Im wanting to OC my GFX card...

Hey there techies!

Im wanting to overclock my Graphics Card in the hopes it might improve certain aspects of the game (frame rate), but I am a total newbie at this and was wondering if anyone could advise me on how best to approach this.

My Graphics card is an ASUS Nvidia GeForce 650 Ti BOOST with 2GB onboard. An Intel i5 650 Processor also...

If anyone could help me with this I would be greatful. Thanks!

Your first question should be;

"Do I need to do this, specifically for FFXIV? What else am I using that needs overclocking, and if so are they lagging?" If FFXIV:ARR is running at 40-60fps (outside crowded areas), then you don't need to do this, you're better avoiding it.

The difference will be so small overclocking a 650ti that it's pretty much not worth your bother with that specific card.


But if you're adamant to do so and are feeling like you just want to experiment, it's essentially a trial and error process where you slowly increase it bit by bit, if you see that it's stable you increase it more and you keep doing so until you see artifacts which looks like this;

Lines or square that aren't meant to be there after overclocking, IMMEDIATLEY start tuning it down until you find the highest stable clock you can find. Your GPU can also completley crap out and had a display driver reset/failure which can kick you to your desktop or lock up your PC forcing you to do a forced-reboot. After turning it down a bit, it's advisable to reboot, seeing as artifacting is usually remains until you reboot your computer (or something the 3D application in question)

http://www.geeks3d.com/public/jegx/2..._fluidmark.jpg

THIS IS RISKY, you /can/ potentially fry your card doing this, and in general over-clocking some cards (as some are very very scalable) will lower it's overall life-time.
DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Consider your power-supply, do you have the wattage to overclock your GPU?
Does your GPU idle at 40-60c already? (If carefully monitor your overclock as it'll increase the temperature).

As this guide suggests, increase it in small small increments, (it's tempting to just go "I'll do 50-100mhz, lolwutdotheyknow" but you're shooting yourself in the foot as it'll make it harder to find your GPU's overclocking 'sweet-spot'.

ALSO BEAR IN MIND, if you have a factory-overclocked GPU take extra caution as they've already tweaked it to a 'way below' the stable pont, so it's more likely to start giving you problems.
http://www.overclock.net/t/112/guide...cking-your-gpu


PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read multiple guides online and try and look up your specific GPU and how others have gone about overclocking it.

I dont have much knowledge about this but:
- make sure your PSU can give more power if needed for oc.
- make sure your fans can still keep your pc at an acceptable tempreture.
- do your own research about OCing and about every part of your hardware to make sure that nothing will go wrong after doing it. Dont just rely on replies here.

If you're still unsure about it then dont do it. Just keep reading more guides till you get comfortable with the idea.

Honestly, I can't really see overclocking your GPU helping out much. Usually overclocking by 100mhz results in a 2-4 fps difference and you'll eventually hit a "hard cap" if you don't also overclock the CPU.

If you still really want to do it though to see if it will improve your game at all, I recommend downloading either MSI Afterburner or ASUS's own GPU Tweak.
Both programs should make overclocking your GPU easy and they're each free to use.

I recommend increasing your Boost Clock (ASUS) or Core Clock (MSI Afterburner) by 20-30 mhz and play the game a little until you start noticing problems and then dial that back a bit till the problems go away.

Seeing as you have a 650 Ti BOOST, it's already factory overclocked so there's not to much more you can overclock it by till it hits it's upper limit.

*EDIT*

I also figured I'd mention that since you have a 600 series card, they're less "Overclock friendly" meaning they have some safety features in their bios that will kick in if certain limits are crossed, making your overclock completely pointless in the long run.

Are you having problems running the game or are you just trying to get the best performance possible out of your system? (I can understand that)

Do tests with FurMark for checking for errors after overclocking. Go up in small increments, check stability as you go with 5-minute tests. Once you get a crash, see artifacts, or get FurMark errors, back off to the last stable test point. From there, drop back by 30-50mhz, and run FurMark overnight to test stability. If it's not stable, back off some more. Remember that you want to be sure it's stable. Also, watch temps -- GPUs are designed to run hot as hell, but you don't want it to breach 90 (100C is the usual design window, and you should always leave some wiggle room for hot days and degradation). Crap fans will give you limited room for overclocking, obviously.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gamemako

Do tests with FurMark for checking for errors after overclocking...

