[SOLVED] Overclock Fail?

Oct 7, 2019
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Yo. Just another chump having difficulties with overclocking a GPU. I've installed MSI afterburner, have been running benchmarks in Valley, and have overclocked the GPU core clock from around 1030 to 1270, and got the core memory from 1200 to 1300 although I admittedly haven't messed around with the memory speeds too much more.

But before I go into this anymore, a little bit of information about my setup. My setup is old. 5 years old to be exact, maybe a little older it's been a while haha. I'm in the process of purchasing the parts for a new computer and am trying to get some extra performance out of my current computer for the time being. The cooling probably isn't the best at the moment, two of my fans are going out that I intend to replace. So the GPU does, unfortunately, hit 79 to 80 degrees C when running Valley for extended periods of time. Additionally, I'm running this computer into a 65 inch TV because I don't have the room for/currently the money for an actual monitor. So this poor computer is having to render frames to 3840x2160. But, I've been setting the resolution of Valley to a much more reasonable resolution for the sake of testing. I've had my eye on my CPU core speeds in MSI during my benchmarking, and there definitely isn't any bottlenecking happening as far as I can tell. None of my cores ever even get close to 100% usage. And finally the BIOS on this computer is old. I don't have Vsync. There's nothing holding back this GPU from doing what it needs to do.

So on to my problem. Despite all of the overclocking I've done, which seems like a lot to me as an underexperienced user, and getting a little over 200MHZ more out of my GPU, I've been getting the same scores in Valley as I do with base clocks. What's happening?

Edit:
Hey it's me again. So I got to messing around with my graphics settings a little bit, which I suppose I should have done before making this post, and sure enough I've made a noob mistake. I've solved my own issue. I watched MSI afterburner and noticed that when I was running my benchmarks on the lower graphics settings, I wasn't getting full GPU usage. So I thought that maybe I wasn't seeing a performance increase because even though I was overclocking the GPU, it wasn't being stressed enough. Although it still makes sense that I would see a benchmark improvement with an overclock even if I wasn't utilising the GPU completely, but I digress. Perhaps I'm bottlenecked anyway, or there is some issue somewhere else, or I just don't know what I'm talking about.

After jacking the resolution back up to the whopping 3840x2160 and watching my FPS tank, I ran some tests again. Now I've only run each test once, so consistency might be under question, but regardless at base clock I got a score of 911 and overclocked around 1050, so around a 15% performance increase, which held the GPU under roughly a 98% load pretty consistently. Whereas prior to, with a lower resolution I was recieving scores around 2200 hitting around the same number no matter what, overclocked or not.

Now I have no idea how to mark this threat solved. But if anyone cares to indulge me and teach someone new as to perhaps why my GPU overclock isn't getting me any sort of performance boost in lower resolutions anyway, I would be much obliged. VSync isn't on, so it couldn't possibly be that I'm outside my televisions native resolution because even if I was, that wouldn't slow down my GPU. Right?
 
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Solution
What GPU do you have?

Your 4k TV ought to have an upscaler to at least upscale from 1080p resolution. That would go a long way to improving frame rates.