Simple overclocking questions (re: artifacts).

About 2 or 3 hours into gaming on my overclocked 9600M GT, I notice some artifacts (or oddities that I interpret as artifacts) and exit the game. I'm finding that the GPU is not overheating (~78C), but the artifacts/glitches were there.

Simple questions:

-Is it possible that artifacts can happen regardless of temperature? As in, even if the GPU temperature is measuring well within specs can specs set too high result in artifacting?

-...or are artifacts a temperature-independent phenomenon, thus making it more logical to presume that the issues I was seeing had more to do with the game than (glitches) than the overclock?

-Is it unusual for artifacting to show up so far into play? (2 hours+)

Notes: I've not seen the issue in other games, BUT I rarely play longer than 1 hour at any time. This was just an extended play session. CPU gets up to ~68C at its max temperature; chipset gets up to ~71C max; GPU ~78C max. Core 2 Duo T9550.

Thanks for your future insight.

 

Yes it can happen regardless of core temp. What it doesn't show is how hot your GPU memory is getting. The artifacts demonstrate that your memory on the card is getting too hot to run stably even if your core temp is under 80C. You just have to back it down then run ATI tool or continue to game to see if your memory is stable.

I believe snow on the screen is when the core is clocked too high.

 

i dont have much feed back to tell u on the whole thing if its just got to do with heating but, back in the day when had an x800 pro they said that u could overclock to an x800xt pe speeds which were about 200MHz faster than the pros stock clocks. so i used ati tool and gave it a try. was steady for about the first hour and then i started to artifact really bad and then my whole system just shut down. so im asuming its just heat but u would have to try and get some info from someone who is more technically inclined with arcitechure on computers than me.

 

understood. I'll back the memory down some more and see what happens. it's really the only thing that I'd moved up at all lately. I thought the setting was fine after all was stable in 3DMark 06 and an hour of gaming. Not so fast.

I assume atitool has some kind of GPU stress testing? I'll try that out as well. Thank you much!

 

Yep, just back off a little and you will be fine. Temps have been known to be wrong....

 

You can do a little test for you overclocking setting and its stability: Download the AtiTool and scan for artifacts, keep it scanning for the amount you regularly play (say 1 hour), if the scan timer does not resets (or if you don't hear any sound) then it will be stable for 1 hour.

I hope this can help you.

 

Just a warning: When you exit the game, temps may drop by as much as 10C before you can check the temperature on the program.

To best monitor temperatures, either use HW Monitor's 'max temp' column or Rivatuner to display temperatures in game.

 

yea, Trophy. I use the system hardware utility from CPUid. I leave it running while gaming, so I'm confident in the temp readings.

Thanks for the recommendation lonzanogo. Unfortunately, rivaruner doesn't "just work" with vista 64-bit. I'll try booting with F8 and starting the computer with signed driver mode disabled.

I dropped my memory from 997 to 980. Lost maybe 20 points on 3DMark, but no visual anomalies in a 3 hour session.

Again, than you to all for the recommendation and warnings.