Overclock your notebook

Gaming notebooks are brilliant. Unfortunately they don’t always work – at least not as well as they should. Sometimes you’ll get a game that won’t play ball, or the performance will be woeful (and it really shouldn’t be). Worry not though, there’s a solution – wrestling back control of your graphics drivers. You see, while NVIDIA and AMD update their drivers on a regular basis, laptop manufacturers don’t, and they make their machines in a way that these generic graphics drivers don’t work either. The reason, in a word, is heat.

As far as notebook designers are concerned, if you were left to your own devices, you’d unsettle the fine balancing act that the system integrator had spent so long getting right – the balance between speed, temperature, aesthetics and battery life. In fact, if you were to examine the actual clockspeeds of your graphics hardware, you’d discover that most of the time it’s actually running far slower than the specification allows for.

Download this article in PDF format (first published in PC Format 223)