Oh god what did I do.

[TaskTool]

It's me again. This time I was bored out of my mind, so I decided to figure out if I could overclock my graphics card. XFX Geforce 9600GSO.

I did a bit of searching and I came across some forums with some guy advising people to use this program called atitool. Apparently it overclocks the gpu and memory, and watches the temperature. It seemed cool so i went to try it..

I did not understand how it worked though.. So I decided to click on Find Max Core.


Basically it opened up Fur Mark, and began to do something.. which i didnt know.. until I started to see artifacts on the image, then I knew it was testing to see how high it could go before it became unstable, seemed simple. But then it froze, and I tried to click abort but it was frozen. I turned off the computer, turned it back on, but it did not boot. Stayed at the bios screen. Turned it off. Waited 5 minutes, and tried again (have had this happen before when it crashed), and it booted up fine.

I then re-opened the program and got this message



So it became unstable at 700mhz, which is higher than my default speed which is 580mhz.. Now knowing that, would it be safe to set it to around 700mhz or a little lower than that? And if so how would I go about doing that with this program?

Also what about overclocking the memory? what will that do for me, and do I overclock it the same way I would do the core clock?

Sorry for my overall lack of knowledge in this area. I never intended to overclock anything, not even my cpu, but I thought it would be neat to try this with my graphics card.


Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0Ghz
4gb OCZ Performance Memory
XFX Geforce 9600 GSO 768mb
Power Up! 550W PSU

(Edit) Ok guys I figured out how to actually apply the clock change, and so, I clock the core clock to 700mhz, (698.50) and opened furmark, or 3d mark or whatever for 5 minutes and watched the temperature, and slowly but surely for 5 minutes it increased, until it reached 70 C where it seemed to have stayed, I dont know if it would go any higher given the time, but is 70 C stable for gaming? And if so, what kind of performance increase is 700mhz over the default which was 580mhz going to make for my games?

Also, about the memory clock, is it safe to overclock the memory? and what kind of temperatures are acceptable for my card?

 

[patonb]

What you should do, is look for the highest clocked factory card, set yours there, then bump the core and memory up 10 or 15mhz each test.

 

[wafflehammer]

the way most people over clock video cards is to raise the mhz by 5-10 then do a test...repeat this until the temperatures are to high or artifacts start showing

 

[TaskTool]

What you should do, is look for the highest clocked factory card, set yours there, then bump the core and memory up 10 or 15mhz each test.

You mean find the highest clocked factory card, and then clock the core clock and the memory to that speed, and then continue to go up 15 mhz until I see artifacts?

 

[wafflehammer]

You mean find the highest clocked factory card, and then clock the core clock and the memory to that speed, and then continue to go up 15 mhz until I see artifacts?

yep...

 

[TaskTool]

yep...

I did that with the memory clock, and I saw a little artifact when I hit 560mhz so I went back down by 5mhz, and its fine now, I am doing the same thing with core clock right now.

But I read somewhere about somebody overclocking the shader clock? What is that and how would I go about overclocking that?

 

[patonb]

For general use, keep them locked, core/shader.

Shader oc'ing is useful in folding/gpu number crunching.

 

[TaskTool]

Yesterday I played crysis on all high settings except for shaders on Medium, at 1024 x 768 and I was getting from 40-50 fps.

I left the computer on and went to sleep while it downloaded Killing Floor.

And immediately I whipped out fraps and began recording. My game then had episodes of freezing, and when I tried to alt+tab out, I found that my whole computer was frozen. After closing killing floor, my computer kept on freezing until it became unresponsive.

I checked atitool for artifacts and there were none, although in crysis I noticed some graphical glitches, like random polygons being rendered in the sky for a split second, and things like that. The idle temperature was 47 c, and when it was using furmark or crysis or any game it went up to about 71 c maybe higher.

Could the system instability be caused by overclocking the card? Or is there something else I need to be worried about?

I had to manually turn off the computer and turn it back on twice. The first time it froze at the bios screen, like it always does when I have these problems.

 

[patonb]

Hmm, back off the OC and try agin.

 

[TaskTool]

Hmm, back off the OC and try agin.

I set it back to default, and I wasn't even playing a game and then my screen went black, and I heard some sort of windows alert message but I couldnt see it, and then I heard an msn message noise but my screen was still black and could not see anything. I rebooted, and here we are again.


Is this hardware related? I am really starting to get worried. Do I blame the overclock?

Before my screen went black my computer froze, first my mouse and everything, and then before it went black I saw like a flash of white.

Please tell me this isnt a hardware issue.. Please tell me I can save my computer xD