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I used to do the same thing, until I read from other users that Furmark is really only good for cranking up your card's temperatures as it doesn't really test real scenario usage of the card in terms of what type of processing and such is done. They have suggested using Unigine Valley instead (http://unigine.com/products/valley/). Running through this a couple of times should help you be more confident in your card's stability. They have a benchmarking feature as well so you can see if there are any improvements when you increment your overclock.

That being said, the only real way you're going to know if your card is stable is to play the actual game for a while. If you don't crash (say after a week of playing) congrats, you're probably stable for FFXIV! Because FFXIV (and all other games) use graphics card for processing in a different way, the card still might crash when playing other games though. Good luck OP!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shioban

Your first question should be;

"Do I need to do this, specifically for FFXIV? What else am I using that needs overclocking, and if so are they lagging?" If FFXIV:ARR is running at 40-60fps (outside crowded areas), then you don't need to do this, you're better avoiding it.

The difference will be so small overclocking a 650ti that it's pretty much not worth your bother with that specific card.


But if you're adamant to do so and are feeling like you just want to experiment, it's essentially a trial and error process where you slowly increase it bit by bit, if you see that it's stable you increase it more and you keep doing so until you see artifacts which looks like this;

Lines or square that aren't meant to be there after overclocking, IMMEDIATLEY start tuning it down until you find the highest stable clock you can find. Your GPU can also completley crap out and had a display driver reset/failure which can kick you to your desktop or lock up your PC forcing you to do a forced-reboot. After turning it down a bit, it's advisable to reboot, seeing as artifacting is usually remains until you reboot your computer (or something the 3D application in question)

http://www.geeks3d.com/public/jegx/2..._fluidmark.jpg

THIS IS RISKY, you /can/ potentially fry your card doing this, and in general over-clocking some cards (as some are very very scalable) will lower it's overall life-time.
DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Consider your power-supply, do you have the wattage to overclock your GPU?
Does your GPU idle at 40-60c already? (If carefully monitor your overclock as it'll increase the temperature).

As this guide suggests, increase it in small small increments, (it's tempting to just go "I'll do 50-100mhz, lolwutdotheyknow" but you're shooting yourself in the foot as it'll make it harder to find your GPU's overclocking 'sweet-spot'.

ALSO BEAR IN MIND, if you have a factory-overclocked GPU take extra caution as they've already tweaked it to a 'way below' the stable pont, so it's more likely to start giving you problems.
http://www.overclock.net/t/112/guide...cking-your-gpu


PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read multiple guides online and try and look up your specific GPU and how others have gone about overclocking it.

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I want you to know that I love you. This is dead on accurate, comprehensive, easy to read, and formatted for visual pleasure.

The Nvidia GeForce 650 Ti BOOST should be able to handle FFXIV easily. There shouldn't really be a need to OC the card to eek out better performance. You're not bottlenecking anywhere right? Though FFXIV is incredibly GPU intensive, it also uses a fair amount of the CPU as well.

I've overclocked my laptop a bit to be able to push higher settings for FFXIV, but I also have a mid end machine and only clock up the frequency on the GPU a bit (100MHz or so max). I didn't OC the core. It generates too much heat and I've found that by pushing a multiplier of 12X on my quad core APU while pushing up the voltages of my CPU VID and NB VID helped me more than pushing my 7670M up as far as I could take it without artifacting/BSOD.

I would recommend that you don't OC your GPU (it should already be able to handle FFXIV easily) but if you decide to, I IMPLORE you, use extreme caution.

Valley is not very sensitive to GPU instability; the ARR character creation benchmark is much more likely to pick up GPU problems, but it might take a loop or two to warm up.

Honestly overclocking your GPU is probably going to do nothing for you, if anything that I5 650 is starving your GPU. Any performance increase you see is going to start with your CPU in this situation.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kittra

I also figured I'd mention that since you have a 600 series card, they're less "Overclock friendly" meaning they have some safety features in their bios that will kick in if certain limits are crossed, making your overclock completely pointless in the long run.

Are you having problems running the game or are you just trying to get the best performance possible out of your system? (I can understand that)

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A good point about the 600 series cards there, I have a 660 and for awhile I had to run with Kboost enabled to keep performance predictable. (Kboost locks the GPU at full power, I wouldn't strongly recommend you not touch that setting unless you know exactly what you are doing.) The drivers seemed to get confused about whether ffxiv was a game or simply a 2d program sometimes it seemed. The latest drivers though haven't given me any issues.

Again though, it's probably your CPU, not your GPU you should be looking at.