How to Overclock your Mining Rig while using less Power

Hi There!

Welcome to another guide here at Build a Mining Rig!

Today I’m going to cover how to do a simple overclock and under volt on Windows. In case you have never heard of overclocking, it is when we adjust the clock speeds of the GPUs so that we squeeze the most amount of power out of them.

It is common for both miners and gamers to try to squeeze a bit more performance out of their GPUs. We can usually get a 20% increase out of them which is quite phenomenal. 

On the under hand, while we are overclocking, we can also under volt. When we under volt, we are going to supply less power to the GPUs. As you can imagine, this is extremely beneficial for the sake of saving money electricity.  We can usually safely drop down a video card to 60% of it’s normal intake.

This can dramatically drop your monthly electricity bill, which would definitely make the Mrs. happy.

What You’ll Need:

• MSI Afterburner

MSI Afterburner

This program is all that you’ll need to perform the Overclock/Undervolt. If you are running Linux, setting this up is a completely different process.

After we have set this program up, it will automatically start with Windows, and apply your settings to your GPUs.

You also have the ability to lower the fan speeds, in case you want to make your mining rig less noisy. This isn’t usually a good idea unless the temperature of your home/garage is cool enough to keep the temperature of the GPUs down.

How to Setup MSI Afterburner

The first thing you must do is download MSI Afterburner. Here is the Link to do so.

Once you have downloaded and installed MSI Afterburner, start it up and now it’s time for the easy part.

MSI Afterburner is very user friendly program.

In the middle just below the clock settings, It’ll will list the GPU that is currently selected.

To the right of that, there is a little red arrow. If you click the arrow, it will give you a list of all of the detected GPUs. You can select each one individually, or click the squiggly line, and select all of them.

To the left, you are given stats about the clock speeds that your GPUs are currently running at.

To the right, you can see the temperature of the GPU you have currently selected.

How to Overclock your Mining Rig

Now that you have familiarized yourself with MSI Afterburner, it’s time to make the necessary changes.

1. First, we are going to adjust the “Memory Clock” to 600.

You can raise this to a higher number, but your miner might become unstable. Some GPUs can handle a higher speed than 600. You can try raising it some more, but if your miner and/or rig crashes, lower it down to a more stable point.

2. Second, now let’s adjust the “Power Limit” to 65.

By adjusting the power limit to 65, you will have dramatically decreased the amount of power that your GPUs are consuming. Be careful not to drop it down lower than this. If so, your GPUs might not have enough power to function properly.

3. Open the List of GPUs and make sure that all of them are selected by clicking the squiggly line.

4. Now click the check mark. This will apply your new settings to all of your GPUs.

5. Make sure to click the little Windows logo below “Startup”.

This will configure MSI Afterburner to open on startup. Your settings are only valid while MSI Afterburner is open. You need to select this so that MSI Afterburner opens and applies your settings overtime you reboot your rig.

6. Wait to see if your Mining Rig is Stable

After you adjust the settings of your video cards, you are going to want to keep an eye on the stability of your mining rig. If you raised your memory clocks too high, your system might crash 20-30 minutes into mining.

If your system does crash, you are going to want to lower the memory clock or possibly raise the power level. Keep repeating this process until you find functional mining settings. Most likely, if you use the mining settings that I suggested, your system will remain stable.

Recap

It’s not very difficult to overclock your rigs while lowering their power consumption. As mining becomes more difficult, it only makes sense to acquire a higher amount of hashing power from your video cards.

It is even more important to lower your power consumption. Consuming too much power can put a major burden on your mining operation, and this simple guide will help alleviate that burden.

I encourage you guys/gals to comment below or email me at nick@buildaminingrig.com if you have any questions!