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Overclocking Intel's HD 4000 | SemiAccurate

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Overclocking Intels HD 4000

Lots of extra voltage for just a little extra performance...

Apr 23, 2012 by Thomas Ryan
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After playing around with Intels HD 4000 in our previous reviews and recording some pretty impressive
performance, we decided to try and find the limit of the HD 4000s graphics performance. To accomplish this
we used Intels own over-clocking utility to tweak the HD 4000 and attain the highest level of performance it
can offer. As youll soon see Intel has a great little over-clocking utility and the HD 4000 has
a surprisingly large amount of headroom above its stock clock speed, but the gains from over-clocking the
HD 4000 are a bit less than you might hope.

Intels Tweaking App

What were looking at below is a screen shot of Intels Extreme Tweaking Utility. As you can see it offers
quite a bit of information about your CPU and PC configuration.

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This system information page is pretty detailed actually. Intels got a CPU-Z like read out on some of the
particulars of the CPU and Memory subsystems. Additionally, this utility sports a tabbed panel navigation
system that allows you to quickly switch between all of the major functions of this tuning application. As far as
aesthetics go Intels Extreme tweaking utility is not bad looking, although the varying shades of blue, black,
and grey tend to blend together after a while.
By far the biggest advantage that using this utility provides over tweaking your system through the BIOS is the
system monitor readouts that take up the lower third of the window. This system monitor can be configured
to tell you clock speeds, CPU usage, temperatures, and most importantly the current TDP of the CPU and
GPU parts of your chip. This information is extremely important for when youre overclocking as it can tell
you whether or not you need to bump up the TDP caps to get the most out of your overclock.

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Here we have the EULA type warning that greets you click on the Manual Tuning tab. Like most other tuning
apps, Intels is not going to be taking responsibility if you tweak one of the settings just a bit too far and end
up with a dead chip.

Looking at the controls on the Manual tuning page we see the all the different ways that Intels utility allows us
to tweak our chip. Now most of the controls in the center of the window are about controlling how much
electrical current and total power the CPU, GPU, and TurboBoost functions are allowed to use. Much like
how modern high-end GPUs require users to change a PowerTune limit, Intels Ivy Bridge based chips
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require you to play with power consumption settings as well. Looking to the information panel on the right
hand side of the window we can see all kinds of readouts like multipliers, turbo boost power caps, and clock
speeds.

Taking it to the Limit

Now for the real tweaking. Below is a tablet of clock, multiplier and voltage settings that were stable and
artifract free, while the HD 4000 was running Furmarks burn-in stress test.

I found that after 1300Mhz the HD 4000 required additional vlotage in order to produce artifract free frames.
While initially the voltage needed by these higher clocks was quite small, as we continued to increase the
clock multiplier the HD 4000 needed exponentially more voltage to remain stable and produce artifact free
images.

The maximum stable over-clock I was able to achieve was 1600Mhz. Increasing the clock speed to
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1650Mhz caused the HD 4000 to throttle after a few seconds no matter how much, or how little voltage we
tried adding to address the problem.

We tested out overclock in Bad Company 2 with mixed results. Performance was somewhat better, but no
where near the 39 percent increase clock speed that we were able to attain. More importantly we found that
the game would crash after a few minutes. So I ratcheted up the voltage until the game seemed completely
stable. This Bad Company 2 Stable voltage ended up being significantly higher than the voltage needed for
Furmarks stress test. 0.4727 additional volts is a lot to apply to any modern processor. As such Im not sure
that this overclock is 24/7 safe, but I havent encountered any issues with it so far.

As I mentioned earlier I achieved a 39 percent overclock, so upon seeing less than impressive performance
improvements in Bad Company 2 I decided to investigate. I ended up using Intels graphics current limit
setting to increase the TDP cap on the HD 4000 to somewhere between 45 and 52 Watts, from the 35
Watts it had been capped at before. I did this by simply maxing out the slider shown above.

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We re-benchmarked our overclock with the new TDP headroom setting and found another small, but
significant increase in performance over the old overclock with the stock TDP configuration.

Was it Worth the Time?

Admittedly, these graphs dont show off the performance improvements all that well, but looking at the
average frame rates tells us a much clearer story.

We recorded a 10 percent improvement in frame rates from stock speeds with our TDP capped overclock.
This isnt much an improvement to write home about, and a rather disappointing return on our 450Mhz
overclock. Moving to our non-TDP capped overclock we can see that our frame rates improved about 16
percent over stock. Again, this isnt all that impressive considering how much additional voltage and clock
speed we used to get to these results. At the same time though, our overclocking attempt moved frame rates
in Bad Comapny 2 from the low-twenties up into the mid-twenties which is a perceptible improvement. But
its not enough of an improvement to enable us to increase any of the games graphical quality settings and
maintain playable frame rates.
So really overclocking the HD 4000 is a mixed bag. If youve got the time it cant hurt; but if youre afraid of
damaging your shiny new $300 chip, you shouldnt feel like youre missing out by not clocking it into the
stratosphere.S|A

Bio

Latest Posts

Thomas Ryan
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Author at SemiAccurate

Thomas Ryan is based in Seattle, Washington. Thomas first began to appreciate the
wonders of the semiconductor industry while doing research on his previous favorite
hobby, PC gaming. Having co- purchased his first computer at the ripe old age of 11,
with $150 and the help of Craigslist he's been buying and building computers ever since.

Tags: (NASDAQ:INTC), GPU, HD 4000, Intel, Intel Extreme Tunity Utility, over clocking, tweaking
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