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I have recently bought Zotac GeForce 430GT video card for my system and I have installed the same with the latest driver and I am not having any issues with the same as well. I just wanted to overclock my Zotac GeForce 430GT for gaming as it is capable of the same. I don’t have much idea about overclocking. So is there anyone who can explain it to me along with the steps that is required.
As far as Overclocking is concerned I will like to inform you that it is a technique that helps the hardware to work on their clock frequency rather than their standard. When you do so you get better performance, video card basically works at specific clock rate which is also known as “core clock”. Your Zotac GeForce 430GT video card has two clock signals where one of the clock signals is used by “shader engines” whereas the other one is used by rest of the chip. Increasing core clock increases shader clock as it is linked to core clock. In a video card GPU is connected to video memory with the help of dedicated memory bus. For increasing the performance of a video card one can increase clock rate, memory bus basically work’s by transferring 2 data per clock cycle. One datum per clock cycle is regular memory transfer of a video card but GeForce 430GT uses DDR technique for doubling the transfer rate compared to regular memory transfer of a video card. 300 MHz and 600 MHz DDR are same as DDR refers to double, memory bus transfers certain number of bits for eg 64 bits, 128 bits, 256 bits between the GPU and video memory. You are not allowed to change your 128 bit video card in to 256 bits as they are fixed, you are not allowed to increase the video memory size as well. Other than this GPU is connected via I/O slot to the motherboard and the connection performs at a specific clock rate. There are some motherboard that allows you to increase this clock rate but the same is not followed by all the boards. Increasing that clock rate depends on motherboards and not video card as I/O slot where we install the video card is controlled by motherboard. There are some boards that offer the privilege of increasing the I/O slot voltage as well and such motherboards are also known as overclocking-oriented motherboards and they can really help in doing a higher overclocking for video card.
That was really a good explanation for Overclocking, anyways I am here to help you further with the same. For Overclocking you need to have program called MSI Afterburner. You can get other ones as well but MSI Afterburner is highly recommended.After that You need to adjust below parameters for overclocking your card.
- Core Clock- You should adjust it with +5/10 increments in order to avoid artifacts.
- Shader clock- You should adjust it with +5/10 increments in order to avoid artifacts.
- Memory clock- You should adjust it with +5/10 increments in order to avoid artifacts.
- Voltage control- this is the most important part, and even this has to be adjust with +5/10 increments.
If you increase Core Clock, Shader clock, Memory clock, Voltage control or any one of them exponentially then they will result in heat production. So make sure that you are keeping an eye on the temps, for that you can use GPU-Z / GPU Shark. When you are done with all this setting and you are sure that the card is stable then you can test out the stress with Furmark or 3d mark 11. If you want then you can use some other similar programs but these are recommended ones. There are other things that you need to keep in mind, like the stress test should get completed without any errors and the Core temps should be less than 100 C.