Earlier this month, Nvidia removed the possibility to overclock the speed of their GeForce GTX 900M mobile GPUs with a driver update. They explained their motives saying that the option was not supposed to exist in the first place for that hardware, making it by all means a bug of the system. After days of uproar from the laptop gaming enthusiasts, Nvidia decided to re-include the overclocking feature in the next driver update.
As you know, we are constantly tuning and optimizing the performance of your GeForce PC.In a way, the initial decision of Nvidia to remove the overclocking on their mobile GPUs made sense. Overclocking is largely used by desktop PC users that want to squeeze their hardware to the last drop of performance. Overclocking, if not properly done, has the potential to damage the hardware because of the high temperatures that the system can be subjected to. That's why many gaming desktop PC rigs feature all kind of cooling systems.We obsess over every possible optimization so that you can enjoy a perfectly stable machine that balances game, thermal, power, and acoustic performance.
Still, many of you enjoy pushing the system even further with overclocking.
Our recent driver update disabled overclocking on some GTX notebooks. We heard from many of you that you would like this feature enabled again. So, we will again be enabling overclocking in our upcoming driver release next month for those affected notebooks.
If you are eager to regain this capability right away, you can also revert back to 344.75.
With gaming laptops, the situation is a bit different. The manifacturer has to address many space and weight requirements that desktop builds don't have. In addition, laptops can't count on the airflow that you have in tower cases. This means that high temperatures become a much larger problem if you want to play on the go. That's why the 900M series was not supposed to have overclocking capability. But it did, and Nvidia decided to remove it, making a lot of people understandably angry.
We all know how much PC gamers love to tinker with their specs and refine their systems. Bug or not, the possibility to overclock the GPUs in gaming laptops allowed them to do exactly that. It's understandable that Nvidia has all the interest in not giving the users tools that are pretty easily misused and could damage the hardware. At the same time one could argue that nowadays' hardware has the capability of monitoring its own status and cut back performance if it finds itself in a rough spot.
Long story short, costumers were not happy with the decision of Nvidia of not allowing users to overclock their GPUs, so they listened to them and decided to include it back in the next driver update, probably after working on it in order to make it as safe as possible.
The next driver update is scheduled for next March. If you can't wait that long to overclock your GPU, you can always revert back your drivers to the 344.75 version and start squeezing right away.
What you think of this decision? Are you a PC gamer that wants to keep its system at its best overclocking at its limit? Tell us in the comments.
