[Tweak League] Tutorial: Overclock your RTX 4060 and get 10% FPS

The second Tweak League installment features an RTX 4060. This time it’s PNY‘s turn, more precisely, the Geforce RTX 4060 8GB XLR8 Gaming Verto Dual Fan Edition OC. We’ve already published a guide to overclocking an RTX 4060 for Tweak League 1. So this time we’re trying to improve and simplify it. Still with 3 levels of difficulty. The aim is still the same: simple overclocking that gets the best out of your RTX.

So let’s start by installing and configuring MSI Afterburner.

Regardless of the brand of your graphics card, the most widely used software for overclocking is the MSI Afterburner. You can download it directly from the manufacturer’s website: https: //www.msi.com/Landing/afterburner/graphics-cards

The RivaTuner part will be useful if you want to display FPS, temperatures and frequencies in-game, but installation is not necessary here.

• Once installed, go to Settings (gear icon), where you’ll need to activate :
  • Unlock voltage control
  • Unlock voltage monitoring

  If you want overclocking to be active every time Windows starts up, you’ll also need to activate :

  • Start with Windows
  • Start minimized

Confirm everything and click on the Windows icon in the top right-hand corner of the main window, which should change color. Now you’re ready!

Before starting overclocking, we ran 3 benchmarks to calculate the performance gains at each stage.

Here are the results:

[nextpage title=”Overclocking Facile (10 min)”]

The easy way: Undervolting (10 min)

This allows us to increase performance while reducing the voltage and therefore the temperature of the graphics card.

Please follow the steps below:

Open the CURVE EDITOR window at the bottom left of MSI Afterburner. Hold down SHIFT and then LEFT-CLICK on the point above 950 mV. We’ll drag it up to 250 Mhz. RELEASE ALL.

Now press SHIFT again and LEFT-CLICK just to the right of the point you’ve just moved (you mustn’t click on a point). By holding SHIFT LEFT CLICK you have selected all the points on the right of the graph. Release SHIFT and CLICK. Now LEFT CLICK on any point within the selected area (to the right of the 950 mV point) and pull it down to 0.

Validate your curve with the button to the right of the diskette on the main menu. You should obtain the following curve.

Set your POWER LIMIT to maximum. The same goes for TEMP LIMIT.

In MEMORY CLOCK type 800 then enter

Re-validate your settings with the icon on the right of the diskette.

Save the profile by clicking the DISKETTE and then the “1” on the right of the menu.

The results:

Performance gains:
95.8 FPS or 1.25% on Borderlands 3.
83.04 FPS or 1.57% on Metro Exodus.
117.38FPS or 3.01% on Cyberpunk 2077.

So there’s a small gain in in-game performance, even though we’ve just lowered the voltages, and therefore the temperature. So you can play for hours without any loss of performance.

This undervolting should have no impact on the stability of your graphics card. Run the free OCCT software for 10 minutes on the Stability test 3D Standard, and if ever there’s a crash, simply open MSI Afterburner and use the icon on the left of the floppy disk, then the one on the right to validate the modifications and return to the default settings.

[nextpage title=”Intermediate overclocking (15 min)”]Intermediate overclocking of your RTX: safe and powerful (15min)

Now we’re looking for a bigger performance boost, using exactly the same steps as for the previous profile.

Open the CURVE EDITOR window in the bottom left-hand corner of MSI Afterburner. Hold down SHIFT and LEFT-CLICK on the point above 1050 mV. We’ll drag it up to 180 Mhz. RELEASE ALL.

Now press SHIFT again and LEFT-CLICK just to the right of the point you’ve just moved (you mustn’t click on a point). By holding SHIFT LEFT CLICK you have selected all the points on the right of the graph. Release SHIFT and CLICK. Now LEFT CLICK on any point within the selected area (to the right of the 1050 mV point) and pull it down to 0.

Validate your curve with the button on the right of the diskette in the main menu.

Set your POWER LIMIT to maximum. The same goes for TEMP LIMIT, and in MEMORY CLOCK type 1000.

Re-validate your settings with the icon on the right of the diskette.

Now it’s time to save the profile by clicking the DISKETTE and then the “2” on the right of the menu.

Now you should run a benchmark program like OCCT for 10 minutes on the Stability test 3D Standard.

The results:

Performance gains:
99.71 FPS or 5.38% on Borderlands 3.
85.893 FPS or 5.05% on Metro Exodus.
123.36 FPS or 8.26% on Cyberpunk 2077.

We’ve got a big perf gain here that we’ve been able to maintain for hours on our Tweak League config.

Be careful, if your PC crashes in game, go back to PROFILE 1. Not all graphics cards are created equal, it’s the silicon lottery.

[nextpage title=”Advanced overclocking (1h30)”]

Advanced overclocking: it’s up to you (1h30)

Now that we’ve validated the intermediate profile, we can push the card to its limits. This means you’ll lose stability, so don’t use it for your gaming sessions if you don’t know what you’re doing. That said, you’ll be able to see if your card is up to the task, and that’s always good for the ego.

This time, let’s start with our previous profile.

We start by playing with the memory clock. Increase it by 50Mhz increments. And check for crashes using 3DMark Time Spy, for example. If a crash occurs, return to the previous frequency and increase by 20Mhz.

Once you’ve reached the maximum stable memory frequency, turn it down by 50Mhz and play with the core clock/voltage curve.

In CURVE EDITOR, we’ll now play with the 1100 mV point. Gradually raise the entire curve. I recommend 20mV by 20mV.

And here too, we’re aiming to reach the crash point in our benchmarks and go back 1 or 2 steps for stability.

Our curve after optimization.

Our PNY RTX 4060 Dual OC enabled us to go to 250 Mhz Core Clock (i.e. 3040 Mhz at 1100 mV) and 1350Mhz Memory Clock . We remind you that each GPU is different and that no two will achieve the same results.

Overclocking RTX / The results :

Performance gains:
101.62 FPS or 7.40% on Borderlands 3.
87.12 FPS or 6.56% on Metro Exodus.
125.49 FPS or 10.13% on Cyberpunk 2077.

In 2 hours I think a 10% performance gain in gaming on an RTX 4060 is simply brilliant. Who says you can’t have fun with an entry-level GPU?

Thanks to PNY for providing its Geforce RTX 4060 8GB XLR8 Gaming Verto Dual Fan Edition OC for the Tweak League. By the way, this graphics card has almost 4% more performance when overclocked than the RTX 4060 we had for the first Tweak League.