Friday, April 27, 2012

What does "overclocked" mean when talking about video cards?

I have been shopping for a video card for my Dell 531s slim Desktop so I can run dual monitors. I am not a gamer. I keep seeing the term "overclocked"...what does this mean? In layman's terms please.

Also, if you know, what video card would you recommend for me to buy so I can run dual monitors just for general web browsing? My motherboard only has one monitor output so I need one more which I suppose means I need to buy a video card. thanks|||You know how processor speeds are measured in Ghz? That's the "clock speed" of the processor.



Like right now, my computer is running on a 3 Ghz processor.



Basically, overclocking is making the something run at a higher "clock speed" than it's supposed to. I could set my computer to run at 3.15 Ghz if I wanted to and see some slight performance increase.



A video card is the same thing, it's also a processor. Overclocking it is basically making it run at a faster speed than it was originally designed for, so that it gets better performance.



That's all there it to it really.



Perhaps another thing I should mention. The only drawback to doing this is that it produces more heat. But an overclocked video card will usually come equipped with a bigger fan to compensate for it.|||Overlocking means running a graphics card, processor or RAM at higher frequency than intended. This almost always void warrantry's and for large overclocks you need a special cooler to stop it from overheating (its dangerous if you do not know what you are doing).



For example if I have a core i7 920 processor, which runs at 2.66GHz normally, and I overclock it to 2.8 GHz, i did an overclock of 140 MHz. The processor will now run faster so calculate data faster, but also produce more heat.



The same can be done with graphics cards but these are more risky (coolers are usually very bad). You can overclock the Memory speed (sort of RAM for the video card), the core speed (like the processor in the video card) and the shader speed.



Hope i helped!|||In layman's terms overclocking means increasing the speed of the device. When you see overclocked graphics cards for sale, that just means the manufacturer decided to do that. So your warranty will not be void because of this.



Usually graphics cards with dual output will allow you to use multiple monitors.

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