NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060: A basic overclocking guide

The RTX 3060 isn't really known to be very powerful and looking at top tier cards like the RTX 3080 for example, it becomes obvious that raw performance isn't the 3060s biggest strength. However, according to most reviewers of the RTX 3060, it's actually quite decent at overclocking and that's why I decided to take my own shot at overclocking the RTX 3060 and explore the limits of its GA106 GPU. In this article I want to share my results and how the general overclocking experience was.

There are dozens of different RTX 3060 models out there, but only a few of them are really well suited for overclocking. When I had to decide on a model myself, the most important features I was looking for were a high power limit (or at least an option to increase it sufficiently), a beefy cooler and a strong VRM. This left me with just a few cards that meet this criteria. In the end, I had to decide between the TUF and the STRIX from Asus, the AORUS Elite from Gigabyte and the Gaming Z from MSI. My choice fell on the ASUS TUF RTX 3060 V2 OC, which is actually not the absolute best out of those cards in terms of overclocking features, but I wanted to keep things a little bit interesting. Additionally, the TUF is a little bit cheaper than the other cards and it looks suspiciously similar to the STRIX. I was hoping that under the hood these two cards would be more or less identical.

Before doing any tweaks or modifications, I always run a benchmark with the card at stock settings to establish a performance baseline and learn about the cards boosting behavior, power limits and voltage settings. I'm using the Unigine Superposition benchmark on 1080p Extreme settings for this and take the average out of three runs to calculate the score. To get the frequency and temperature readings, I use GPU-Z and log everything to a file. For power measurements I use an Elmor PMD from elmorelabs.com to get more detailed power readings than whats possible using only software tools.

These were the results for the stock runs with the fans running at 100% speed:

One thing to note here is that the advertised boost clock on the different models is completely irrelevant in practice. Each card will boost as high as possible as long as it does not hit a power, voltage or temperature limit. In it's stock configuration like this, the card is almost always bottle-necked by the power limit of 170 watt.

Looking at the frequency behavior, using the peak core frequency as a performance indicator doesn't really make sense, because these clocks are only hit at the beginning or end of the benchmark whereas the average clock speed is much lower overall.

We can also observe that during the benchmark run the voltage does stay around 1.10V and fluctuates about 30-40mV with a few exceptions.

Having established a baseline it's time to overclock the card. I am using MSI Afterburner as my tool of choice. 

The overclocking process itself is fairly simple and I usually do it like this when I'm pushing for maximum performance: 

After you have set your maximum values for memory and core, you can try reducing the memory frequency a tiny bit and see if you can push a higher core clock this way. Sometimes pushing the memory frequency too hard can bring some instability and does limit the maximum core clock a bit.

Of course if you are trying to overclock your card for daily use, you should run multiple benchmarks and the actual games or applications you are running with the card to verify the stability of your overclock settings.

I ended up with the following values in afterburner. 

With my settings dialed in, it's time to run Superposition again and see how the card performs with OC.

Looking at the max and average core frequencies, this is actually a decent result. The max core frequency increased by over 13% and also the memory frequency is up about 18% from stock.

What's also interesting is that the average power draw didn't really change at all compared to the baseline run, even with an increased power limit of 187W. This means that the card needs more voltage now if I want to push for higher boost frequencies.

If you are overclocking your RTX 3060 for daily usage, I recommend stopping now as there isn't really a point in going further unless you want to get your hands dirty and do some mods. For me though, I want to push the card harder and to do so I still need more headroom with the power limit. I don't expect any improvements after this step, but it will be necessary anyway once I have voltage control for the GPU.

The easiest way to increase the power limit on my ASUS TUF RTX 3060 V2 OC is to flash another VBIOS with a higher power limit onto it. As the card comes with dual bios, there's also relativity low risk involved of bricking the card if anything goes wrong during the flashing process. I used the VBIOS of the ASUS STRIX RTX 3060 V2 which luckily worked without any issues for me. It depends from model to model if there is a VBIOS available that's compatible with yours and has a higher power limit, so this might not be an option for you.

To flash the VBIOS I did take the following actions. First, I checked the current BIOS version with GPU-Z and also exported the VBIOS to a file just in case.

After that I headed over to techpowerup.com to search for the VBIOS of the ASUS STRIX RTX 3060 V2 that matches my BIOS ID as close as possible. For example the ID of my TUF card is  94.06.25.00.9B and I found a STRIX BIOS with version 94.06.25.00.A2. This is the BIOS I'm gonna use.

With the BIOS in hand the only thing left is flashing it onto the card, for which I used NVFlash. As the STRIX does have a differend board ID than the TUF, you will need a special NVFlash version with board ID missmatch disabled to be able to perform a cross flash. I tried a few different versions and it did take some time to find a working one, but in the end I was successful with a NVFlash version someone posted in a forum.

Please remember that flashing another BIOS onto your GPU always comes with a risk, especially when doing a cross flash like me. You are responsible for making sure the new BIOS works on your card. 

With the new STRIX VBIOS on the card, I repeated the benchmark with the exact same settings as in my previous run, just with the higher power limit and as expected, the results were more or less the same.

