I've said in many threads, and I can't say why it does, but once you overclock it seems to bypass the current drivers and revert to the I assume bios clocks.
Its hard to explain and that wasn't good
Basically when I first install a system, all is completely hunky dory, any driver(from about 9.12/10.1 up) will default a dual screen system to 400/900 (though personally I get flickering up to 400/1000 in some instances so those are the clocks I set myself).
That works fine for me, I reinstalled windows today as it happens, dual screen, not a flicker in sight, same happened last time.
Now the SECOND I overclock, it seems to override something in the drivers, the "fix" as it were and after I overclock the OLD idle speeds come back into play, the 137/300 speeds as in your config file.
I really don't know why, only that it does. Without overclocking the drivers would appear to have a fix that when default clocks are enabled, and it finds a dual screen setup, it over rides those clocks, but anything outside of default clocks and the fix doesn't work.
So for me, in that config file you posted, I'd change the core clock settings to 400/400/775 (775 is max it will go on a 5850 in the CCC< you can put in 9.2Ghz there, it will only go to 775 with normal bios), in the memory I put 1000/1000/1100.
I actually seem to get away stability wise, with the lowest voltage setting while still at 400Mhz so I keep both the first two settings at 950, largely because afterburner only allows 1v as the lowest setting and 0.95v you can set here, drops temps and power a little.
Even worse though is, now and then, it did a few days ago, out of no where it started enabling itself to 137/300 clocks again. I may well have overclocked something different to usual, I hit a few profiles in afterburner and everything was back to normal. I'm not really sure at that stage, what had changed.
The safest, completely fullproof method is to run stock or overclocked 3d speeds all the time, either using gpu clock tool, or msi afterburner, gpu clock tool will disabled powerplay full stop, at any speed you set. Afterburner will only stop powerplay working completely if you set clocks above the CCC limits. For a 5850 thats 775Mhz, if you set afterburner to run at 775Mhz, it will still drop to idle clocks, set it to 776Mhz and it will stay at whatever speed you set it too. Usefully, if you reset the speed to 775Mhz, it will re-enable powerplay, while gpu clock tool won't.
SO what I tend to do for gaming, is set a higher overclock with higher voltage, around 950/1.25v and it stays there in games no matter what. Then for idle stuff i'll have a profile at 775Mhz, set that and powerplay will kick in idle speeds for me. I then use the config file with the AMD profiles to make sure those don't go too low.
Cainer, if AMD made this a sticky on THEIR forums, it would solve almost everyones problems. I've remarked on that repeatedly aswell, AMD, Intel, Nvidia, just about everyone should have one page updated with these kinds of fixes, a page EVERYONE knows about and everyone will check first. They are all morons for not doing that.
