Mobile Graphics Overclocked: NVIDIA GT 425M

Conclusions

Overclocking a notebook graphics is a tough challenge in itself, since mobile computers aren’t usually designed with that particular purpose in mind. Consequently, they don’t have much of a cooling to deal with the extra heat. In overclocking, heat is the number one enemy. We ran into a number of temperature-related issues a couple of times during our tests, but, with the aid of a notebook cooler pad we finally managed to finish the entire test successfully.

Compared to its standard 560 MHz default core frequency, we noticed significant performance improvements from overclocking the GT 425M to 700 and 730 MHz. High image quality settings in DirectX 11 games would still reduce the frame rate down to an unacceptable level. Stick to low graphics quality in these games, and you’ll be getting satisfactory frame count of up to 40 FPS. In DiRT 2 (DirectX 11 mode), under “Ultra” image quality setting, we obtained a nice performance increase, from 29 FPS to 36 FPS. DiRT 2 is the only DirectX 11 game in our test that would still yield adequate frame rate under maximum graphics setting. Others are simply no match for the GT 425M, overclocked or not.

We also noted a remarkable performance increase in Batman: Arkham Asylum. With PhysX enabled and switched to “High”, the standard GT 425M yielded 28 FPS. The same graphics card spew out 35-36 FPS when overclocked. That’s a 25% improvement, which, in this case, turns an unplayable game into a very much playable one. The extra performance helped increasing the frame rate pass the 30 FPS barrier.

We haven’t been able to obtain a GeForce GT 430 sample, but if our overclocking attempt had somehow put the GT 425M at the same level with GT 430, then it seems that these two cards are best suited to gaming at lower resolutions, like 1366×768, 1280×720, or lower. Assuming the only difference between the two GPUs are their rated frequencies that is. You should have little or no performance issue at all with DirectX 9 and DirectX 10, but DirectX 11 gaming would require some image quality adjustments.