Is it worth overclocking graphics cards?

[qubit]

Looking at reviews, articles and forum posts on TPU and elsewhere, graphics cards from the last few years seem to be engineered to hardly overclock at all. They give minimal performance gains, if any, and possibly at the cost of greatly increased power consumption and heat, therefore, do you think it's worth going through the time, effort and sometimes risk, of overclocking the card?

 

[lowrider_05]

For my part, i only Overclock in the sense of Undervolting while also slightly raising the clocks so i get more efficency out of the GPU

 

[Hyderz]

overclocking these days not so much, now undervolting is where the real gains are
where undervolting might not net you extra fps but you use less power while maintaining same fps and making your gpu runs slightly cooler

 

[GreiverBlade]

in my view, AIB already drive to the utmost limits GPU that are already really close to these aforementioned limits when released by AMD and Nvidia

in the recent years, AIB models have little to no extra Oomph over a reference/foolers edition, tho they have better designs or cooling solutions which would be what i ask from a custom card, given the little potential OC yield nowadays, undervolting is indeed the new way of tinkering a GPU/CPU (a bit sad tho, but i am glad i was born beginning of the 80s good time good time ahah )

 

[delshay]

For my part undervolt is king. I prefer a constant frame rate other than one that's very erratic, ie throttling. ..Plus, I prefer very low noise from all fans.

 

[trog100]

maybe overclocking is a poor description.. fine tuning might be a better one.. doing something the manufacturers cant do..

trog

 

[Tomgang]

I voted others because I overclock, but mostly do it for fun and not running it for every day use. I oc for benchmark runs. Else the oc is only mostly giving small increases but for to much more wattage use. Specially in these inflation prices on electricity. I mostly undervolte and use power target to limit the cards power consumption so performance and power consumption fits for the current game used. There is no reason for to let my card use 380 watt if it can deliver enough performance for let's say 200 watt.

 

[xtreemchaos]

nowa days na ,unless you're after beating a overclocking benchmark thingy but there mainly holded by commercial means overlockers who get the best of everything mostly for free so its very hard to compete for the average joe blogs.

 

[agent_x007]

Undervolt, and *downclock.
*I can live with up to -10% lower core frequency than stock (but, I expect 100% stability at this lower frequency - regardless of workload).

 

[Ruru]

When you have this much (or more) headroom especially for the memory like my 1080 Ti has, why the hell not? Overclocked every card since GF2 MX.

 

[GreiverBlade]

When you have this much (or more) headroom especially for the memory like my 1080 Ti has, why the hell not? Overclocked every card since GF2 MX.

View attachment 265301

that's relevant to the "last gen" that was worth OC ... my 1070 was OC'ed too (factory OC plus my own OC work, from a time where the AIB were doing mild OC and leaving quite a bit for the end user to play with) ... but gen past RTX 20X0 and RX 5X00 weren't that kind in term of headroom ...

 

[Ruru]

that's relevant to the "last gen" that was worth OC ... my 1070 was OC'ed too (factory OC plus my own OC work, from a time where the AIB were doing mild OC and leaving quite a bit for the end user to play with) ... but gen past RTX 20X0 and RX 5X00 weren't that kind in term of headroom ...

Well, looks that this year's "put your kidney on ebay" card has also some memory OC headroom, at least from TPU's review

 

[GreiverBlade]

Well, looks that this year's "put your kidney on ebay" card has also some memory OC headroom, at least from TPU's review

View attachment 265306

that's not much nonetheless
the OC induced gain is not that high compared to previous gens (10XX, RX 5XX and before)

and it does not perform better than lesser OC from AIB customs

end user OC is technically dead, outside "extreme **LOL**" overclocking competition (probably with highly binned chips, even tho the sponsored "pofessional **LOL**" overclocker will say otherwise )

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

It was a thing, my Vega is one of the last cards worth touching though, I don't see much point on new cards due to boost algorithms.

 

[nguyen]

Overclock (higher clocks at same voltage) + Undervolting (capping max voltage/clocks) = better gaming experience.

 

[Ruru]

that's not much nonetheless
the OC induced gain is not that high compared to previous gens (10XX, RX 5XX and before)
View attachment 265308

and it does not perform better than lesser OC from AIB customs
View attachment 265307

end user OC is technically dead, outside "extreme **LOL**" overclocking competition (probably with highly binned chips, even tho the sponsored "pofessional **LOL**" overclocker will say otherwise )

Sucks that TPU tests OC performance only with that ancient Heaven, hell, I remember running it with GTX 470 back in the day.

 

[Outback Bronze]

Voted no. Casual gamer here. Prob not even that these days : (

 

[ARF]

Sucks that TPU tests OC performance only with that ancient Heaven, hell, I remember running it with GTX 470 back in the day.

Maybe there is a reason to use Heaven - as you can see despite being very old, it works with faster graphics and scales well.

To answer the question - No, of course not.

More reasonable is to undervolt and have cooler and quieter card with the same performance. As normal people should and would do..

 

[Vario]

I undervolt with Afterburner, my 3060 was able to drop from 1.10V to 0.950V for same clocks, off the top of my head, the temperature under load is something like 20C lower and wattage 40 watts lower.

 

[bug]

Looking at reviews, articles and forum posts on TPU and elsewhere, graphics cards from the last few years seem to be engineered to hardly overclock at all. They give minimal performance gains, if any, and possibly at the cost of greatly increased power consumption and heat, therefore, do you think it's worth going through the time, effort and sometimes risk, of overclocking the card?

This is not exactly how I see it.

In the past, power delivery was much simpler/crude. Because of silicone variance, different chips would clock very differently. Yet, in order to be able to offer a guarantee, manufacturers had to settle for the lowest sustainable frequencies, often leaving a lot of untapped performance on the table. And you could get that back by means of overclocking.
Over time, power delivery evolved significantly, so today little (if any) potential is left untapped. Everything scales dynamically until the silicon physically can't take any more. And that's a good thing: your shiny new GPU (or CPU, for that matter) is doing the best job it can do out of the box.

Sure, you can squeeze some extra juice if you really know what you're doing and you have something like an EVGA Kingpin (RIP), but for anything that's not a hardcore enthusiast, overclocking is effectively dead.

 

[INSTG8R]

I have great thermals so in my case I don‘t see why not. That said I’m only using the AMD OC options available so its fairly limited but I’m able to max them out, undervolt, and still have great temps and get a fairly significant higher boost which does help.

 

[AusWolf]

My opinion might not be the most popular one, but I think overclocking is and always has been overrated. If the performance difference isn't something that you feel without an FPS counter on screen, then why do it at all?

 

[P4-630]

For benchmarking perhaps, for gaming few extra fps , not so much...

 

[bug]

My opinion might not be the most popular one, but I think overclocking is and always has been overrated. If the performance difference isn't something that you feel without an FPS counter on screen, then why do it at all?

There were select few cards that had a lot of untapped potential. But that was years ago (remember the Radeon 9500?).
These days, you're just burning a lot more power for 5-10% more fps that do not translate into any improvement in gameplay.

 

[Outback Bronze]

overclocking

Futuremark. And the rest.