What's out there?

I find myself a lucky owner of a nvidia 580m in my new laptop, and I want to explore (slightly) overclocking it. The video card in my old laptop wasn't worth overclocking, so I'm completely new to this whole idea. I understand the gist of overclocking and the risks involved, what I'm not sure of is what exactly I should use to do it. My google searched have returned tons of programs, so I'm just more confused. Could somebody help a newbie make sense of all these programs and maybe suggest a program to use? Thanks!

 

I guess you need to start from the basis.
First of all, you need an overclocking program with OSD in order to keep your eyes on clocks and temperatures until you find your limit.

Get MSI Afterburner newer beta here:
MSI Afterburner 2.2.0 Beta 5 (2011-07-05) - Guru3D.com Forums

Get 3dmark06 and 3dmark11 ready to run, optional is vantage.

Get Furmark here FurMark: VGA Stress Test, Graphics Card and GPU Stability Test, Burn-in Test, OpenGL Benchmark and GPU Temperature | oZone3D.Net

Install it and launch it. You will soon see the sliders of core/shaders and memory. First two are linked and cannot be unlinked as the Fermi Arch. is made like this.

Before attempt anything, go into settings, monitoring, and enable the features you want to track down, such Core/Memory clocks, FPS and GPU Temperature. Each option has a checkbox, select it and check "Show in On Screen Display".

As soon as you click ok a new program should launch, which is rivatuner osd server. Open that program and select VECTOR 2D if you're on Windows 7 SP1. Otherwise leave it as it is, but i still advice Vector 2D.

Ok youre set. Now begin to OC the Core, shaders will increase accordingly. Start with 50mhz bump, hit apply.
About Memory, usually you can do 100/150mhz bump. Oc both at the same time, then apply.

Launch furmark, begin a stress test and let it run at least for 5/6 minutes. Keep an eye on temperatures, be sure they dont reach values above 85c while stress testing.

If everything went ok, raise 50mhz bump, apply, do a stress test again. You may need to do this until the VGA driver crashes or something similar happens (like artifacts). Thats your limit.

I say that an average OC is 100/150 mhz more on Core and more than 300mhz on Memory.

When you think you got a stable OC, or maybe the one you're happy with, launch 3dmark06 and 3dmark11 and see how it does.
Better thing to do is to run them at stock clocks, save the results ,then try again with OC to see how much improvements you got.

Hope it helps

 

I would sooner try to UNDERVOLT the gpu.
Why?
Because it's the one component that is likeliest to heat up during gaming (RTS games which are more CPU dependent are a different story though) and raise the overall temperature inside the laptop (besides, undervolting the new SB cpu's is not really doable as far as I understand it).

Besides, the 580M is already about 5% to 10% faster than the 485M (both of which are identical btw with the latter being on a larger manuf. process and with only slightly lower clocks) and quite the capable gpu.
I don't get this desire to OC an already 'powerful' high-end mobile gpu.
I'd only consider it for games that LAG (and even then if the current temperatures offer big enough headway for the OC in question - otherwise, you risk running your gpu at settings which it technically might be able to handle, however, the overall temperatures might jump to levels where they might potentially cause issues).

 

Don't run 3dmark 06. Run vantage and 11. Remember to look at the gpu score for improvement.

GLHF!

 

Sweet, thanks for the replies! That should be more than enough to get me started

 

The truth is out there...


Sorry, saw the title and had to share it.

On topic. MSI Afterburner is pretty easy to use and even comes with the optional Kombustor (which is similar to Furmark). If you can undervolt, I'd do that too. It helps with the heat (and noise from the fans).
I don't think this will be a problem, but if you find the temperatures too high for your taste, look for a nice cooler. Some users are very fond of them.

Congrats on your new notebook!