or how high you raise your clock speed. This means that while it will probably give you higher scores in benchies at higher clock speeds, there is even more of a risk of frying your card while running those benchies.

 

The 2D setting is lower because Windows and 2d apps do not need all of the power that 3D rendering sucks up. The memory speed on all 3 should be the same. The memory clocks are given in single channel mode in the bios, but represented at their DDR speeds within Windows which are displayed in parentheses.

 

The GDC is a separate clock that will make the core go that much faster than the bios core setting. You can try different values for this to see if you get better results, but I would recommend keeping it at 60 or below, higher than this has not really been tried. I believe the GDC is something that only came out recently so it may not be supported on older cards than the 7xxx series.

 

Voltages tab:

The bios voltage control is just like the CPU voltage control in the motherboard bios. The only difference is that with a software mod of the video card voltage you may be limited in the amount of voltage you can give the GPU no matter how high you set it.

 

If you want to edit the voltages you can do the following:

Go to Tools->Voltage Table Editor. Once in the voltage table editor, if you wish to keep the default voltage values, but add your own as well, then you can change the amount of active entries to 04 and edit the new value with a different VID and voltage entry. Then you can go back to the exact mode and select the new voltage for whichever of the settings you like. I would recommend that you change the 2D voltage by as as much as you plan on raising the 3D clocks.

 

Advanced Info tab:

The advanced info tab contains information about your card's vendor and board type. There is really no need to change this as it does nothing for performance.

 

Timings tab:

This is where you can edit the memory timings of the card. Only a limited number of timings is available through this tab. You can change the timings through the Timingsets. The Detailed timings button will show the timings in more familiar form for those used to bios timings for the motherboard. If you are a WAY more advanced user than most of us, then you can edit ALL the timings defined by the bios in hex by using Tools->Adv. memory config.

 

Temperatures tab:

You can edit the temperature settings, fan speeds, or even disable the temp monitoring function of the card altogether. (Note: If you disable temp montoring then you may still be able to get the card's readout of temp by using a plugin for a program such as MBM5.)

 

Boot Settings tab:

Here you can set if you want the gfx boot message to display before the computer bios posts. You can also edit the message displayed and the color of the message if you want to get creative about it all. Here, you can have a nice little bootup ascii art all your very own!

 

After you are done editing your bios, then you can save it and flash it to the card. In order to do this you boot with the nvflash boot disk, go to the nvflash program and bios containing folder and use the command:

 

nvflash -5 -6 newbios.rom

 

where "newbios" is the name of the bios that you edited and then saved to the floppy in the same folder as the program and backup bios. I would suggest trying a very small change at first, flash it, and go back into Windows and verify that your change took effect just to familiarize yourself with the flashing process and to make sure that it worked.

 

If ANYTHING goes wrong while flashing the card DO NOT REBOOT!! Immediately reflash your backup bios instead. If you cannot see things after you flash and reboot then it is very handy to use an old PCI video card (you can pick one up VERY CHEAP) to view the screen and reflash the backup bios. If you don't have an old PCI video card, then you may try blind flashing by way of beeps and hoping that you've typed everything correctly, but I certainly wouldn't recommend doing things this way.

 

PLEASE NOTE: You may have to uninstall and reinstall your video drivers and its probably a good idea to do so anyway whenever you flash a new bios.

 

Have fun with it... I've been able to get my highest overclocks ever by editing bioses and flashing. It is possible (and not uncommon) to get maybe 3-400 more in the 3DMark05-06 benchies if you find or edit a bios your card likes better than the one it has.

 

_______________________________________________________________________

 

SECTION 3 - The hard volt mod section

 

DO NOT ATTEMPT UNLESS YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING!! YOU WILL KILL YOUR CARD IF YOU DO THIS WRONG!!

 

I have never actually attempted this myself, so I will simply say that just as with any computer component you can get a much greater amount of performance out of it by adding voltage. For those of you wishing to undergo the ultimate graphics card tweak I thought I would reference a guide. I know people who have done this on air and never killed their card, but you must do it correctly or you WILL kill your card almost instantly. There is no reason why it shouldn't work if done properly though. Also, I've seen MAJOR increases in benchies (like 1000-1500 pts better in 3DMark 05-06) from cards that have this mod performed on them.

 

Here are links to guides on how to perform the hard volt mod on your card.

 

Here are the basics for hard volt modding.

 

Here is for the 7800GT.

 

Here is for the 7800GTX.

 

Here is for the 7900GT/GTX

 

I tried to make this guide as complete as possible for your graphics card overclocking enjoyment. I hope you have found this helpful. Let us know how your graphics overclocking goes!!!!

[d3M0n]

This is my first attempt at a guide for overclocking so tell me what you guys think!! Any comments suggestions are certainly welcome!

 

d3M0n

[Redbeaver]

very cool guide! i bet its very useful for many many people out there

 

good job

 

edit: i read teh review on the hardmod, thats not a very nice review since the pic are blurry and people could solder the wrong joints. tHAt would be very bad. very.

 

here's a better pic, not perfect, but should be safer.... although this is for 7800GT, not GTX. there might be some differences... u need to points out that for a hardware mod, if you're unsure, DONT DO IT!

 

http://www.vr-zone.com.sg/?i=2656&s=1

[Kakarot]

Great guide.

