How to Overclock Your Video Card

Tweaking the I/O Bus (Cont’d)

Besides increasing the I/O bus clock rate, you can also increase its voltage. Usually, by increasing its voltage, you will be able to set it at higher clock rates without making the system crash. However, we recommend that you first find the maximum clock rate the I/O bus will run with stability (i.e., without crashing), and only then increase the I/O bus voltage to see if your system will run without crashing using a higher clock rate. Keep in mind that sometimes you won’t be able to improve the overclocking even by increasing the bus voltage.
Not all motherboards provide this option. But from all the motherboards shown before, only the one portrayed in Figure 17 didn’t provide it. On the motherboard in Figure 15, this option was called “AGP OverVoltage Control,” in Figure 16 it was called “AGP Voltage,” in Figures 18 and 19 you would have to select “Advanced Voltage Control” and then would see this option as “NB Core/PCI-E Voltage” (see Figure 20) or “NB to PCIE VGA Voltage” (see Figure 21).

Figure 20:  Option for increasing the PCI Express x16 voltage

Figure 21: Option for increasing the PCI Express x16 voltage

As you may have noticed, the exact name of each option varies considerably, and we tried to give some examples. However, it is impossible to cover all motherboard models available on the market and tell you what each option will be called on your motherboard in particular. We hope that with our examples you at least got an idea as to how to identify these options.