560M Overclock Resetting

Hi all, I have been overclocking my 560M from its native core clock of 775 to 925mhz, and it seems ok according to the temperatures, and there is no artifacting going on, but when playing games, sometimes the screen goes black for a second and recovers, with my overclock totally undone.

Turns out the Nvidia Driver stopped responding and recovered. Usually the graphics card is at about 64C when it happens, so i doubt its a heat problem. This occurs anywhere between 10min to an hour of gaming and seems really random. I use the 285 nvidia drivers. When I dial the core clock back to 875 it never happens. Does anyone know what might be going on?

I am somewhat satisfied with the performance at 875, but I just feel like this problem is keeping my GPU from reaching its potential... the temperatures remain so low that it seems like theres a lot of headroom for more OC.. if only i can get it to stop resetting!

 

Not all graphics cards can overclock to the same level. You are probably getting that problem because its an unstable overclock. I'd scale it back to a stable oc.

 

Your display driver is crashing because the overclocking is making the GPU unstable. Temperature has nothing to do with it because temperature has to do with voltage, not core clock. Each 560m gtx will have different overclockability. Unfortunately, the 560m gtx cannot be vbio flashed to increase voltage which would have allowed the card to be overclocked higher with increased stability. Using 3DMark or any benchmarking tool to test the overclock is fine, but its not going to be perfect tester since games will be more or less demanding for whatever reason. The best way to test this is to play the games you plan on using the overclocking for like an hour and if all looks good, then increase clock a bit and repeat.

 

a.) is this primarily happening with skyrim? Skyrim seems to be pretty sensitive to overclocks, moreso than any other game I have (and 3dmark11) and can reset clocks frequently if they're too high

b.) are you using the latest beta drivers (290.53) as they seem to increase heat on the 5XX series cards compared to the last beta (290.36) and so the driver downclocks at a lower overclock than it would on 290.36

 

as others have mentioned, Overclocking has many factors to it besisdes just temps, and in this case, the car is not stable with such clocks.

That's why you have to tone it down and really test it for long amount of time to see if its really stable. Along with different software/benches.

My card can overclock over 920 core/1100 memory, but that stuff is barely stable for benches and almost no games. Hell, 860/1100 was stable for most games but the ocassional one would kill it. Thus... I rarely overclock much anymore anyways unless I really need it.

I tend to use stock 800/1000 for normal games, and only slight OC when the game is too demanding.

 

I've got my gtx560m at 940/1880/1749 w/68°c. I have the same problem with black screen but only in skyrim.

 

I havent had this happen in skyrim, but the longest i played it for is about an hour.. (finished it on my old laptop prior to getting this one). Im getting the instability issues in crysis 2 and BF3.

I see now that stability has to do with more than just temperature.. thanks for clearing that up people. This is my first time really overclocking, my other comps were always kinda crappy to begin with so i never did bother with it.

I rolled back my drivers from 290.XX to see if it was due to the fact that i was running a "beta" driver, but obviously it wasnt that. Now Im running driver 285.6X and just keeping the card on 900/1800/1500 and it hasnt crashed since. Are you guys sure there is no way to increase the voltage?