One of the most commonly asked questions in the Sysopt community forums is: “How can I overclock my graphics card?” Indeed, much like basic CPU overclocking, lots of people know of it and don’t have the faintest clue where to start despite its simplicity. Well my friends, the road to enlightenment is here, if you could just follow me. . .

Getting Started

To begin with, you’ll need a third-party utility with which to overclock the card. Although increasing numbers of manufacturers are including utilities to allow customers to overclock their cards in their drivers, there are still some who don’t want you doing this sort of thing (overclocking puts stress on a system and voids manufacturer warranties, for a start). Third-party utilities tend to be universal in that they work on card types irrespective of manufacturer. As such, anyone with an appropriate type of card will be able to overclock it using a third-party utility. My personal preference is the excellent Rivatuner, which includes a comprehensive set of tweak tools, overclocking options and, in new versions, support for cards from both of the “big two” of the graphics industry -- ATI and NVIDIA. It is for this last reason I am writing the guide based around Rivatuner, which is freely available from guru3d, as are several other graphics card overclocking tools. If you find Rivatuner not to your liking I would recommend having a poke about there and tooling up with your weapon of choice.

But back to business. Once you have downloaded the Rivatuner zip file and installed the program, navigate to the shortcut located on the start menu and click on the shortcut.

You should then be presented with the following screen:

Next up, navigate to the button next to “Detonator XP detected” and click, then click again on “Customize System Settings”:

The following screen should then present itself (although the figures will vary):