Question Should I bother overclocking?

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DylBKR

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Mar 31, 2023
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My PC is very new has a 7 7700x CPU and 6800xt GPU in it should I be looking to overclock. I questioned it yesterday after noting that my system is like 5Fps away from running Jedi Survivor with epic settings at solid 60 without FSR. I have no clue about how to do it really so guidance provided it makes sense to me would me very appreciated.
 
I honestly don't think it's worth it. A <10% difference is barely noticeable if at all and you could probably adjust one of the settings to get the same result anyway without losing much image quality. That is, even if you had an A-B comparison, you'd be really pixel hunting.

But whatever helps you sleep better at night I guess.
 
DylBKR said:
My PC is very new has a 7 7700x CPU and 6800xt GPU in it should I be looking to overclock. I questioned it yesterday after noting that my system is like 5Fps away from running Jedi Survivor with epic settings at solid 60 without FSR. I have no clue about how to do it really so guidance provided it makes sense to me would me very appreciated.
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A 7700X and 6800XT...assuming you're on a 1440p, 144hz monitor. That's a solid system, you should even be able to play a lot of games with raytracing so long as you keep the settings sane, maybe with a little FSR2. OC'g isn't really necessary but if you like to tweak it's not very hard, and there's always the challenge of finding the limits of your hardware. RadeonSettings is an ideal tool...maybe even the best... for doing it too.

Some low-hanging fruit after you enable it are to enable Fast Memory timings. Also make sure AMD Smart Access Memory is enabled which might need a BIOS setting change. This isn't overclocking just using the card's capabilities you paid for. After that, it gets a bit strange as things can seem a bit weird with the way it works.

If you do nothing more than undervolt you AND your card will appreciate it. Stock voltage is 1.150V, UV to 1.100V and you'll see a remarkable improvement in GPU temperature -- with a resulting performance improvement as well since modern GPU's are thermally constrained. Being cooler, fans will run less and at lower RPM while returning improved performance. I believe that would be a win-win-win, something you should do. Some 6800XT's stay stable UV'd to 1.050V, the best mine can do reliably is 1.075V running a Time Spy stress test. But don't expect that to be a hard voltage limit, it looks to me like a bias adjustment that runs a lowered V/f curve than stock. You'll see the GPU will still hit much higher voltages in monitoring utilities (Afterburner's Rivatuner is ideal for this) if it feels it needs to, just never as high as stock settings. That's part of what makes it seem strange.

After undervolting, increasing the power limit is the next performance improvement. Performance can increase but it can also decrease if gone too far. Thats because the increased power draw makes the card run hotter to a point it will limit clocks and degrade performance in long gaming sessions or stress tests. You can customize the fan curve to cool it better and push it more, limited only by your tolerance for fan noise. This is also why undervolting is the better first step since it lowers power required, and temperature.

And then you start the overclocking. But that bumps up temperatures a LOT and will affect stability, forcing you to back out your undervolt which drives up temperature even more making you question the sanity opening up the power limit. The higher temperatures can bring in clock dithering that negates any OC you dialed in. There's a delicate balance between your undervolt, extra power, temperature and overclock you have to find. Some never do and the actual performance benefit from the GPU overclock vs. just the undervolt and power bump truly can be pretty small when you do find it. Unless you use some sort of heroic cooling for the GPU: liquid cooling kits work great for this.

But if you just do the undervolt with a power limit bump and nothing else you're miles ahead since it's also better for GPU longevity, that's why so many suggest doing that and nothing more.
 
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Zerk2012 said:
I don't believe in overclocking a video card that is factory overclocked, very little to gain and you run the risk of bricking your card.
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You can't brick a gpu by overclocking it, it has built in protection to stop you from doing harm to it. The worst would be to cause a shutdown. You can always get another 5% out of an already overclocked gpu. He wants to get to 60fps and that would only be 5fps (average). That would not bring anything into the danger zone. (80's music playing in my head)
 
Fix_that_Glitch said:
You can't brick a gpu by overclocking it, it has built in protection to stop you from doing harm to it. The worst would be to cause a shutdown. You can always get another 5% out of an already overclocked gpu. He wants to get to 60fps and that would only be 5fps (average). That would not bring anything into the danger zone. (80's music playing in my head)
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You need to check some of the threads on here where they bricked the card.
 
Zerk2012 said:
You need to check some of the threads on here where they bricked the card.
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In a modern video card the only way I can see it being bricked due to an overclock is if the card was poorly designed to begin with where one of the components blew out. So really, as much as I offer sympathy to the person who bought said card, they did identify what to avoid, assuming what they did was reasonable.
 
Don’t bother overclocking. CPUs at least are decent about boosting and getting good performance from the cpu. As far as gpus, they may have some protection but I don’t think you’d get much more than a few percentage points so why bother.
 
I think at this point we should stop calling it "overclocking." Yes the companies list specs such as "base clock speed" and "boost clock speed", but the reality is every video card since give or take 2016 basically increases the clock speed until it hits a limit. That limit is what's going to prevent the card from clocking higher. And even then, the limits on most cards are already generous anyway, and pushing it further is akin to what I'd call activating War Emergency Power (if you don't know what that is, look at the link). So there's no baseline clock speed anymore, it's just whatever the card thinks it can get away with.

Even the so-called "OC" thing that most video card tweakers like MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision do isn't actually adjusting any clock speed limits. It's undervolting the video card in the sense that it's going to apply less voltage for a given clock speed.
 
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No point in OC now. The fps difference isn't much better than margin of error, and can easily end up lowering overall performance, as seen with Ryzen single core performance dropping as multi-core performance boosted or locking Intel cores at a value which ends up lower than single core boosts and uses a ton of power doing exactly nothing.

With gpus, even a 10% performance boost is still only 3-5fps at best, which you can't see anyway, so no point in pushing the card harder for a gain that's essentially worthless.
 
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