How To Overclock and Undervolt NVidia RTX 3050 – with Examples
Overclocking and undervolting NVidia RTX 3050 is a great and completely free way to get more performance out of your graphics card. You can increase its performance and decrease temperatures by adjusting the clock speed, voltage, fan curves, and other advanced settings on your NVidia GPU.
In this guide, you will find step-by-step instructions on how to overclock and undervolt the NVidia RTX 3050, as well as a few tips on how to achieve optimum results.
Before we get into it, let’s clear some things most of you might be worried about.
Will overclocking void the warranty of the NVidia RTX 3050?
No, overclocking and undervolting will not void the warranty of your NVidia RTX 3050. This is because it’s just a software adjustment that involves no physical changes to your card. Even if you try to overclock too high or give too much voltage to the card, it will shut itself down to avoid any damage until you revert the overclock.
Will this guide work for other NVidia Graphics cards as well?
Yes, this guide will work for other NVidia graphics cards as well. Overclocking and undervolting an NVidia RTX 3050 is relatively similar to other NVidia GPUs. However, depending on your card’s capabilities and cooling solutions, you may need to adjust specific settings. It is best to research before attempting any overclocking for your particular model.
Overclocking and Undervolting the NVidia RTX 3050
Before you start overclocking the NVidia RTX 3050, I highly recommend you go ahead and reinstall some fresh NVidia GPU drivers. Follow my guide on how to completely uninstall any previous drivers and then go ahead and download the best driver depending on the games that you play.
Now that you have the best NVidia driver installed let’s start.
Step 1 – Download and Install MSI Afterburner
MSI Afterburner is a GPU overclocking tool that allows you to overclock your graphics card’s core clock, and memory clock, and adjust the fan speed. To get started with overclocking your NVidia RTX 3050, you will need to download and install MSI Afterburner.
The MSI Afterburner installer can be downloaded from the MSI website.
Once the installer has been downloaded, simply run it and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation process.
After installing MSI Afterburner, you can begin overclocking your NVidia RTX 3050 graphics card.
Step 2 – Download and Install Superposition.
It is time to download and install a benchmarking tool to properly test if the overclocks you will apply later on are stable or not.
Superposition by UNIGINE is one of the most popular benchmarking tools available today that will allow you to test the stability of your NVidia RTX 3050 overclock accurately.
To download Superposition, simply visit their website and follow the instructions provided.
Once you have downloaded the program, install it on your computer and now you can proceed to the third step of this guide where we are going to show you exactly how to overclock and undervolt your NVidia RTX 3050.
Step 3 – Overclocking & Undervolting NVidia RTX 3050
Go ahead and run MSI Afterburner, and it looks like the image below.
As you can see, there are a few options that you can instantly change, like Core Voltage, Core Clock, Memory Clock, Power Limit, Temp Limit, and Fan Speed.
The first thing I highly recommend you do to your NVidia RTX 3050 when overclocking is to increase the Power Limit and Temp Limit to the maximum. To do that, bring the slider to the right.
Putting the Power Limits to the maximum doesn’t mean that your GPU will automatically consume more power, it just means that your NVidia RTX 3050 will consume more power if it actually needs it to perform better.
Now that you have set the power limits of your NVidia RTX 3050 to the maximum, it is time to start tweaking it.
Now the way that I like to overclock NVidia GPUs is the following:
I start with Memory Clock=300 and Core Clock=0 and perform an 8k Optimized test on the Superposition benchmark.
If everything is good and the test ends with no stuttering, artifacts, or FPS drops close to 0, go ahead and raise the Memory Clock by +100 and do another test on Superposition.
Repeat the same steps until the Benchmark crashes or it’s unstable and go ahead and use the last stable value.
Once you find the maximum Memory Clock speed that your NVidia RTX 3050 can handle, start tweaking the Core Clock.
Start with a Core Clock=50 while having the Memory Clock on whatever value you found stable and perform a test on Superposition.
If it’s stable, go ahead and raise it by +25 and do a test again.
Repeat the same steps with increments of 25 until Superposition crashes or is unstable.
Once you’ve found the perfect overclock for your NVidia RTX 3050, go ahead and do the following:
- Click the “Apply” button.
- Click the “Save” button.
- Click on 1 on the right column to save your NVidia RTX 3050 overclock.
Let me give you an example of a possible scenario when overclocking your NVidia RTX 3050 so you can understand it better:
Overclocking NVidia RTX 3050 example 1
| Attempt N. | Core Clock | Memory Clock | Stress Test Results |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default | 0 | 300 | Finished |
| Attempt 1 | 0 | 400 | Finished |
| Attempt 2 | 0 | 500 | Finished |
| Attempt 3 | 0 | 600 | Finished |
| Attempt 4 | 0 | 700 | Finished |
| Attempt 5 | 0 | 800 | Crashed |
| Attempt 6 | 50 | 700 | Finished |
| Attempt 7 | 75 | 700 | Finished |
| Attempt 8 | 100 | 700 | Finished |
| Attempt 9 | 125 | 700 | Crashed |
With the above table, you can see that Attempt 4 is the best possible speed for your Memory Clock that your NVidia RTX 3050 can have, and Attempt 8 is the best possible Core Clock + Memory Clock overclock that you can have on your NVidia RTX 3050.
You will need a lot of testing and back and forth to get the best overclock settings for your NVidia RTX 3050, but it’s worth it since once you find the best overclock, you don’t have to do it again.
Step 4 – Fan Tuning your NVidia RTX 3050
Since the NVidia RTX 3050 gets pretty hot at high speeds and often overheats, I would recommend creating an “aggressive” fan configuration to keep it as cool as possible.
If you want to keep your NVidia RTX 3050 as cool as possible, you can copy the best fan configuration for NVidia RTX 3050 below:
Once you’ve done everything, save your changes, and you are ready!
