Hi guys, Im new to overclocking and have always gone with keeping my card runnong stock. Recently I have heard that AMD cards overclock really well, and I wanted to know where I could learn to overclock safley. I own the Radeon hd 7870 Ghz edition. Sorry f this comes off as a dumb newbie questions, but I am new to more advanded hardware work. Thanks!
What 7870 do you have? E.g. Sapphire, Asus, Gigabyte and so on?
Sapphire
I have the sapphire 7870 ghz and overclocked it. I only had a about a 5-7 fps increase. Sadly the sapphire models are starting to be voltage locked. Like mine thats why i didn't get much of an increase. I found overclocking the cpu gave me a better boost. I got from 3.2 to 3.9ghz and gained like 10-15fps. So with a moddest cpu overclock and gpu overclock you will see better results. But if you wish to continue on overclocking get msi afterburner to overclock with.
download asus gpu tweek (i have a sapphire 7870, it's voltage locked, gpu tweek will give you a small bit of voltage control), download unigene heaven to use as a stress test
raise your core clock 50 Mhz and run the stress test until it starts artifacting, the computer crashes, or it gets too hot, then back it down 2 notches (if the almost crashes and your framerate plumets, your done and you need to restart the computer), do the same for the memory clock
you can raise the voltage as much as it will let you, the overclocks should be more stable, but it will get hotter
I also have the Phenom II 4x 965 Black and am thinking of upgrading to the FX-6300. How overclockable are these two?
Both of those cpus are very overclockable just depends on you motherboard and you cooler.