Skip to main content

Overclocking made simple: Nvidia RTX cards turn up the heat with a single click

Image used with permission by copyright holder

If the idea of overclocking your graphics card is scary, intimidating, or just boring, but you want the improved performance anyway, Nvidia’s new RTX-series of graphics cards may be just what you’re looking for. The new cards will be supported by an application called Nvidia Scanner, which will automatically adjust clock speeds and voltages to get the absolute maximum performance from your card with just a single click.

Recommended Videos

Historically, graphics card overclocking has been more complicated than CPU overclocking. You needed specialist software or a modified BIOS — and even then it was rarely as easy as just upping the multiplier. Today, it’s much easier, with a number of software tools to make the process more layman-friendly (here’s how we do it), but testing for stability can still be a laborious process. Nvidia’s Scanner is designed to be the next step in that evolution, making it possible to overclock your new RTX GPU to the max, without risking crashes or overheating.

With increased power requirements over their last-generation predecessors, Nvidia’s Founders Edition RTX-series GPUs come equipped with dual-fan coolers for the first time. That extra cooling power means that they should have some extra thermal headroom, and Nvidia claims that it planned to leverage that all along with easy overclocking.

An early example of Nvidia Scanner at work in EVGA Precision X1 Nvidia

Nvidia Scanner is a big part of that, but it’s not an application — it’s an API that software partners like EVGA and MSI can utilize for their own overclocking tools. According to PC World, Nvidia Scanner is designed to speed up the often slow process of small speed increases in between stability tests. With the press of the Test button, the API will test your graphics card’s ability at different frequencies and voltages, all the way up to its practical maximum. When Scanner starts to detect low-level mathematical errors, it can shut the overclock down before a system crash occurs, making it much easier to avoid hard reboots and system crashes.

This automated overclocking is claimed to take around 20 minutes to complete, but once it’s there, you should have a pretty stable graphics card overclock that you can then fine-tune yourself if you want to push things further or tweak noise levels and power usage.

There are some drawbacks, namely the limitation to core clock increases and the Turing-series of RTX cards. Nvidia is looking to expand into older GPU generations in the future, and may make it possible to use Nvidia Scanner for automated memory overclocking at some point too.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
Nvidia’s RTX 5080 laptop GPU almost makes the flagship obsolete
Upcoming Nvidia RTX 40-series laptops over a black and green background.

Nvidia makes some of the best graphics cards to be found in laptops, but some of these GPUs might be closer in terms of performance than you'd expect. The laptop version of the RTX 5080 has been benchmarked, and it's shockingly close to the RTX 5090. Are the laptops equipped with the RTX 5090 still worth buying?

Notebookcheck was able to compare the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080 laptop GPUs under ideal circumstances: In two iterations of the same laptop. The cards were both paired with AMD's Ryzen 9 9955HX CPU, which removes a lot of the usual benchmarking discrepancy you'd run into in laptops. When both are installed in similar systems, we can get a good feel of how each card performs without external factors, and that is the case in these benchmarks.

Read more
Laptop GPU names feel like a scam
Gamer playing Overwatch on GIGABYTE G6X gaming laptop from GIGABYTE gaming laptop deals.

Despite the top-tier graphics cards from the past few generations being absolute power hogs, drawing hundreds upon hundreds of watts to deliver what feels like increasingly-modest performance gains, their laptop counterparts have taken enormous leaps in capabilities. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have made great strides in what onboard graphics and dedicated graphics chips can do with relatively limited power and cooling options.

But even so, mobile GPU naming feels like a scam. The latest example is the flagship Nvidia RTX 50 GPU of this generation, the RTX 5090. On desktop it's about 30% faster than an RTX 4090, but with boatloads more memory, support for the latest multi frame generation technology, and a near-600W TDP to go with it.

Read more
Would you pay less for a defective GPU?
The RTX 5090 sitting on top of the RTX 4080.

The graphics card market is an absolute mess at the moment. Stock issues persist despite Nvidia's early claims that it would solve early issues with the 50-series, and AMD has promised to get its exceedingly popular RX 9000-series GPUs back in stock as soon as possible. That's meant pricing is even more ridiculous than ever, with top cards going for hundreds or even thousands of dollars more than they should, and last-generation options priced just as crazily.

But there are alternatives. Alongside buying older and second-hand cards, there's a new brand of GPU available at discounted prices for anyone willing to take a loss on maximum performance: Defective GPUs.

Read more