OVERCLOCK A GEFORCE GTX 560 TI

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 560 Ti, which is based on the company's mainstream GF114- GPU, has proven to be quite a ca­pable graphics card in its price segment. To prevent the card from being too fast and potentially encroaching on the more expensive GeForce GTX 570's territory, however, Nvidia had to delicately balance the 560 Ti’s features and performance. The GeForce GTX 570 is powered by a pared-down version of the much more expensive GF110 GPU—to cannibalize its sales would be bad for Nvidia and its board partners, indeed.

With the right tools and a bit of ex­perimenting, it's easily possible to sig­nificantly boost the performance of the more affordable GeForce GTX 560 Ti. The MSI Afterburner GPU tuning utility, for ex­ample, gives users the ability to not only overclock their GeForce GTX 560 Ti cards land many other graphics cards, as well], but also alter fan speeds and GPU volt­ages for even more extreme overclocks.

To illustrate just how much perfor­mance is left under the GeForce GTX 560 Ti's hood, we grabbed MSI's already factory-overclocked GeForce GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II card and did some tweaking with Afterburner. The first steps in the process are obviously downloading and installing Afterburner. We recommend downloading the latest beta build avail­able at bit.ly/3f5il3 to ensure the broadest compatibility. It wasn't until Afterburner v2.2.0 beta 9 that the 560 Ti was even sup­ported, so if you've got a newer graphics card, using the latest beta is the way to go.

After downloading and installing After­burner, launch it. A simple menu with a few sliders and hardware monitoring informa­tion will open. You could begin overclock­ing right away, but there are some hidden options that you need to enable in order to unlock the full potential of the app. At the lower corner of the main window, click the Settings button. A new window will open with a number of options available; tick the Unlock Voltage Control and Unlock Voltage Monitoring options and then click OK. Then close and re-open Afterburner and the voltage monitor and voltage con­trol sliders should be available.

Our particular MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II started with a core voltage of 1000mV, or 1v (although it was reported at .95v in the voltage monitor), an 880MHz GPU clock with 1,760MHz shaders and 2,100MHz GDDR5 memory. (The actual memory clock was 1,050MHz with an ef­fective data rate of 4.2Gb/s. Afterburner reports DDR speeds.] Like a CPU, pump­ing more voltage into a GPU should allow for higher frequencies—within reason- provided the GPU has adequate cooling. Without modding a card's cooler, however, cranking up the voltage beyond about 5-9 percent isn't advisable. The Twin Frozr II cooler from MSI is fairly capable, though, and the card has a robust voltage regu­lator module, so we were confident we could push our particular card much fur­ther than stock.

Without tweaking our card's GPU core voltage, its GPU could hit 940MHz with de­cent stability. Increasing the GPU's core voltage to 1.087v, however, allowed us to

push the GPU all the way up to 992MHz, an increase of 112MHz (12.7 percent) over stock and 170MHz (20.6 percent) over Nvidia's reference spec for the 560 Ti. Just for giggles, we also increased the memory clock to 2,161MHz, but didn't have much success beyond that number. The fan speed was maxed out to ensure the lowest possible temps.

Our tweaking was well worth the ef­fort. The stock MSI 560 Ti Twin Frozr

II offered up 25fps and a score of 629 in the Unigine Heaven 2.5 benchmark and 32.2fps in Alien vs. Predator.* At its over­clocked frequencies, though, the card managed 26.9fps and a score of 681 in Unigine Heaven and 34.6fps in AvP, in­creases of 8.2 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively. Not bad for doing little more than downloading a free utility and turn­ing a few knobs.

* Benchmarks were run at 1920x1200 with 4xAA and maximum tessellation enabled.