A little over four years ago, I built myself a gaming PC for my birthday. My years-long dream of tinkering a computer of my own specifications into existence came true, and save for a frustrating issue with a stick of RAM, which occurred days out of warranty, the computer has served me well for its entire existence.

That being said, as any computer user can relate, a four year old computer does not always perform nearly as well as it did when it was new. 

My goal was to tinker with my computer by expanding the storage and overclocking my graphics card. I have never overclocked a component, so it was a new and interesting challenge. Expanding the storage is something I have much more experience with, and was a simple process of plugging in a few wires and mounting the parts. 

The best part of this endeavor: the process was entirely free. The HDD and SSD I installed were salvaged from an old desktop and laptop respectively—parts I had lying around. The overclocking was done with free software and only augmented components already installed in the computer.

Installing the drives

To install the two drives, a 250 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD, I used the SATA power cable coming from my power supply, and attached two additional SATA data cables to my motherboard. The 1TB HDD, a 3.5 inch drive, fit into the second of two drive bays in the bottom of the computer, and the SSD fit on a side mounted slot in the back of the case.

Overclocking

Overclocking is the process of increasing the clock speed of a computer component beyond the originally designated speed. Measured as a frequency, usually in gHz, the “clock speed” represents the number of times in a second a computer can complete a task (called instructions per clock). While it may seem concerning to run a chip at higher than its rated clock speed, if you have sufficient cooling, it is completely safe to do so. 

I used a program called MSI Afterburner to overclock my GPU. While it normally has an intelligent automatic overclocking mode, I had an error message come up every time I tried the automatic mode, so I had to overclock manually. Manual overclocking is nothing short of trial and error. 

First, I set a custom fan curve, so that the fans of my GPU begin to ramp up more quickly at lower temperatures and keep the overall temperatures down. Then, I increased the maximum voltage. (I increased it to the maximum value, but the GPU will not permit higher voltage than it is rated by the manufacturer, but the voltage out of the box is lower than the peak voltage.) Then, I set a baseline overclock of +100 MHz to the core clock (the processing unit speed) and of +500 MHz to the memory clock (the RAM used by the GPU).

Quantitatively, in a synthetic benchmark, which is not always representative of real use, I had a performance increase of 8.6% without spending a dime. While that is impressive, what is more important to me is the qualitative experience of several games which I very much enjoy (like Forza Horizon 4) becoming considerably smoother. 

And with that, I could spend the rest of my break enjoying my computer even more than before.