It's clear from the chart that the increased power limit didn't have an effect on the clock speed at all. The two curves are nearly matching each other during the full benchmark duration.

Another way to allow the GPU to use more power than intended, is to perform a shunt mod. Shunt mods are a very common way to falsify the power readings of the GPU by placing another shunt resistor in parallel to the existing shunt. This way the total resistance of the shunt decreases which in turn results in lower power readings. For example placing a 8mΩ resistor on top of a 5mΩ resistor results in a total resistance of about 3mΩ. You could also just replace the shunt resistors with lower value ones to achieve the same result.

The ASUS TUF RTX 3060 V2 OC has two shunt resistors that are connected to the 8-Pin power connector. I recommend to only mod shunt resistors connected to power connectors and not to the PCIe slot to avoid any damage.

If you can't use a VBIOS with a higher power limit or you need an even higher power limit for extreme overclocking, doing a shunt mod might be your only option.

With the increased power limit it's time to get my hands dirty and bring out the soldering iron. I'll start by adding manual voltage control to the card, but before that, let's take a closer look at the PCB of the ASUS TUF RTX 3060 and its VRM implementation.

ASUS has implemented a 6-Phase VCORE VRM on the TUF RTX 3060 using the NCP81610 controller with SiC654A 50A integrated power stages.

The NCP81610 can also be configured over I2C and there are even soldering spots on the PCB to solder a 3-Pin header onto the card. Unfortunately though, it's not possible to control the output voltage of the VRM directly over I2C, it only allows setting the switching frequency, OCP and load line.

For powering the GDDR6 memory, a uP9529Q controller is used with two phases of the same SiC654A 50A integrated power stages. 

To get voltage control, I am using an EVC2SX to perform a REFIN mod using one of the VMOD headers. With the EVC2SX it's really easy to get voltage control on almost any GPU and it requires just a tiny bit of soldering to get the job done.

The mod works by connecting the REFIN pin of the NCP81610 controller to one of the SRC pins on the EVC2SX and a GPU voltage measurement wire to the corresponding VIN pin.

With this setup I can simply use the EVC2 software to source or sink current from the REFIN pin to manipulate the voltage. The VRM controller is constantly adjusting the output voltage to match the voltage at REFIN, which means I can ultimately manipulate the VRM output voltage with this mod. In addition, I also get more accurate voltage monitoring capabilities using the EVC2SX. 

If you do this kind of voltage mod, make sure to start with the smallest increment possible and start with a negative value (-10.0μA) to see how much the voltage decreases. This way you get an idea of how much your settings affect the actual voltage. Then you start increasing the voltage by setting positive current values. In my case, 50μA was the highest value I was able to use before hitting the power limit again during the benchmark.

With the voltage mod done, it's time to see how the card performs with a slight voltage bump. I really wanted to reach 2300MHz on the core, so I cranked up the clock speed just a tiny bit and reran the benchmark. To my disappointment however, the card didn't really boost any higher in a meaningful way and a lot of times the card crashed whenever I tried to push the clock speed further.

Even though the maximum core frequency didn't scale, the average clock speed did improve slightly and so I still managed to get a higher score than without the mod. The card is also hitting the power limit again, pulling 209.5W on average during the benchmark run. 

The problem with the voltage mod is, that the final output voltage is still influenced by the boost algorithm of the card. It's only possible to apply a positive or negative offset from the currently requested voltage and doesn't allow us to set a constant value. I believe to get better stability at higher frequency, additional modifications would be required to not let the PWM_VID interface interfere with the voltage regulation to get a constant voltage.

In the voltage distribution diagram above we can see that the voltage is now spread much wider during the benchmark run and even though the minimum and average voltage increased compared to the stock card, I think especially the minimum voltage is still to low to provide enough stability for higher clock speeds.

If you want to get memory voltage control on your RTX 3060, you can simply do the exact same VMOD on the uP9529Q memory voltage controller as previously described for the GPU core. Connect a wire from the REFIN pin to one of the SRC pins on the EVC2SX and a memory voltage sense line to the corresponding VIN pin. Voltage can be controlled with the EVC2 software by sourcing current into the REFIN pin. I haven't done this mod on my own card though because I want to leave it as stock as possible and use it for other stuff afterwards.

The RTX 3060 does indeed overclock very nicely and even without any mods you can reach great clock speeds over 2200MHz on the GPU. On my ASUS TUF model, performing a voltage mod was really easy with the EVC2SX and just required soldering two wires to the card. Same goes for memory voltage control, but I haven't done that mod on my card.

I was hoping for better voltage scaling with the increased voltage, but that would've required additional mods and I still want to use my card for other stuff in the future. It's still great to be able to get control for both the GPU core and memory just with some wires and the EVC2SX.

To conclude this short overclocking experiment I think to unlock the full potential of the RTX 3060, more modifications are required than just this simple voltage and power limit modifications. If you are looking to overclock your RTX 3060 for daily usage, I recommend not to do any modifications the overall performance impact is just not worth it.

Anyway, the card was still fun to work with and I was especially impressed from the build quality of my ASUS TUF card with it's robust and overkill triple fan cooler and the structured PCB design.