Having tried to play Arma2 and finding it impossible. some work was needed doing on the gfx card.
To get the most from the game in both gfx and rendering speeds a good overclock was in order with attention, so often left out, to the noise and effectiveness of the fan control.
I thought I'd post a small tutorial on how to use Rivatuner to overclock your gfx card and primarily alter your fan speeds accordingly.
For the purpose of this tute I’m using my Gigabyte 275 GTX on a p5k with a e8200 overclocked to 3.8GHz and 4gb or 1066 ram. (see the sig for full listing).
Firstly, you’ll need to update your drivers to the latest. Download Rivatuner and make a cuppa as you’ll be sitting at the desk for the next hour.
When you install Rivatuner and open it up not all the features will always be open to you. Rivatuner is often 2 or 3 driver releases behind so you might have to add these entries in manually.
Go to the power user tab and expand the rivatuner system tab. Scroll down again until you get to force driver version. Double click on the value area and it will let you enter in a number. I am using the latest drivers from nvidia which are 190.38. Check what drivers you are running and edit the value accordingly. To enter this value I typed 19038.
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh257/yamunsa/2.png[/IMG]
Now that you have entered a driver value Rivatuner will have opened up more areas to play with.
If your drivers are recognised skip the above and lets get on with overclocking!
To save on making things complicated for me I recommend that a novice overclocker reads an article like this:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-275-overclock-guide/2
These clock speeds reviews are really easy things to find in google. Just type your gfx card details and the word overclock in to the search pane and bingo. I have my 275 system tweaks set to:
Core clock:700
Shader clock:1585
Memory clock:1225
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh257/yamunsa/3.png[/IMG]
These clock speeds were taken from the article but are slightly under. In all honesty I just couldn’t be bothered finding a few more hertz here and there when I could just go ‘bang’ and move on. The clock speeds entered are still above a bog standard 285 GTX so I’m still well chuffed.
So, now that you have found an article that has someone’s benching and you have the relevant clock speeds click on apply and the save icon. I have saved it under ‘push it’ for no other reason than to jolt my memory in the future. (The third picture below shows this).
Now, obviously we are pushing more power through the gfx card which in turn is going to make it hotter. Lets setup the fan controls to cool the card down but also not turn the case in to a noisy wind turbine.
From the overclocking tab now click on the fan tab. I will now show you how to setup your fan controls using a driver based technique in rive. There are other methods using low level optimisation but honestly – this is less confusing.
The 275 comes out of the case with a 40% fan speed set at stock. Nice and quiet… and I like to keep things that way.
As you see in the picture we have 3 slider bars to play with. Like a gfx equaliser we can slide them to and fro and then hit apply. If you move you slider +20% and hit apply you are likely to hear a change in pitch. What we are about to do is increase the fan speed gradually to match the heat of the card.
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh257/yamunsa/4.png[/IMG]
We are going to make a number of custom fan profiles.
As the 275 comes with a standard 40% fan speed I am going to start at 50% as my first profile. Move the slider of the performance 3D bar to 50% and hit apply. Now click the save icon and save the name as ‘50’. Repeat this now in 2% increases up to 66%. This will leave you with profiles 50, 52, 54 etc to chose from.
Once you have completed this ‘ok’ out of this section and click on the Launcher tab.
By pressing the green + symbol we can now make a new launch entry.
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh257/yamunsa/5.png[/IMG]
Press the green plus and chose ‘regular item’ and click ok. Your first entry is going to be your 50% fan profile so name this 50%. Tick the Associated fan profile and using the drop down menu use the corresponding profile.
Repeat this stage for all your profiles. (yes yes I know its boring). Once you have your 50 to 65% entrys I want you to do one more entry.
Its also a regular entry but this time call it ‘Gaming’. Tick the Associated overclocking profile and using the drop down click on ‘Push it’.
Now we’re going to set a schedule to activate our settings. Click on the Scheduler tab and as before click the green plus to make a new entry. (Geez you’ll be pros at this by now).
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh257/yamunsa/6.png[/IMG]
Name the task ‘50’ and using the drop down select the 50% launcher. In the Schedule drop down select ‘on hardware monitoring range event’.
A popup will come up asking you if you wish to “enable hardware monitoring”. Select yes.
Now, make the ‘Data source’ be the core temperature and enter you first value, the range minimum, to be 45 and the max to be 49. next the data sampling period as 10 and the task freezing also as 10. Make sure the ‘display range on hardware graph’ is ticked.
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh257/yamunsa/7.png[/IMG]
Click ‘ok’ and repeat for all of your fan profiles. Make sure that no profile has the same temperatures listed. For example we have set our 50% scheduler to cover the ranges of 45 to 49 degrees. Our 52% scheduler should cover 50 to 52 degrees. 54% covers 53 to 54 degrees etc.
For the last temperature entry extend the range up to 100 degrees. So 66% will cover 65 degrees through to 100.
Lastly add an entry and this time call it ‘Overclock’. Select the Gaming profile you made earlier and select the schedule to be the run task ‘at Riva Tuner’ start up.
Now move back to the Main tab and clicking on the top customise menu select the icon that looks like a magnifying glass over a strip of old film.
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh257/yamunsa/8.png[/IMG]
A whole heap of graphs will appear. Picking which ones you want is entirely personal but for the sake of this exercise we will only consentrate on ‘Core Temprature’.
Click on the ‘Setup’ icon at the bottom of the graph. Scroll through the ‘source’ section and highlight ‘Core Temprature’ – click setup again. Now edit the maximum value limit to 100.00 degrees and if you are one of the lovely people that have a G15 you can also tick the ‘Show core temperature in LCD’ and change the font size to 6x8 so you can read it – click OK!
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh257/yamunsa/10.png[/IMG]
What we have now done is set up an overclocking profile for your graphics card that will start up when you initialise Rivatuner, not when you start your computer.
As the card gets hotter the fan cooling the card will increase its rpm to match the cooling required. By making so many small incremental stages you will not hear any major changes in pitch as the fan increases as well as applying gentle changes to the cooling of your unit.
If you were to monitor the core temps without the above settings you would notice large spikes and troughs with the gfx card rapidly heating and cooling whilst entering and leaving a gaming session. Now you will see a smooth line on the graph as the fan compensates for the additional heat caused by an overclock.
To note: the Gigabyte 275 GTX used for this tute, with the above Rivertuner profiles, even with a good overclock now does not exceed 60 odd degrees. Below is a graph of a 15 min session in ArmA2, Solo mission: Trial By Fire, (including the chopper flight in over the sea), showing that the gpu did not exceed 53 degrees. The video settings were all on very high except post processing turned to low and with a screen res of 1440x900.
[IMG]http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh257/yamunsa/11.png[/IMG]
This session was recorded with a full overclock, as shown, in an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees.
Good luck with your overclock!
