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A standout feature of RTX 50-series GPUs is their willingness to take some good old-fashioned overclocking. No-one was more surprised than us when we booted up stalwart overclocking tool MSI Afterburner and whacked the sliders up on some of our test cards; by contrast the past few generations of GPUs have had very little headroom to play with. For the new cards, however, there’s often a surprising amount of performance left on the table.
Now, thanks to an update file from Unwinder, the creator of Afterburner, you can technically push RTX 50-series memory clocks even further—all the way up to a stonking 36 Gbps.
That’s if you want to risk pushing your card well past its stated limits, of course. First spotted by Uniko’s Hardware, Unwinder posted the updated MSI Afterburner database file on the Guru3D forums, along with installation instructions.
Essentially, backup your installation folder, overwrite a database file with the new .dat file, and you too could be pushing your GDDR7 up into the stratosphere with an extra 3000+ MHz worth of headroom over the standard Afterburner settings.
About that. While the RTX 50-series GPUs we’ve tested so far have been mostly fine with hefty overclocks, each individual card will vary as to how much it can take without causing serious damage.
Even when reported temperatures are well within tolerances, VRAM can cook itself to death very quickly—so if you do decide to take the modified Afterburner plunge, do be aware that you’re risking the health of a very expensive and hard-to-obtain card for what are likely to be minimal performance gains.
What tends to matter more for performance are boost clock speeds, and it’s here we’ve had some pretty staggering results. Our glorious hardware overlord Dave managed to eek out over 500 MHz worth of extra performance from a Founders Edition RTX 5080 before it started to complain, which resulted in 10% higher frame rates.
Similarly, most of the RTX 5070 Ti cards we’ve tested so far have proven themselves capable of similar overclocks, although it must be said, not all. One GPU (which shall remain nameless, as we haven’t officially reviewed it yet) came with a factory overclock setting that made it remarkable unstable, so bear in mind that the silicon lottery factor definitely comes into play here.
Overclocking can be a dark art, and tools like MSI Afterburner have long made the procedure seem simpler than it actually is.
While it’s tempting to whack the sliders over to the far right and see what happens next, there’s always a risk you’ll cook something into the middle of next week and void the warranty. A bit of a boost is probably fine, but asking this amount from your expensive new GPU is potentially asking for trouble if you don’t know what you’re doing.
The signs to look out for when it comes to memory overclocking are incongruous solid blocks or blobs of colour, or sharp stars appearing on the screen. These are the tell-tale signs of your VRAM being pushed too far. The GPU being over-stressed, on the other hand, will likely manifest as erroneous coloured pixels, or bright full-screen flashes of colour.
Should none of that put you off, however, then this tweak is pretty simple to enact. Just promise me you’ll back it down at the first sign of trouble, yes? RTX 50-series cards are difficult enough to get hold of right now as it is, and I’m not sure I can take reading your Reddit post if you manage to burn out such a highly-sought-after bit of silicon in the middle of the current shortage.
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Kurt Indovina
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