Overclock your card

Launch the Display Settings applet, click 'Advanced Settings', choose your display adaptor's tab and fire up its control panel. If this is an ATI card then you should see an Overdrive section with sliders for GPU core and memory clockspeeds; Nvidia cards have the same, and add a Shader Clock slider for good measure. (Don't see that? Make sure you're using the Nvidia drivers, not those provided with Windows, and install the Nvidia System Tools from here.)

Tempting though it might be, don't immediately push all these sliders to the maximum just to see what happens. Your PC will almost certainly crash, unless your video card overheats and dies before that happens. It's much better to take a gradual approach, one slider at a time.

Push up the Memory Core clock by maybe 10MHz, save the changes and then run something like the Crysis benchmark (demo at www.crysisdemo.com, benchmarking tool here). If the demo looks fine then repeat the process, perhaps reducing the increment to 5MHz after a couple of overclocks.

Crysis

CRYSIS: Tweaking just two configuration settings almost tripled our Crysis frame rate

If you've pushed the card too far then artefacts will begin to appear: strange lines, noise and general video oddities. In this case you should make a note of your last successful clockspeed, return to the default settings and move on to the next slider.

When finished, you'll have the highest successful value for each clock, so try setting all the clocks at the appropriate value. This probably won't be stable, so wind back the clocks you pushed furthest and try again until you're artefact-free.

RivaTuner

OVERCLOCKING: RivaTuner is an excellent video overclocking tool that works with both ATI and Nvidia cards

We tried this on a test PC and managed to increase our GeForce 8800 GTS performance by 14 per cent – nothing spectacular, but not bad for a couple of hours' work. Be sure to monitor your GPU temperature and increase fan speeds if necessary. RivaTuner has everything you need to safely tweak both ATI and Nvidia video cards.

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