My stationary PC at home is getting quite old. It features a quad core i5 3570 CPU, 8GB of ram, 1TB SSD and an Asus GTX 970 strix GPU. I have been postponing an upgrade since most of the games I play are fine on this rig anyway, with adequate FPS and loading times - oh, and I am not really a gamer.

But anyway, I recently tried The Outer Worlds game and was hit by performance issues. Looking at the metrics it seemed my GPU was the bottleneck. To fix, I investigated if I could overclock it at a bit to achieve the 60 frame per second I wanted without sacrificing too much graphical fidelity. Long story short, I could not achieve 60 fps but I did increase GPU performance by 10% without stability issues, which is obviously better than nothing.

The GTX 970 from Asus has a stock GPU boost clock of 1178 MHz and memory clock of 7010 MHz. After a bit of fiddling, trial and error, computer crashes, etc. I manage to overclock the card to 1295 (+117) and 7030 (+20) without any stability or crash issues.

Overclocking of the Asus GPU can be done by using Asus’ own overclocking application: GPU Tweak II, which can be downloaded here: https://www.asus.com/us/site/graphics-cards/gpu-tweak-ii/

A screenshot of my profile setting can be seen here:

Not all cards are the same, as such not all cards can be overclocked to the same degree. My suggestion is to try my settings, see if they are stable, if not reduce the clock speed a bit.

Good luck overclocking!

Many of the old DOS / early Win95 games utilizes the IPX protocol for multiplayer.An example of this is the game: Carmageddon and Red Alert 2

Inter Packet Exchange (IPX) has long been deprecated in favor of TCP/IP, meaning that it is somewhat hard to get old games to play on modern PCs - even PCs running Windows XP.

Although Windows XP does support IPX natively, getting games to run using this protocol is hard on modernish hardware - in any case, I have never really succeeded.

Lucky for us, IPX wrapper exists that wraps IPX packets in UDP broadcast packets meaning that the game/application talks IPX but using UDP as a Network layer protocol.

IPXWrapper by Solemn is exactly this, a wrapper for many of the old games: http://www.solemnwarning.net/ipxwrapper/

I recently tested this out using Carmageddon, a racing game from 97’ against a couple of friends in a LAN setup. Just copy over the dlls into the game directory and the game will load these dlls instead of using the ones coming with Windows and will thus use UDP as Network layer packet transport.

Wonderful workaround to deprecation!