It’s been about five years since I upgraded to my current PC, and with recent titles like Watchdogs Legion, my GTX 970 is starting to show its graphical age, particularly when you start comparing standard graphics settings to those with RTX enabled. It all looks very clean and shiny. However, Nvidia’s RTX cards are far too expensive for me at the moment. Plus I’m quite reluctant to drop money on say, a 2080ti when the new 30 series is now on the market.

So, in a bid to tie me over until the costs level out, I installed MSI Afterburner and Kombustor, and had a go at overclocking the 970. Yep, I’ve finally popped my overclocking cherry.

Following a couple of Youtube Tutorials, I tinkered with the settings, increasing the core clock and memory clock frequencies incrementally before it all started to get a bit unstable. Running tests from userbenchmark.com before and after the overclocking showed a decent improvement in performance and % score, squeezing a few extra FPS out of the old dear. I also ramped up the fan speed to 100%, so the system stays much cooler when handling more complex processes (even if I now have a small wind turbine under my desk).

If you want some extra visual juice from your machine but don’t have the choice of upgrading to a newer graphics card at the moment, then overclocking your current device might be an option for you. Just bear in mind that it is possible to put too much stress on your setup, so I’d recommend using tools like Afterburner with a guide to avoid damaging your computer.