PSU Holding me back?

[Rob Turbo]

I recently bought a sapphire 7850 oc edition and after seeing the massive 7850 overclocking thread on here I decided to give it a go.

The best I can get is 1150/6000 @ 1.225v, even slightly over on the speed/slightly under on the volts, I get crashes, I never see over 62c.

Could this be down to a cheap PSU or do I just have a card that isn't the best at overclocking?

My current PSU isn't a big brand, it's a 750w, a good few years old. I don't have a very much spare cash but could possibly stretch to about £60 if it's going to help things, but if I'm just going to be buying for the name and not seeing any benefit I have more important things to spend my hard earned on!

 

[Gregster]

If the crashing is switching completely off with no freezing, I would say it is your PSU but if it is freezing or hearing sound in the background, it is your Overclock not being stable.

Those clocks are decent and any more will not be noticable in games TBH.

 

[Jarrod]

When my PSU was being over drawn, it would just shut off or sometimes just freeze with looping sound. A swap to a nice Corsair TX850 fixed this. But ofc, hard to diagnose if there is sound playing as it may or may not be the PSU.

 

[Havana_UK]

Sounds like 1150/6000 is the best you'll get from the card, but be happy with that, it's a pretty solid improvement!

 

[Rob Turbo]

It has made a difference in games, so I'll be happy with it if that is it's limit, but if the real limitation was elsewhere I'd rather squeeze more out of it!

The crashes have been in heaven with the sound off so I don't know if the sound is still playing, I've only been moving on to playing games once it's stable in heaven. Sometimes it freezes for a bit then I get a BSOD (a0000001), other times heaven has frozen but I've been able to open task manager and close heaven, then adjust settings and re-open heaven.

I was getting power related (IIRC) BSOD when I was overclocking the CPU (i5 3570k) but still managed to get to around 5ghz but it was running quite hot under load, I settled at 4.3ghz for sensible noise/temp.

I think for the time being I'll stick with what I've got, then maybe get a bit of overtime in at work and get a new PSU, then try again from scratch with the overclocking.

 

[Gregster]

I am very confident a new PSU will not make a scrap of difference to your overclocks. If the PSU is a crap brand though, it could pay to get a reputable brand to save it failing and taking one or more of your components with it.

 

[Rob Turbo]

Well it turns out 1150 wasn't stable, dirt3 crashed after only 2 races, then at 1140 it crashed after about 5 races, now I've got it at 1130 running heaven, memory is still 6000(1500) and still at 1.225 volts. I'll leave it on that for a few hours and use my laptop until it's done.

The first crash in dirt3 was coloured lines all over the screen and the music sort of froze, it just stayed like that, I had to reset it. The second was the same other than the screen was black, no coloured lines.

I'll look into getting a new PSU anyway, I don't want it ruining anything if it goes pop! Modular would be nice but it's an extra £20 ish for equivalent models just so you don't have to tuck as many wires out of the way so I'm not sure I'll bother.