What Should I Be Clocking My Graphics Card too?

[Hockeynut]

I have a Gigabite gtx 950 and i am new to pc's and pc gaming. What numbers should i be using inside of msi afterburner for overclocking my graphics card. I don't know what the stock numbers are but i would like to overclock it, but i have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to this. Right now my card is at max (118) for the power limit and for both the core clock and the memory clock are at 500MHz and it isn't running games very well (my card has stock cooling btw). I have a AMD FX-8320e at stock and 8 gigs of ram, I don't know if this changes anything but i thought i would add it just in case. Thank you for the help.

 

[MakotoSGT]

I have a Gigabite gtx 950 and i am new to pc's and pc gaming. What numbers should i be using inside of msi afterburner for overclocking my graphics card. I don't know what the stock numbers are but i would like to overclock it, but i have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to this. Right now my card is at max (118) for the power limit and for both the core clock and the memory clock are at 500MHz and it isn't running games very well (my card has stock cooling btw). I have a AMD FX-8320e at stock and 8 gigs of ram, I don't know if this changes anything but i thought i would add it just in case. Thank you for the help.

I would honestly advise against it
But if you really want to experiment.

Then okay.

First thing when you overclock is you gotta look at your temps, High temps are bad for your GPU's health.
So keep it under 80c
Secondly, can I know what clocks your gpu is at by default so I can tell you how far you shouldnt go?

 

[Hockeynut]

I am kinda new to the website too, I liked and appreciated your response and didn't mean to down vote it, and I don't know how to quote it or I would... But here is the link to the graphics card that I bought.

N950OC-2GD/dp/B013XFK0R6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1465014215&sr=8-2&keywords=gigabyte+gtx+950

P.S. I also don't know how to make this a link and not just a bunch of letters and numbers on the screen

 

[Design Factor]

Here's the steps I took on overclocking my first GPU which was a R7 240 from AMD.

Before you do anything in MSI After Burner get a note pad and download a bench mark app such as Valley or Heaven bench mark, and run them on stock clock speeds & jot down your GPU's temp, core clock speed in-game as well as your memory clock speed in-game and lastly the score and FPS.

Now open MSI After Burner & up the power limit slider to max & push your Core clock speed up by 10-15 MHz and after you do that run your preferred benchmarking software again. When that's finish, again jot down your results. Now continue this process, and here's how you know when to stop while the benchmark software is running your looking for artifacting (which is distortions and other visual inconsistencies google for more details) as well as keeping an eye on your GPU temps making sure they don't go over 80C. Whenever you do see artifacting or high temps dial back you core clock to the previous state & run the benchmark again (it would be a plus to play a GPU intensive game for a bit as well to put it in a real world situation) and when that's finish you have your safe core clock.

Now for your Memory core clock it's safe to up the slider by 30 MHz following every other step afore mentioned as if this was the core clock.

When all of this is finished I'd strongly recommend running a GPU intensive game for a couple of hours to really stress the GPU with the modified clock speeds, and again if you don't see any artifacting or high temps it's safe to say you overclocked you first GPU.

I also used this method on my fairly new GPU by MSI the 960 and it runs well.

 

[Hockeynut]

Thank you