Overclocking legend Peter “Shamino” Tan, now working at Asus, has released Ark OC Tool (opens in new tab)Homemade program to overclock Intel’s Arc Alchemist graphics cards. Unfortunately, neither Intel nor Asus endorse this utility, so it is provided as-is and should be used only at your own risk.
Even among the best graphics cards, Intel Arc doesn’t play well with popular third-party overclocking software like MSI Afterburner, Asus GPU Tweak III, or EVGA Precision X1. Being new to the graphics card game, it’s puzzling that Intel didn’t make their graphics cards work with external overclocking applications, or at least reach out to the respective parties to guide them through support. Arc owners have been using Intel’s Arc Control software to overclock their graphics cards. Arc Control isn’t a bad tool, but it certainly has its limitations.
Tan uses Arc OC tools Intel Graphics Control Library (opens in new tab) (IGCL), this software comes with all overclocking features available as of January 9th. The program can be downloaded from overclocking expert Pieter-Jan Plaisier’s SkatterBencher. website (opens in new tab).
Arc OC Tool supports offset and static (locked) overclocking. The former takes advantage of the graphics card’s voltage-frequency curve, while the latter allows consumers to adjust their specific voltage and frequency. For now, Intel’s own Arc Control software only allows offset overclocking, so the static feature is exclusive to Tan’s homebrew software.
Or that’s the theory. In our limited testing with an Arc A770 Limited Edition, we tried to force a clock speed of 2300 MHz while running FurMark (above). It didn’t take and it didn’t take 2350 MHz. The card continued to run fine at 2200 MHz for the most part, and occasionally blipped to 2250 or 2300 MHz. But I did that before I tried the Arc OC tools.
It’s also worth heeding the warnings posted on the website.
“important! Be careful with voltage settings! On my A380 it should be set to 1.00000 for the default voltage, then 0.99999 for less than 10mV and 1.00001 for more than 10mV. If you are not careful, it is possible to set >2V to previously demonstrated.”
That’s… bad. If a change of 0.01mV actually represents a change of 10mV, it seems that the software is not actually using the correct value. I managed to get the PC to lock up by trying a 200 MHz offset and a 0.01 V voltage offset, but given that warning I didn’t want to look too much into voltage changes. In other words, proceed with caution.
Unlike Arc Control, Arc OC Tool doesn’t come with all the eye candy features and flashy sliders. Instead, Arc OC Tool aims to provide a simple user interface with essential options for overclocking. So if you’re looking for a practical Arc overclocking application and don’t want to add bloatware to your system, give Arc OC Tools a try. It’s not that Intel’s driver doesn’t install Arc Control.
