We used the indispensable Unigine Heaven along with 3DMark's well known Fire Strike and Time Spy benchmarks to cover synthetic testing along with a host of real-world gaming counterparts.

Our performance analysis articles on recent games can provide additional insight into what performance you should expect. Try to pick real-world benchmarks that use engines relevant to the games you like to play. One synthetic and one or two real-world benchmarks should be plenty. Find a few reliable, easy to use gaming benchmarks to run before, during, and after overclocking, both for stability testing and performance measurement purposes. Now it's time to test the hardware and see how well your card currently performs.

Games with built-in benchmarks (Price varies).

3DMark (opens in new tab) if you want a very thorough benchmark ($30).

Unigine Heaven (opens in new tab) for benchmarking (Free).

MSI Afterburner (opens in new tab) for overclocking (Free).

Here's what we recommend you download for this process: EVGA's Precision is another excellent graphics card overclocking suite, if MSI's Afterburner leaves you cold. In addition to a long history of stable releases, Afterburner is simple to use and provides a few extras including a built-in temperature graph along with voltage and real time clock speed monitoring tools.

MSI's venerable Afterburner is the best place to start when it comes to overclocking your graphics card. Manufacturer-specific overclocking software exists, but most veteran PC enthusiasts stick to a few trusted packages that have been around for a while and work on most graphics cards no matter who makes them.

Good news: overclocking your graphics card is actually really easy, and you don't even need to leave Windows to do it! While the motherboard BIOS is where most CPU overclocking takes place, graphics cards are tweaked via desktop software. (Image credit: UL Benchmarks) (opens in new tab) The software you'll need

Overclock gpu msi afterburner