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Iv'e always barely been able to play Planetside 2 and recent updates seem to have pushed me over the edge, and can no longer get enough frames for the game to be playable even with 800x600 resolution and 50% render quality. Is overclocking worth it? I know it can cause potential trouble but at this point Its either overclock or take a LOA until i can get a new PC. How big are the risks and what are they? I have a Radeon 7300
I wouldn't go as far as overclocking.. i'd get a new graphics card... How long is it since you updated the parts in your computer?
What i mean by go as far as overclocking is that you could risk your computer breaking down on you :PQuote:
Originally Posted by AOD_Lonearcher
** You can OC your card, but given the age of that card, it wont help much. Even modern GPU's(Especially CPU's) dont get "huge" or real world benefits from OC'ing. It is relatively safe to OC your card, be sure to use MSI Afterburner: http://gaming.msi.com/features/afterburner And just adjust the GPU Clock Speed, dont adjust the Memory Clock speed until you feel you have reached a stable GPU Clock + Voltage.Quote:
Originally Posted by AOD_Rex Crater
* Your Graphics card's latest drivers should be installed, And certain features of MSI Afterburner may not be available, again, due to the age of the card.
The only issue(That I can think of) you'd run into is if your card overheats, due to lack of cooling coupled with increasing the amount of Voltage to the GPU, it will obviously Fry or cause crashes. As long as your conservative with the amount of voltage you decide to increase, you should be ok.
You can get a new Graphics card, as well as Processor & MB. If you cant play at a 800x600 Resolution, then you can get a cheap (assuming your not on a recent Intel/AMD Chipset) MB+CPU and Graphics card for around $270 (ASRock mATX H97 LGA 1150 MB + Intel Pentium G3450 @ 3.4GHz DC w/ no HT + Nvidia GTX 750)
do i risk breaking more than my Graphics card by overclocking? my PC is just some $500 shitbox from Best Buy so cooling isn't probably the best, and i wasn't really planing on buying new parts until i can get a decent PC as my current one dosn't seem like its worth investing in.
No, it shouldn't, not unless it catches fire, which is highly unlikely, It will just fry your card; Thats the WORST CASE scenario.Quote:
Originally Posted by AOD_Rex Crater
If your still sketchy about it use HWMonitor to monitor your Temp.'s: http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
Then look up the rated (safe) operating temperature's of your Graphics card and CPU, and if it reaches any of those temps(Your CPU will most likely shutdown immediately if it reaches its maximum operating temperature[TJMax], but your GPU might not)
yeah ill just go for it. I'm only going to overclock when I play planetside anyway and if i do break it its cheap to replace. Thanks for the advice!
You should always overclock when possible, as long as it can be safely done. Overclocking is essentially free performance so it is always good to get.
Generally overclocking will not get you to a different quality level unless it is some serious CPU bottleneck, but on the GPU side, you can typically get an extra 5-10+FPS. and if a game is heavily CPU bottlenecked, you can sometimes get a good 20-30% performance boost depending on the overclock. E.g., taking your CPU from 3.5GHz, to 4.5GHz+ (sadly not too many games now really benefit from a CPU overclock (with the exception of poorly coded single threaded ones such as second life).
I like to use the newest version of Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, which will let you compare your system to others'. It will let you download tuning profiles from people who match your systems spec's the most and show you their benchmark.
On my system I chose a benchmark not at the highest rating as I kind of baby the safety of my system.