Graphics Cards OC discussion.

I just wanted to start a thread over Graphics Cards & Overclocking them. Primarily because I’ve noticed a trend recently and figured a discussion on it may prove educational/interesting.

Some starting points:

  • How much does actual speed of the product out of the box influence your purchase, i.e. would you pay more for an OC version of the same card?

  • Who here OC’s their GPUs beyond what the manufacturer sells it out of the box?

  • What tools do you use?

  • How much does the reviewed OC potential affect your impression of a card?

What I have noticed in forums around the web & therefore the attached keyboard warriors, is that whenever a GPU is released that does not have a huge OC head room beyond the manufacturer’s OC that it gets slated (think of the reviews of the RX 480, the Fury line, and even the first GTX1080 reviews). I appreciate that in the past OC was effectively getting more performance out of card for free. But surely what we are seeing now is a tightening of product (read chip & PCB) consistency that allows the manufacturer to dial in the best clock speeds for their boards so it ends up at the thin edge of the wedge and there’s very little advancement to be made unless additional cooling (custom water cooling) is added to the board.

For those interested here are my responses to my own questions:

Speed of the GPU is low down on my list of specs to consider. I check cooling ability and noise first & also aesthetics (wanky but it’s true). Because I do OC I figure I should be able to boost a cheaper card to similar clock speeds through tweaking. As long as the power components & everything are equivalent I would choose the cheaper card.

As stated above I do get in & OC all my cards. It’s a combination of improving, however incrementally, my purchase & also my love of tweaking & experimentation.

I use MSI Afterburner & Kombustor & then perform checks with 3DMark & Valley Benchmark ( I don’t use Heaven, I just like the look of Valley more :slight_smile: ). I then use in game benchmarks for comparison. But I have noticed that I have thought I had a stable OC through all my benching & stress testing, but when I actually get in game I end up with CTD’s, so have to dial it back to the manufacturer’s OC speeds (happened recently with my Nano, GTX950 & GTX980).

OC potential used to be of great interest to me, but recently I’m starting to wonder if it’s an archaic way of thinking for someone who isn’t a true competitive OC’er.

My XFX R7 370 is factory overclocked to 995MHZ. I honestly planned on overclocking it once but I remember when the AMD Community Manager Jake Francis said that OCing GPUs isn’t recommended at all. So ever since I’m kinda scared to overclock it. Nor I’m not sure if I would gain some performance boost if I overclocked it and also I’m not sure if I have enough room to overclock that oldie. So far the GPU is doing its job but on the newer games it’s kinda struggling to keep it away from the 30fps mark.

To answer your questions:

  1. I wouldn’t pay more for the OC version. You can pretty much overclock the same GPU by yourself with 0 sweat.
  2. I answered it above hurrdurr
  3. I don’t. Since, well, look above xD
  4. :grin:
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I haven’t tried overclocking my Fury X yet. I think it would be a good candidate.

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teh_g I believe it should be as it’s water cooled. I could OC my Nano a reasonable amount but in real world terms the thermal throttling made it pointless. Pipe dream for aesthetics & OC would be to do a custom loop on my Nano.

I don’t overclock anything anymore, honestly. I just don’t want to go to the trouble of messing with it, I seem to have so little time these days, I’d rather spend it playing, than tweaking hardware.

I will buy, and have bought before, gpus that are factory overclocked. I might pay a bit more, but not sure I would pay too much more for them though. But I heard one time, that the GPUs that are overclocked at the factory, are the ones that did the best in the factory’s quality tests, that there are certain requirements the card must pass before it can be factory overclocked, so they can warranty it with the OC.

So for me, I’m not that overly concerned with the performance, but I would buy a factory overcloced card because I would feel that I’m getting better quality components on the card.

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