In today’s tech world there are more ways than ever to overclock your PC, but to be fair motherboard and graphics vendors have probably done the most to make it as accessible as possible to mainstream DIY builders and gamers. One of the easier ways to achieve a pretty basic overclock is by using the bundled software to simply ‘Auto’ overclock key components. This may have been seen as ‘adding value’ to the product in the past, but the recent behaivour of NVIDIA now means that in fact, the factory preset overclock that we were used to getting on 3rd party AIBs is now only available to the consumer if you run an ‘Auto OC’ feature.

So how effective is an ‘Auto’ overclock compared to getting hands on and doing it manually? Well that is exactly the question posed by Steve Burke and Gamers Nexus. His latest video is touted as a ‘Man vs Machine’ battle where he runs the software bundled with his EVGA NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti SC card, and then tries to see if he can beat the resulting overclock with his own ‘Manual’ efforts. He even sets himself a similar time limit to make a bit more challenging.

So firstly, how does the ‘Auto Overclock’ actually work. Steve explains that the software essentially does a Volt / Frequency (or VF) scan to determine what should be the ideal voltage and frequency. There are in fact two ways this can happen. The card can be configured in ‘Basic’ mode meaning things are done automatically. After the scan the results are referenced against a Volt / Frequency table which tells the card what target voltages and frequencies to use. In fact there are three options on the table, the software will just chooses the most stable option. There are ‘Quick’ and ‘Full’ test options, with the full test taking up to an hour to complete.

I’m not going to ruin the video for you guys, but I think it’s an interesting look the current state of affairs with VGA overclocking, especially in an era when ‘out-of-the-box’ overclocks are now forbidden and end-users are forced to apply a software OC at home. Catch the video from Steve here on the Gamers Nexus YouTube channel.

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