Afterburner inconsistencies, Clocks and OSD on 860m/Y50

I started trying to use Afterburner again, now on my Lonovo Y50 with maxwell 860m 2GB. I'm currently using 4.0.0 but saw this previously as well which is why I went to the latest version. I've also seen this with several nvidia drivers, I'm on the latest official version currently. I'm not a big overclocker anymore but I used to do it a lot just for benchmarking. I've read that the 860m is generally a good overclocker so I wanted to see if I could squeeze a few extra FPS out of it.

I seem to be able to get +135 and +300 easily, with no temp issues and I'd be fine with these settings for gaming, IF I could consistently get them to stick. The issue I'm seeing is that sometimes Afterburner itself may show the core from +0 all the way to +3x,xxx for some reason, instead of the +135 I have it set for (one profile, auto loads upon windows login). The OSD sometimes shows that the core is 405, 540 and occasionally it will show 1020 or so. I'm not sure if I'm having an OSD issue (reading or displaying correct core clock) or if it's an Afterburner issue applying the clock. Due to me not trusting the readings I never know if I'm getting full performance or not.

Any help would be appreciated getting it setup more reliably. I would prefer auto start and set it and forget it setting, but I'm even ok with manually starting it if I have to. It just seems like I have to exit and restart it several times to get it to say what I want so now I don't ever believe either Afterburner or the OSD.

I've tried searching the web and these forums but it's hard to find good search terms and results related to what I'm seeing. I really hope it's just some settings I need to tweak. I see some "low level" type settings in both afterburner and the osd program but haven't messed with them yet.

 

Maybe your card is downclocking itself when you aren't using it 100%? I know this can happen easily with Kepler and should also happen with maxwell. What games have you been trying? Or do your games drop frames a lot when your OSD shows the core drop heavily?

Also, you may wish to try using something like nVidia Inspector to see if it's a MSI Afterburner problem or if it's a direct problem with your card's power or something. Sorry I can't be a lot more helpful here.

Also, you might want to post in this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/751352-860m-beast.html

 

Afterburner is really bad for mobile cards... Grab Inspector and use that. Its not as flashy but it works for setting clocks. You may have to set it and then set it again when it settles down (you'll see what I mean) but after that, its golden.

I have Afterburner, Precision X, and Inspector on my machine and I threw away the first two. They're just not reliable for mobile and the OSD from each of them has issues so I use RTSS with HWiNFO64 to get what I want (to be fair, the only issue with MSI's OSD is I can't see the voltage but that's something that I monitor for a reason so Afterburner is a no go).