7970 Overclocking Problems

[Robes]

So bought the Sapphire 7970 Dual x last week and finding the card pretty nice but having some weird issues.

Been testing some over clocks, clocked it to 1150/1600 with no voltage increase. Every seemed to be looking nice and rosy ran through an hour of Far cry 2 benchmark loops, ran though an hour of 3d mark 11 loops, ran heaven for an hour or so, ran through an hour of Furmark with highest temp being 76c on the gpu with the fan on default auto.

Sat the missus down in front of the thing not having played an actual game (benchmarking/testing is easy to do while your working, gaming isn't) stuck on Sonic generations (I know, I know a little sad, but we only had 30 minutes and didn't want to get into anything too much). Within 20 minutes or so the PC paused for a couple of seconds then artifacts started to appear. So I thought "dam! Clocks running too high better throttle it back".

So with no time left to play I moved the clocks down to 1100/1375 and switched it off for the night. Day before yesterday, ran loads of tests all came out clean, great! Sat down last night (had a whole hour to myself) to play Dead Island played for around 10 minutes and again black screen and it started artifacting again!

I know the obvious solution is go to stock speeds (which last time I used did seem fine) but obviously having bought this card instead of the 670/680, I would like more from it.

Anyone got any ideas? Drivers I guess would be one which I will try tonight, I'm on 12.6 I'll try 12.7. Anything else?

 

[Robes]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I've had similar strange issues - OC'd my card, everything seemed stable, played a few games with no problems... then run heaven 3 and I get loads of white flashing blocks all over the screen...

Reduce the OC (even below stock) and they stay there, so start thinking the card is failing... yet the few games I try still seem to be ok. After a reboot everything is fine in heaven 3 again.

One thing I did spot was that when I installed 12.7 beta drivers the AMD settings tool and GPU-Z were reporting the version as 12.4. Did an "uninstall everything" option on the amd installer, and windows was still installing a driver dating april 2012. Had to tell it to delete the driver files etc a few times through device manager as it kept on finding earlier versions.

Finally got it to stay on "vga compatible", and then reinstalled 12.7 - and now not showing as 12.4, and seems to be a lot more stable. Looks like it may have had a mismatch of driver files that was causing the issues.

See your's the way round I'd expect. The intensive bechmarking screwed the OC over, but mine seems to be the other way round. I play a reasonably stress free game and it goes wrong.

Very strange

maybe you need to put voltage up a tiny bit. if it works fine at stock then it's not faulty, and you can't guarantee a stock voltage overclock all the time i suppose? try upping it a tiny bit until you're stable

Aye, tis another good suggestion just a little disappointed if I have to up the Voltage as it's already quite a high voltage card 1.174.

 

[Robes]

Hmmm - So I've upped the voltage to 1.2v and everything seems to be fine what's strange though is if I keep at default voltage and have the fan running flat out the problem seems to appear faster!

Anyone think could be a faulty fan? Or would this just be the nature of things i.e. the fan drawing more power and leaving the GFX card a little short thus the artifacting?