 

Riva tuner can disable the test function though (going from memory)

 

Go into power user, nvidia/overclocking/global (will check when I am at home)

 

give test 1, a value of 1 (test function disabled - through riva anyway)

 

Now for a silly question: I have 2 different brand 7800gtxs, so 2 different bioises.

 

Can I use this idea, to make them have the same bios?

 

Also, do you guys ever overclock the 2d settings?

 

Thx

[d3M0n]

Hey, thanks for the heads up on the disabling test function in rivatuner. I didn't know that. Also, yes, you most certainly can make both cards have the same bios. Just back up both bioses and then flash one to the other so they both have the same bios. Simple as that. And there is no reason to overclock the 2D clocks really as you are only dealing with the low end gfx of Windows there. Its already way higher than it needs to be. LOL!!

 

Great guide.

 

Riva tuner can disable the test function though (going from memory)

 

Go into power user, nvidia/overclocking/global (will check when I am at home)

 

give test 1, a value of 1 (test function disabled - through riva anyway)

 

Now for a silly question: I have 2 different brand 7800gtxs, so 2 different bioises.

 

Can I use this idea, to make them have the same bios?

 

Also, do you guys ever overclock the 2d settings?

 

Thx

[d3M0n]

Thanks for the kind words. At the end of the hard mod review is a very clear pic of the solder points. It is very difficult to get a good clear close up as is demontrated by the blurriness on the pics you linked to as well... And that is VERY good advice: If you are unsure, DON'T DO IT!!! You don't want to kill your nice $4-500 card now do you? LOL! :nod:

 

very cool guide! i bet its very useful for many many people out there

 

good job

 

edit: i read teh review on the hardmod, thats not a very nice review since the pic are blurry and people could solder the wrong joints. tHAt would be very bad. very.

 

here's a better pic, not perfect, but should be safer.... although this is for 7800GT, not GTX. there might be some differences... u need to points out that for a hardware mod, if you're unsure, DONT DO IT!

 

http://www.vr-zone.com.sg/?i=2656&s=1

[Kakarot]

Hey, thanks for the heads up on the disabling test function in rivatuner. I didn't know that. Also, yes, you most certainly can make both cards have the same bios. Just back up both bioses and then flash one to the other so they both have the same bios. Simple as that. And there is no reason to overclock the 2D clocks really as you are only dealing with the low end gfx of Windows there. Its already way higher than it needs to be. LOL!!

 

I may be reading this wrong... but would that make both cards, the exact same...

 

lol

 

What I mean is, if I saved my asus bios - cause it works well and overclocks nice... and flashed that to the msi...

 

would I have 2 asus card, hehehe.

 

Also, 2 flash them both to a current bios. Where would you find legitamit bios updates? thx man

[d3M0n]

Essentially they would be the same except that one core would limit the other's ability to OC and one set of vRAM would limit the other as well if you were to use them in SLI setup. In other words, if you have the same bios on both, then the only limiting factor would be the weakest GPU/vRAM.

 

I may be reading this wrong... but would that make both cards, the exact same...

 

lol

 

What I mean is, if I saved my asus bios - cause it works well and overclocks nice... and flashed that to the msi...

 

would I have 2 asus card, hehehe.

 

Also, 2 flash them both to a current bios. Where would you find legitamit bios updates? thx man

[smshpkins]

A while back I BIOS modded my 2 MSI 6800s from 325/600 to 415/830. I changed the voltage table so in 3D mode I am running at 1.42V, but in 2D I have the clock adjusted to 325/830 and the voltage adjusted to 1.32. My only suggestion is figure out what works in RivaTurner 1st, THEN start meddling with your BIOS. As always, however, if you aren't sure what a setting will do, research first.

[Redbeaver]

Thanks for the kind words. At the end of the hard mod review is a very clear pic of the solder points. It is very difficult to get a good clear close up as is demontrated by the blurriness on the pics you linked to as well... And that is VERY good advice: If you are unsure, DON'T DO IT!!! You don't want to kill your nice $4-500 card now do you? LOL! :nod:

 

no man, when u actually tried it, the pic on vr-zone is much better. on the site that you posted, there's only 1 clear pic to where u would solder the joints. on vr-zone theres better layout for people to follow.

of course, its still blurry nonetheless.

 

but u have to be really really careful when soldering. shorts the wrong one or burn the trace of one, u will kill ur board with slim to no-chance of reviving it.

 

if u never soldered before, u probably wouldnt know how hard it is soldering thro a schematic.

 

 

clearer picture is definitely better. there's another one out there with much better pic. i'll post here when i know.

 

edit: voila!

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=425634

[d3M0n]

Very nice post with pics there Redbeaver!! Beautiful pics!! It appears people are using different voltage regulators for the 7800GT and the 7800GTX. This should be pointed out so that people know they actually have to research what has worked for THEIR card and not just assume one review is as good as the other. Thanks man!!

 

no man, when u actually tried it, the pic on vr-zone is much better. on the site that you posted, there's only 1 clear pic to where u would solder the joints. on vr-zone theres better layout for people to follow.

of course, its still blurry nonetheless.

 

but u have to be really really careful when soldering. shorts the wrong one or burn the trace of one, u will kill ur board with slim to no-chance of reviving it.

 

if u never soldered before, u probably wouldnt know how hard it is soldering thro a schematic.

 

 

clearer picture is definitely better. there's another one out there with much better pic. i'll post here when i know.

 

edit: voila!

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=425634

[d3M0n]

Anyone else have any comments, suggestions??