Artifacts during UCin harmful?

Ive been playin around with ways to extend my battery time, and one of them is underclockin my videocard. Im usin 216/176 at the moment with windows running just fine, no instabilities there so far. As soon as i do anything demanding though, like a game i get serious artifacting.

I was just curious, as during my underclocking i dont plan on playin any games, is it harmful to my lappy if i just use windows with such low clock speeds?

 

It's not harmful.However it might cause the system lock up.
In this case artifacts are a sign of GPU pipelines being messed up because of inappropriate clocks.However, as I said there is no risk of damage

 

when u say GPU pipelines bein messed up, those are just problems with the rendering process, but not hardware right? Does that mean that you can go as low as ur stability will allow you without causing videocard damage?

 

No damage.
But the Driver has many connections with different parts of the GPU.So it might cause some problems for the System.
The shaders work in parallel.Wrong clock settings may cause some synchronization problems [or perhaps some other problems like some data corrupted on it's way to memory] that leads to some problems in the final picture.

 

thnx a bunch for the info!

 

If i really want to save power, I can underclock my 7900 GS as low as 50/50 (I normally use an overclock of 580/740). Windows vista gets really sluggish at those kinds of speeds. The lower your clocks, the more likely your system will lock up. But I don't think there's much of a risk when you ask your hardware to run slower than specifications.

 

WOOW, that's low. I tried 50/50 on my go7700, and the screen went wonky and then i got a bsod. Now i (manually) run it at what powermizer ran it at (100/175)

 

I managed 80/60 on x700, but I couldn't play movies in media player. 100/100 resolved that.

I haven't tried x1600 yet. I will though! And I think that mujtaba explained it well - no hardware problems, but possible bsods and freezes can be observed at that low clocks.

Ivan