Almost no improvement in performance after overclocking.
Almost no improvement in performance after overclocking.
Hello. I hope someone can assist me since I'm unsure why this is happening. I tried to overclock my GTX 1060 laptop (laptop), achieving a speed above 1600MHz, which is about a 14% boost. The system runs smoothly on this GPU. My issue is that I've noticed very little improvement—only a few frames per second in Ac Unity (around 3-4 fps), even when the frame rate exceeds 60. The benchmark results also showed minimal gains. Could anyone provide guidance or help? Thanks.
I think you're being too cautious about this. Laptop GPU overclocking is well known to be tough due to heat and power limits, and real improvements are usually under 5%. You shouldn't expect big jumps—games that once ran at 60fps might only gain 4-5fps afterward. Nividia managed just a 3FPS boost on their lowest settings after an OC (116 stock vs 119 OC'ed for the mobile 1080), which is less than a 1% improvement. Will you really see a noticeable change in minimums on a laptop screen? Probably not.
I strongly caution against overclocking on a laptop. These devices rarely provide enough cooling capacity for sustained high loads. Most lack the necessary thermal management to handle continuous full CPU and GPU usage. Nevertheless, addressing your query—performance gains are typically limited. Expect only 0 to 5% improvement in most games, with 5 to 10% possible in optimized titles that can leverage higher GPU clock speeds. A gain of 3 to 4 frames per second falls within the 5 to 10% range.
^ agreed, and if the GPU isn't the limiting factor then OCing won't make a significant difference.
Are you certain? I've noticed the opposite with my R9 290 (15% OC on core clock), seeing a much bigger boost than my GTX 1060's OC.
The results differ significantly between games and graphics cards. Some overclocking yields excellent improvements, while others offer minimal gains despite adjustments.
Which games are we referring to? Have you looked at benchmarks for those specific titles using your GPU?
My recommendation remains to skip overclocking your laptop due to the high risk of failure.
I own a 1060 and a small OC boosted my performance by five frames in Tomb Raider 2013. I didn’t start tweaking yet because I’m already achieving 60fps at 1080p on a 60Hz display. The 1060 is such a strong card that I don’t feel the need for an overclock just yet.
Another point—do you own the 3GB or 6GB model? The smaller version can create performance issues in certain games.
Constraint?
The same games that were evaluated were Heaven benchmark (not a game, but a benchmark) and Metro last light (Redux on the gtx 1060, I have definitely tested the "normal" Metro LL benchmark on my r9 290, but don’t know about Redux). On these platforms I observed a notable improvement with my R9 290, though minimal on my 1060, even considering the percentage difference is only around 1% in their overclocking. The only program where I noticed a reasonable boost was 3DMARK Time Spy.
My gtx 1060 has 6GB.
What's your CPU activity? Are any cores or threads reaching maximum? If your CPU is the bottleneck, optimizing your GPU won't help much. Laptop CPUs are generally less powerful than their desktop versions.