A GPU’s Tale: The Overclocking Pitfall

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• Increased Power Draw
• Higher Operating Temperature
• Screen Flickering
• Occasional Crashes While Gaming

Overclocking lets you squeeze every last drop of performance that your graphics card has to offer. But is it worth all the effort and potential downsides? Well, not in my experience with my GeForce RTX 4090. Let’s discuss why.

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Increased Power Draw

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Increased power draw is an inevitable side effect of overclocking, no matter how safely you overclock your graphics card . That’s because to get more performance out of your graphics card, you need to provide it with more voltage in most cases.

Yes, you can technically raise your graphics card’s core and memory clocks without upping the voltage. However, that comes with its fair share of downsides—like stability issues—which we’ll get to in a bit.

When you raise the voltage or power limit slider in a GPU overclocking tool like MSI Afterburner, your graphics card draws more power from the wall to give you that extra performance.

In my experience with my RTX 4090, the energy consumption skyrocketed by 15-30 percent for a 2-5 percent boost in frame rate across various games. So, is overclocking worth the increased electricity costs? Not in my book.

Higher Operating Temperature

Another downside of raising the voltage while overclocking is increased heat dissipation. Simply put, the more voltage you supply, the more heat your graphics card generates. And nobody wants their graphics card to run too hot.

This isn’t a major issue if you have a triple-fan GPU with massive heatsinks or if it’s liquid-cooled. My RTX 4090 is a liquid-cooled AIO unit with a 360mm radiator. So, for me personally, this is the least of my problems.

However, if your graphics card runs hot most of the time, expect a negative impact on its lifespan. Therefore, if you plan to keep your graphics card for several years, I highly recommend against overclocking it.

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Screen Flickering

Screen flickering is an issue you’ll encounter when your GPU overclock isn’t stable. In most cases, this happens when the voltage supplied to your graphics card isn’t enough to keep the clocks stable.

People often overclock without raising the voltage to avoid higher power draw and temperature, but that comes at the cost of your graphics card’s stability. You may experience flickering while playing games or sometimes even while navigating in Windows.

While there are several ways to fix screen flickering on Windows , the only way to resolve it after an overclock is by either raising your GPU voltage or reverting the clocks to their default values.

Occasional Crashes While Gaming

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Besides screen flickering, your favorite games may occasionally crash after you overclock your GPU. This issue is predominant in games that are GPU-intensive. Once again, this is a good sign that your overclock isn’t stable.

Therefore, you’ll either need to increase your GPU voltage or lower the core and memory clocks until you no longer experience crashes.

You may also experience game crashes if you’ve overclocked your CPU or RAM. That’s why it’s important to safely stress test your overclocked CPU, GPU, and RAM before you start playing games.

As you can see, overclocking isn’t for everybody. Unless you really need that last bit of performance and think it’d make a noticeable difference in your favorite games, it’s not worth the effort because of the problems you may have to deal with.