Published 7 minutes ago

Ali is a tech enthusiast with 3+ years of experience covering PC tech. He loves all things PCs but particularly has a lot to say about CPUs and motherboards, and has covered reviews on CPUs, motherboards, RAM, and GPUs.

Open-world games and walking simulators are his favorite. Outside of this world, Ali loves cricket, traveling, and rock music.

If you want to extract maximum performance from your components, overclocking is probably the first thing that comes to mind. In theory, you can increase the clock speeds of most modern CPUs, graphics cards, and RAM. But given the performance dynamics of modern PCs, overclocking isn’t always the best idea. In particular, if you’re rocking a relatively recent mid- to high-end system, you’ll likely find that undervolting the GPU nets much better results than overclocking the CPU.

The performance dynamics of modern CPUs and GPUs

They’re running faster than ever

PCs get faster and faster every year, even if progress seems slow here and there. Modern graphics cards and processors deliver incredible performance, but none of that is possible without a significant increase in power consumption. CPUs (especially Intel ones) can clock well over 5GHz under boost clock profiles, but they do so at the cost of a lot of power. Anything above 5GHz generally requires much more power than below that, and the performance gains aren’t as substantial because the speeds can’t be actively maintained.

GPUs, on the other hand, are usually more limited (1.8–2.8GHz), but only because they are focused on parallelism and execute tens of thousands of threads concurrently. This parallelism, powered by a smaller (yet significant) number of execution units, means they aren’t doing any better in power consumption; even mid-rangers (like the RX 9070 XT and RTX 5070) peak at over 250W. This is where undervolting comes in. The thing is, manufacturers set the GPU core voltage to accommodate a wide range of PCs and operating conditions, so they often leave headroom. This means that, in most cases, you can undervolt your graphics card without problems, though the extent will vary with card and silicon.

Both overclocking and undervolting should be performed carefully and with guidance. Incremental decreases (undervolting) and increases (overclocking), stress testing until failure, and resorting to the last stable setting usually do the job.

Related

Overclocking is dead, and modern CPUs are the culprits

Manual overclocking makes little to no difference these days

GPU undervolting often improves performance

While CPU overclocking often fails, and performance gains are negligible

The fact that you can safely undervolt your graphics card means you can reduce power consumption without sacrificing performance. In fact, in many cases, undervolting unlocks more performance. The reason is that, as I mentioned earlier, modern GPUs consume loads of power, with mid- to high-end cards often reaching thermal limits in gaming or other sustained workloads (such as GPU-accelerated video editing). By reducing the voltage, you decrease power draw, lowering the likelihood of throttling when hitting the same clock speeds. GPUs generally hit boost speeds more consistently than CPUs, and undervolting allows them to achieve those speeds more effectively, leaving more room for performance gains. You can even overclock on top of an undervolt in most cases!

As I mentioned, CPUs are already operating at very high frequencies. This is by design: CPUs are already tuned for maximum performance and only hit boost speeds when needed. This design ensures the user gets maximum performance out of the box and doesn’t need to tinker with anything. So, with CPUs already clocking serious speeds by default, any additional, even incremental, increase will require much more power; you’ll need a high-end cooling unit, and even then, any overclock you achieve will not improve performance by much. This is because, as I said, they boost dynamically, so increasing frequency won’t be very beneficial (especially in gaming, since it relies on small bursts of boost speed).

MSI Afterburner

MSI Afterburner is one of the best overclocking software with many extra features to monitor your PC’s performance.

GPU undervolting is safer and simpler

CPU overclocking can be time-consuming and more likely to introduce instability

GPU undervolting is straightforward: it only involves tinkering with your GPU’s voltage-frequency curve until you find the best setting. It also doesn’t need you to enter the BIOS, as third-party software like MSI Afterburner does the job. More importantly, undervolting involves no risk of damaging your GPU and can even improve its lifespan. The card can also run quieter because the fans don’t need to run as fast.

Overclocking increases power consumption and heat generation, so it can cause instability if you’re not running with sufficient cooling. You may also need to tolerate more fan noise. Furthermore, higher-end overclocks require you to access the BIOS and understand more advanced settings, such as Load Line Calibration.

Related

4 reasons you should undervolt your GPU

Undervolting isn’t as scary as it sounds and the advantages you can gain from doing so are well worth it

CPU overclocking can still make sense in older hardware

…and GPU undervolting not so much

The unique dynamic-boosting behavior has long been present in Intel and AMD CPUs, but was far more conservative in older ones. They also had lower boost clock speeds, and there were no E cores on Intel’s side before the 12th generation. So, there was lower power consumption and less heat from those processors. In particular, I’m referring to early Ryzen (1000 and 2000 series) and pre-Comet Lake (10th generation) Intel chips. Overclocking these CPUs may, in fact, improve performance, since they have more headroom to maintain higher clock speeds than their boost defaults.

As for GPUs, they started pushing aggressive boost-to-power-limit behaviors with AMD’s RX 5700 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 2000 cards. Before that (except for the GTX 1000 and RX Vega), GPUs had limited V-F control or didn’t deliver meaningful benefits from these adjustments.

Optimize what actually matters

If you’ve got relatively modern hardware in your PC and want to get more performance out of it, undervolting your GPU is a good way to do that. On the other hand, since CPUs are already at thermal limits, overclocking them is unlikely to yield meaningful gains and may require expensive cooling.