Quick overclocking question

Is static (the appearance of some speckles or "snow" on the screen) after a while a problem with the core being clocked too high or the memory being clocked too high? About an hour into playing some games such as STALKER and Crysis I'll get it.

 

Yes, if you see anything else on the screen that shouldn't be there it's called artifacting and means you raised the clocks too high.

 

I agree. My overclocking failures have ended up with artifacting.

Tone down the speed or increase the cooling.

 

What speeds did you have?

From 2.4ghz to what?

Well... If it happens 1 hour into the game... its probably heat issues right?

And... what settings do you play Crysis on?

 

Turned out it was my memory. I lowered that by about 20mhz, but actually I was able to boost my core clocks up by 10 mhz, so my FPS probably didn't get hit at all.

Hmm... I don't think what I had was artifacting. Isn't artifacting texture distortion as a result of video card malfunction? Like when I quit my game, the screen was still fuzzy.

I figured it was temperature related, but I heard that as long as the card was under 100 degrees Celcius it wouldn't be a problem. Mine usually started showing problems at 90 to 92 degrees.

I run Crysis quite smooth when the card is overclocked (smooth to me means over 25FPS avg.) at 1440x900, all High with Shaders on Medium. CPU-affected things such as Physics and Sound are at Very High since they bare no effects on GPU.

Thanks for the replies.

 

Artifacts are anything you see on screen caused by OC'ing too much or a faulty graphics card. I would imagine the higher you go over your optimum clock frequencies the more intense and different artifacting will be seen. When the graphics card on my old Samsung gave up the ghost (no oc'ing) I saw extreme texture distortion to the point when the whole screen was unuseable.

I've had the intermittent snow effect you talked about when I clocked my 7950gtx (sli) core over 600 on another computer. Thought it was an in game problem, but noticed it on a 3dmark06 test as well. This happened even though some people with a similar setup used those freqs with no problem. Ideally you should run your own tests as all systems/environments are different including the same laptop models (look at the variation for the same systems in 3dmark scores).

 

I do run my own tests... however I only used a 3dmark06 test as my reference. I wouldn't play a full hour's worth of a game every 5mhz increment.

 

I also have a 8700gt and it never started artifacting...instead, 3dmark2006 or Crysis will freeze the entire system if i push the clocks too high.

Raiser Roofer, you have lots of headroom for oc´ing the shaders....try 1800mhz. Right now i´m using 755/1850/975.

 

Yes, "snow" is usually memory, and yes, your FPS probably did get hit, because with modern video cards it's not the core clock that counts, it's the memory clock.

Try doing a quick 3Dmark with the ram set a little higher and adjusting the core mhz too, you'll see that clocking the core 10% higher results in maybe 3% better fps, but 10% faster memory results in ~10%+ more fps.

But remember even 10% more fps isn't going to make a game go from unplayable to playable, going from 20fps to 22fps isn't going to help much Anything under a 25% increase really isn't worth doing, so unless you're getting 25% framerates then don't bother o/c'ing.