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I'm planning to dip my toe in the overclocking waters once I receive my 1080 TI preorder, as it sounds like Pascal cards are known to overclock pretty well, and they seem to be advertising just how geared-up the new TI card is for big overclocks.

Only issue I have is - I've installed the EVGA Precision X app before now, just to control fan speeds, and I hated it! I'm pretty sure I actually felt my eyes burn a little.

It seems MSI Afterburner is currently regarded as the best overclocking app... but oh dear god! It seems every manufacturer has their own horrificly ugly skinned nightmare of an app, with clunky interfaces, unreadable garish fonts, awkward stylised curve tweaking graph windows, etc, etc...

Is there really no Pascal-feature-compatible overclocking app that just has a normal, clean, unskinned interface, that quietly loads into the system tray, and takes up a minimum amount of system resources?

Please tell me I'm not stuck with these things! My Asus Xonar systray app is bad enough... I'm not sure I can handle another!


(I would've guessed nVidia Inspector was an option, but I've read a few comments about it not really being a good tool for overclocking, and that it doesn't support certain overclocking settings presented by Pascal cards. Is that the case, or would the latest 1.9.7.8 (Nov 2016) release be usable?)

The most consistent kind of OC is the BIOS mod, which works in any OS without software.

Unfortunately nVidia have seen fit to encrypt the Pascal BIOSes (which should more correctly be called option ROMs). They seem to hate anyone unlocking their carefully applied market segmentation which is why we've had to have a different BIOS editor for each generation: Maxwell BIOS Tweaker, Kepler BIOS Tweaker, and NiBiTor for Fermi.

Ah, interesting... I would've presumed a bios-level tweak would be the ideal scenario, but I'd not heard of it for GPUs, and just assumed there was no way to do it, unlike bios-level CPU overclocking.

So for the time being, that option is off the table? Does it seem likely someone will manage to "unlock" pascal's bios encryption then, or is that likely a dead-end from now on?

Nobody's done it yet, something about needing a certificate from an OEM to sign it or it won't work.

You'd need to use one of the ugly softwares to determine the limit first anyway, at least within the voltages it allows. If there ever is one a vBIOS mod could raise these limits, and there are always hardware mods.

MSI Afterburner isn't that hideous in my opinion. It's not too bad looking and is quite easy to use.

The lack of Nvidia clock control in the drivers is a major downside to owning Nvidia cards.

I miss the days of enabling the coolbits registry string, and I don't like running user-account based OC tools for driver-level hardware. For example, if your machine isn't logged in, Afterburner isn't running.

EzioAs wrote:

MSI Afterburner isn't that hideous in my opinion. It's not too bad looking and is quite easy to use.

It's *possibly* in the running for "least hideous"... but that's not saying much
It just amazes me how much screen-space they can take up with five simple attribute sliders, and a couple of info strings. Meanwhile the graphs, which actually might be useful, are squeezed into tiny little spaces surrounded by vast expanses of empty, bad 80's sci-fi bitmap.

At least it's mostly rectangular... it's the circular ones that bug me the most. Why anyone thinks overclocking tools can't get by without having to look like a car speedometer, I don't know.


I just wish someone would offer an option. Keep the horrible Screen-Hogging-Mess-Edition, for the kids to admire with their youthful complete-lack-of-taste... and just give us an option to turn it all off, and have an unskinned, simple version that does all the same stuff, within the same app.
Even better, the non-hideous mode could fit *all* the relevant controls into a single, intuitively laid out window, so there's be no need to have everything hidden behind tabs, popups, pull-outs, pull-downs, menus, etc, etc.

bfg-9000 wrote:

Nobody's done it yet, something about needing a certificate from an OEM to sign it or it won't work.

You'd need to use one of the ugly softwares to determine the limit first anyway, at least within the voltages it allows. If there ever is one a vBIOS mod could raise these limits, and there are always hardware mods.

Yeah, I'd be happy to use it to find a decent oc profile, and then uninstall the damned thing once the settings were set into the bios.

Ah well, guess I'll have to stick with the ugly approach in the meantime and just keep checking for updates on the bios tweak side.

Chrispy_ wrote:

The lack of Nvidia clock control in the drivers is a major downside to owning Nvidia cards.

I miss the days of enabling the coolbits registry string, and I don't like running user-account based OC tools for driver-level hardware. For example, if your machine isn't logged in, Afterburner isn't running.

Huh, seems "Coolbits" still exists for the latest Linux drivers... we're just stuck with the 3rd party rubbish under Windows for some reason. Whyyy??

Chrispy_ wrote:

The lack of Nvidia clock control in the drivers is a major downside to owning Nvidia cards.

I miss the days of enabling the coolbits registry string, and I don't like running user-account based OC tools for driver-level hardware. For example, if your machine isn't logged in, Afterburner isn't running.

That's nuts. I had no idea that OC'ing wasn't a default driver option. Part of the problem is that Microsoft now requires an App, you aren't allowed to have extended control panel options any more, but still... AMD manages to do it.