Overclocking
Overclocking pushes the chips of a miner or GPU beyond their stock frequency to gain hashrate, at the cost of higher power consumption.
Overclocking means raising the operating frequency of a machine's chips beyond the factory settings. On an ASIC, you adjust the frequency of the hashing chips, and often their voltage, through the firmware. On a graphics card, you adjust the core clock, the memory clock and the power limit.
The gain is easy to understand: faster chips compute more hashes per second. But power consumption generally rises faster than hashrate, so efficiency gets worse: each terahash costs more in electricity. Heat and noise also increase, components wear out faster, and calculation errors can appear if the settings are too aggressive. Overclocking therefore mainly makes sense with cheap electricity and very effective cooling, such as hydro or immersion cooling.
Before overclocking, check that the power supply and the electrical installation can handle the extra load, watch temperatures and the error rate in the web interface, and proceed in small steps. Also bear in mind that overclocking not intended by the manufacturer can affect the warranty. Undervolting works the other way, aiming to reduce power consumption to improve efficiency.
Our HappyMining firmware is installed free of charge on machines bought from us; its dedicated page presents the settings it offers.