How far to overclock the graphics?

I'm able to overclock to 650/800 comfortably and that's the highest I've tried yet. I was wondering what happens when you overclock too far and is any damage caused? Temperature has almost never gone over 58°C for all games (only once when playing Crysis it reached 68°C). How would I know when to stop? If the computer does crash does it cause irreversible damage? I've been getting lots more fps in games and overclocking has allowed me to higher settings in games so I want to go as high as is safe. How far have other people with ati 5650's managed to get their clock rates to?

Also, how do I safetly test to see if a clock rate is stable?

 

Use furmark stability test to see if its stable, if its not you will see some artifacts, overclocking too much will crash your system and will restart the computer.

 

Yeah just tried 800/800 and then 760/800. Both made the screen fade to black and I had to restart. I will try going down to 750/800 and keep working my way down until it stops crashing. Then I'll try the test you suggested. Thanks!

EDIT: the highest stable core clock seems to be 680. I haven't tried pushing memory beyond 800 - is overclocking memory more dangerous than overclocking the core? How far should I try it?

 

You should really increase your clocks slightly and test until you start getting artifacts, then reduce back to your last stable speeds. Crashing your unit certainly doesn't help anything.

 

I'll go up by little amounts like you said. I'll doubt I'll make it much more but at the beginning I didn't think I'd be able to overclock it this far so it's going good. Then I'll have to try some games.

 

remember to keep the stability test on at least 15 mins to see if there are artifacts.

 

I have mine set for 700/900. Let us know how far you can go and still be stable....

 

670/950 lasted over 10 minutes and there were no artifacts or crashing. Should I now try a game? Is it safe to have memory clock so high? What about the temperatures of the memory - is that displayed as well? It says my gpu temperature has not gone above 69°C - does this include memory?

 

The memory chips don't have temperature sensors, so you have little idea how warm those things are getting.
They still throw artifacts up when they're malfunctioning, though.

 

It kept crashing while playing Crysis. So I lowered the core speed a little to 650 and kept memory at 950 and it works fine.