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Should I be concerned?

ATIorNvidia

ATIorNvidia

ATIorNvidia

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So I decided to start clocking my 5870 (using Sapphire TriXX), so I fired up Furmark and first ran it for about 15 minutes at stock speeds. Everything was fine, so I set the Core straight to 900, and from there, went in 5mhz increments until artifacts started to show up. When I hit about 955 core, I started artifacting, so I backed down to 925mhz, but was still artifacting, then I backed down to 900, then stock, then even below stock (~800mhz) but the artifacts still wouldn't go away.

Anyway, I fired up a game, and that was artifacting too.... so I ended up restarting Windows, and they disappeared. I'm back at stock now and everything seems to be fine.

P.S Voltage/mem clocks weren't touched yet.
 
ATIorNvidia said:
So I decided to start clocking my 5870 (using Sapphire TriXX), so I fired up Furmark and first ran it for about 15 minutes at stock speeds. Everything was fine, so I set the Core straight to 900, and from there, went in 5mhz increments until artifacts started to show up. When I hit about 955 core, I started artifacting, so I backed down to 925mhz, but was still artifacting, then I backed down to 900, then stock, then even below stock (~800mhz) but the artifacts still wouldn't go away.

Anyway, I fired up a game, and that was artifacting too.... so I ended up restarting Windows, and they disappeared. I'm back at stock now and everything seems to be fine.

P.S Voltage/mem clocks weren't touched yet.
Click to expand...

Be concerned but not worried. A restart is often required to reapir a dodgy overclock on a graphics card. Just resume testing from where you were safe and drop it a tad.
 
I've seen that before.
It's nothing to worry about.

Although I'd just run the Heaven benchmark tbh for stability, as you get some performance figures off it too, and you can see if the overclocking is having a positive or negative effect past a certain point.
 
I think there may be a problem with the card. I notice some extremely subtle artifacts when I'm playing BF3. Like, I'll see a small black square appear on the floor and disappear within a split second, and this is at stock speeds. It doesn't happen in anything else, nor has it happened in the Heaven benchmark or Kombuster/Furmark?

Using 11.10 drivers.
 
Just clocking the card is extremely unlikely to damage the card. It is heat and voltage which does the damage, and since you didn't increase volts or put your finger in the fan it should be fine.
 
yes, often once you go beyond stability then you can still get artifacts afterwards, even at lower clock speeds, not always but it can happen. If its there at stock after a reboot thats when to worry.

Also, DO NOT USE FURMARK. Not least because its utterly pointless, you might only be able to get 900Mhz stable in furmark, yet every single game you ever play will be stable at 950Mhz, maybe 1Ghz, who knows. Likewise you can get away with higher voltage and overclocks in "real" games which have far lower loads than Furmark.

The only thing furmark is useful for, is finding stability in furmark......... no game, ever, loads a gpu like it.

Ignore furmark, overclock a bit, fire up a tougher gaming title, and see if its stable, really as simple as that.
 
Just thought i'd have a go at overclocking my graphics card too for the first time.

I have it running stable, according to Furmark, at 950MHz core clock and 1080MHz Memory clock (870/1050 stock).

Now, my question is do people keep their overclock set all of the time or just set it to a profile in MSI afterburner/EVGA precision or similar, and then change from stock speeds to overclocked speeds depending on what you're doing?
 
mine is set all the time at 780(606 is stock) but i do use different profiles,ie higher if im playing a pc intensive game
 
Fair enough. Thanks.

I have just got it to 970MHz/1120MHz which runs Furmark for 20minutes with no artifacting.
But then after that it goes back to the desktop and minimises Frumark stress test screen.
Nothing locks up but if i try to restore the Frumark window it doesn't pop up.

Again no lock ups and temps aren't too bad (86c max) considering that at stock it idles at 60c anyway.


I will run BF3 in a bit and see how it goes. then i will save it as a profile and switch between stock and the overclock as need be.
 
ATIorNvidia said:
So I decided to start clocking my 5870 (using Sapphire TriXX), so I fired up Furmark and first ran it for about 15 minutes at stock speeds. Everything was fine, so I set the Core straight to 900, and from there, went in 5mhz increments until artifacts started to show up. When I hit about 955 core, I started artifacting, so I backed down to 925mhz, but was still artifacting, then I backed down to 900, then stock, then even below stock (~800mhz) but the artifacts still wouldn't go away.

Anyway, I fired up a game, and that was artifacting too.... so I ended up restarting Windows, and they disappeared. I'm back at stock now and everything seems to be fine.

P.S Voltage/mem clocks weren't touched yet.
Click to expand...

Had the same problem with my card, absolutely crapped my pants when it was doing it at stock a reboot fixed it like yours and since then I've left it heh. I've been meaning to overclock again but theres not much information on people overclocking my specific card so I havnt found any average end walls ;(
 
OK, now my card ran fine on the Furmark stress test for 30mins+ but 5 seconds in BF3 and it crashes the system completely.

Any tips for this?

Cheers
 
drunkenmaster said:
Also, DO NOT USE FURMARK. Not least because its utterly pointless, you might only be able to get 900Mhz stable in furmark, yet every single game you ever play will be stable at 950Mhz, maybe 1Ghz, who knows. Likewise you can get away with higher voltage and overclocks in "real" games which have far lower loads than Furmark.

The only thing furmark is useful for, is finding stability in furmark......... no game, ever, loads a gpu like it.

Ignore furmark, overclock a bit, fire up a tougher gaming title, and see if its stable, really as simple as that.
Click to expand...

Quoted for truth, Furmark is utterly pointless and people that insist on running it for lengthy periods only have themselves to blame when it goes **** up!
 
coupe69 said:
Quoted for truth, Furmark is utterly pointless and people that insist on running it for lengthy periods only have themselves to blame when it goes **** up!
Click to expand...

Fair point.

However, when i ran Furmark for 30mins with one of my overclocks i had no issues and temps maxed out at 86c.

However, as soon as i fired up battlefield on High settings the system completely froze and i had to reboot.

Surely BF3 isn't more stressful than Furmark.
 
I have another rather annoying problem. I've managed to get 950/1200 stable in games/benchmarks, but sometimes when I switch user, log off, or put my PC to sleep/try to log on again), the PC will hang or the screen will go all fuzzy, which forces me to restart. When in Windows, it's perfectly fine.
 
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