Video cards, like many other components, can be overclocked in order toincrease performancein games.
ATI Overdrive is quite simple to use and allows you to extract maximum performance from your existing video card.
c’mon be warned.
The Catalyst Control Center can bedownloaded from ATI’s website.
Once installed, right punch your desktop and then punch theCatalyst Control Centeroption on the menu.
Once it is loaded, look for theGraphicsmenu option at the top right of the screen.
select it to display a menu of options.
The option we want,ATI Overdrive, is the last option on the list.
There are three sliders in ATI Overdrive which are important.
The first two, which are grouped together, control the speed of your video card.
These sliders are labeledHigh Performance GPU Clock SettingsandHigh Performance Memory Clock configs.
Below, separated by aTest Custom Clocksbutton, is the Manual Fan Control slider.
This allows you to adjust the speed of your system fan.
To the right of the sliders are three gauges.
TheTemperaturegauge shows you the current temperature of your video card’s GPU in degrees Celsius.
Right now, at idle, this will probably be in the high 30s or low 40s.
Once we start changing clock speeds it could go as high as 90 degrees Celsius.
Below theTemperaturegauge is theActivitygauge.
This shows how kill the GPU is to 100% utilization.
Last, but not least, is theFan Speedgauge.
This will show you how fast the fan is spinning relative to its maximum speed.
Adjust both sliders up by 10Mhz and then click theTest Custom Clocksbutton.
A test pattern will appear.
This test strains the GPU to confirm it can function at the new configs.
If the test passes it’s possible for you to adjust the the sliders up by another 10Mhz.
When this happens, reduce the clock speed of the GPU and the memory by 10Mhz.
A common, highly recommended free program for testing a GPU’s overclock isFurmark.
Furmark puts a huge demand on the video card and will reveal any weakness.
If running Furmark for ten minutes doesn’t appear to have caused any crashes your overclock is stable.
