MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC System Build Guide

GPU Overclocking

MSI's Afterburner software is perhaps the most famous GPU overclocking software around. While CPU and memory overclock can be done in either Windows or the UEFI, you can only OC the GPU in Windows. Afterburner also allows us to manipulate the GPU's fans, and since we are using an MSI GPU, things work in harmony. You can set the fan speed to scale on its automatic curve, or you can activate a manual fixed level or a manual applied curve. I set the curve shown above so that the GPU's fan speed would ramp up quickly.

My final overclock seen above. I increased the already overclocked GTX 1080 Ti to 1605MHz Core and 1509MHz on the memory. I also increased power and temperature limits, but I didn't touch the voltage level as the GPU is just very expensive and I didn't want to add more noise because of the required extra cooling. Some video cards cost a lot because of their advanced cooling and voltage regulators, and the GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio already comes overclocked, but it did have room for more. If you are using a card and don't know what type of overclocks to expect, try reading some reviews, because they typically overclock the GPUs to see how far they go.

Final Overclocking Gains

Here we see how the system does with varying levels of overclocking and the type of overclocking. From stock to GAME BOOST, the CPU gains roughly 19% better performance with just automatic overclocking in Handbrake and gains 8% in gaming in Resident Evil 6. Those gains go higher and higher.

If we leave the CPU stock and overclock the GPU, we also get minor gains, but the GPU OC makes more of a difference when we remove the CPU as the bottleneck by overclocking it either manually or through GAME BOOST. Our best results come from combining our manual CPU OC and GPU OC together.