Taking a brief detour from “My journey to Linux”, I wanted to overclock my Geforce GTX 760, as I had done the same on Windows.

Before enabling and using, you should determine the suitability of the utility for your intended use, and you shall assume all responsibility in connection therewith. When “2” (Bit 1) is set in the “Coolbits” option value, the NVIDIA driver will attempt to initialize SLI when using. Coolbits is working fine it wont overclock to those settings until you are in a 3d app. Run at the Coolbits overclock you have set along with a game or something 3d and then go back and look at your log file in RivaTuner and you'll see where the core jumped up to your desired overclock along with the memory.

Caution: Overclocking will void your warranty and could fry your graphics card. Continue at your own risk!

How To Install And Use Coolbits Overclock Tool

Now with that out of the way, let’s get down to business 🙂

First step is to enable the proprietary driver, if you haven’t done so already – I went with the newest one available as seen below:

The second step is to enable the coolbits extension, to do so run this from a terminal:
sudo nvidia-xconfig --cool-bits=12

After this you have to reboot the PC.

After the reboot start the NVIDIA X Server Settings application, and go to “PowerMizer”, here you can enter offsets for both the core and memory for your graphics card.

To apply a value, just press ENTER in the “Current” box, it’ll say something like “Graphics Clock offset set to XX.” at the bottom of the screen, like mine does here:

Finally you need a tool to see whether you went too far with your overclock. I used Unigine Heaven which is very simple to install:

1. Start by downloading Unigine Heaven from their site: https://unigine.com/products/benchmarks/heaven/ – it has a big download button on the frontpage at the time of writing.
2. Once downloaded, do a chmod +x Unigine_Heaven-4.0.run to be able to run it.
3. Now run the installer with ./Unigine_Heaven-4.0.run – this will extract the tool to a subfolder from where you run it
4. And finally run the tool with
   cd Unigine_Heaven-4.0
./heaven


With heaven running, I moved NVIDIA X Server Settings to my secondary monitor, and simply started tweaking the settings – constantly looking at heaven for artifacts.

Always find the maximum safe clock for EITHER core or memory first – don’t increase both simultaneously or you wont know which one causes issues, once you hit a wall.

I went with 50mhz steps for memory first, increasing it by 50mhz, waiting for around 10 seconds, increasing it again and so forth. Eventually I noticed artifacts in the form of oddly colored rectangles popping into the image every once in a while. This was when I’d gone too far.
I backed down the clock by 50mhz until these disappeared, and noted this as my safe memory overclock.

Then I dropped memory overclock back to 0mhz, and did the same with core – although only increasing by 10mhz at a time here. Once you get too far with core overclock it’s likely your system will hang. You will have to flick the power switch or use a hard reset button to reboot it. Now you know what’s too much – I’d then subtract a few steps (like 20-30mhz) from that value, and run a couple of benchmarks in heaven to see if it’s stable.

For me my GTX 760 crashed at 90mhz core overclock, so I went the very safe route and stopped at 50mhz since the last few mhz didn’t really give much improvement. Memory started causing artifacts at 1500mhz overclock, so I went with 1400mhz as my safe value.

Then I ran a couple of benchmarks to ensure it was stable.

How To Install And Use Coolbits Overclock Laptop

Do note: Despite running benchmark for 30 minutes, your system could still become unstable after hours of gaming – if you want to be absolute certain it’s stable you’ll have to let it run heaven for at least as long as you normally game in one sitting. I didn’t do this, and as such my overclock may prove to be too much in the future. Choose for yourself whether you want the risk of crashing mid-game down the road 🙂

As a conclusion, here are the stock and overclocked results I got in Unigine Heaven. Notice how much the Min. FPS has increased – this is crucial for smooth gaming 🙂

Stock

Overclocked

Finally to automatically apply these settings at boot, we have to do a bit of manual work. The nvidia X server settings doesn’t support loading overclocks, so I went and created a simple bash script, and added it to startup applications.

The scripts is as simple as:

#!/bin/bash
nvidia-settings -a '[gpu:0]/GPUMemoryTransferRateOffset[3]=1400'
nvidia-settings -a '[gpu:0]/GPUGraphicsClockOffset[3]=50'

A brief explanation is in order:
[gpu:0] means to apply the setting to my primary graphics card, if I had two I would use both [gpu:0] and [gpu:1].
GPUMemoryTransferRateOffset is how much I want to overclock the memory.
GPUGraphicsClockOffset is how much I want to overclock the core.
[3] means to apply the overclock to “performance level 3” of my graphics card, this is the level a GTX 760 will utilize for running games. The lower levels are used when just browsing etc.
1400 and 50 are the mhz values for each overclock value.

How To Install And Use Coolbits Overclock Windows 10

I hope this post helps you guys get that last bit of power out of your hardware – in my case I got quite a healthy increase (especially for min. FPS, which is crucial for smooth gameplay) so it was well worth the effort 🙂