Best GT 1030 Overclocking Settings Guide
If you’re looking to get more performance out of the GT 1030, this great guide walks through the exact overclocking steps, tools, and benchmark tests that can push this tiny card further than you might expect. The GT 1030 is a low‑power favorite for budget builds and small form factor systems, and with the right tuning it can deliver noticeably better gaming and productivity performance:
So you want to overclock a GT 1030 graphics card. If so, you’ve come to the right place.
The Nvidia GT 1030 is a low power entry level card introduced in mid 2017. This card happens to be one of my personal favorites. It’s one of only a few modern graphics cards out there that are small enough and with low enough power requirements to add to just about any small form factor or off the shelf department store desktop.
This card is perfect for slapping into an old business desktop and turning it into an affordable gaming or editing machine without all the hassle. Now, that being said, it is entry‑level, so 1080p gaming is a little bit of a question mark. But perhaps with some overclocking we can tip it into the 1080p column’s favor.
Let’s see what we’re dealing with. GT 1030 is based on the GP108 graphics processor and has 384 CUDA cores running at 1228 MHz core clock and 1502 MHz memory clock. It comes in both standard height and low profile, as well as both single and dual‑slot variants. The GT 1030 can come with either active or passive cooling solutions and has 2 GB of GDDR5 memory. The example card we have here is the Gigabyte GT 1030 low profile.
Now let’s get ready to overclock and benchmark this little card and see what kind of performance we can get out of it. The first thing we’re going to do is update the drivers. Let’s pop over to Nvidia and grab the latest ones.
Now that our drivers are freshly updated, the next step is to install an overclocking program called MSI Afterburner. MSI Afterburner is a completely free tool that gives you a high level of control and monitoring over your graphics card. It’s made by the company MSI, but in no way do you have to use it with an MSI brand of card or anything like that.
Now that MSI Afterburner is installed, let’s look at the key settings we’ll be using. We’ll be focusing on voltage, clock speed, and fan settings. We can see that the fan speed is currently set at Auto. You can turn this off and manually select the fan speed, however for this video we’re going to leave it on Auto.
We can set our core clock and memory clock values from here. For voltage, you can see that the setting is grayed out by default. If you’d like to change the voltage, you’ll first need to go into Properties and check Unlock Voltage Control. I would recommend being very careful when changing the voltage and only doing it in small increments.
After you’ve made your changes, you can reset them back to default by clicking on the reverse arrow at the bottom. Once you’re satisfied with your changes, you can click the check button to apply them. You can save your current settings to a profile by clicking the Save button, then clicking on one of the profiles along the right‑hand side. Finally, you can have the current settings automatically apply at Windows startup by clicking the Windows icon in the upper right corner.
Now I’m going to put a list of known successful GT 1030 overclocks on the screen as well as in the video description. Every card is different, but this should give you a good jumping off point for possible overclock values that may work for you.
Now that we’ve locked in our overclock settings, we’re going to want to test them. We’re going to run through five different programs with benchmarks to test our overclock for stability and speed. All the programs we’re testing with are free, I’ll put links for them in the description.
What I’ll do is run through all five benchmarks with stock settings, then select a moderate initial increase in both core clock and memory clock settings. I’ll then run the 3DMark Demo benchmarking tool just to be sure it can make it through the test without crashing. I’ll then increase the overclock values slightly and run the test again.
Once the settings have been pushed too far and I start seeing crashing, graphical glitches, or things just don’t seem to be working properly, I’ll dial the settings back to where they were just previously when everything was still working solid. At that point, I now have a good idea of where the sweet spot is for overclocking my particular card. I can either stick with those settings or try tweaking things just a little bit further.
After a number of tests, this particular card was able to achieve an overclock of +170 MHz core clock and +620 MHz memory clock. Tweaking the voltage up slightly didn’t seem to do anything, and some tests would run just fine with higher settings, but I wanted rock‑solid stability in all situations, so this is what I settled for.
Let’s go through the benchmarks to see how well our new and improved card did. First up is 3DMark Demo, a popular benchmarking tool released in 2013. Running at default settings, our original graphics score came in at 1066. After overclocking, graphics was able to reach a score of 1230. That’s an increase of 15.4 percent, so it’s looking good so far.
Next we have Shadow of the Tomb Raider Trial benchmarking tool. Running at 1080p and the Low settings preset, our initial frames rendered was 3626 and an average FPS of 23. After overclock, frames rendered increased to 4104 and average FPS of 26. That’s a frames‑rendered increase of 13.2 percent. Perhaps not quite playable at 1080p, but certainly an improvement.
Third on the list is Star Control: Origins benchmark. Running at 1080p on the Low preset level, the base test achieved an average frame rate of 67.6. After overclock, the test achieved an average frame rate of 78.5. That’s an increase of 16.1 percent. Looks like some pretty decent 1080p results from this title.
Our fourth benchmark is PCMark 10 Demo. This professional benchmarking tool from the same company behind 3DMark attempts to measure performance for more business and professional computing tasks. The initial test scored at 3027, while the overclock score came in at 3143. This is an increase of 3.8 percent, so not a huge difference here.
For our fifth test, we have Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Benchmark Tool. At 1080p on the Standard preset, the GT 1030 achieved a base score of 6919, or “Fairly High”. After overclocking, the card was able to achieve a score of 8076, or “High”. This is an increase of 16.7 percent. Looks like an enjoyable experience to be had with this title at 1080p.
So there you have it: the Nvidia GT 1030 overclocked and ready for action.
Now my question for you is: do you have the GT 1030? How was your performance with it? Let us know down in the video comments, and thanks so much for watching!
MSI Afterburner download page:
