GPU overclock stable on 1 hour of Heaven benchmark, crashes on Crysis 3

[OC-CO]

As the title says, I've OC-ed my GTX 980 Ti recently and found the most stable speed where basically any game I tested so far doesn't crash after hours of gaming after previously it did (Shadow of Mordor, Witcher 3, Dishonored 2, Far Cry 4, Battlefield 4) so I decided to run some sort of stress test.

I did this by running a full 1 hour of Unigine Heaven benchmark, and haven't noticed any artifacts and had any driver crashes and I thought that this was stable and went on to play my games.

Needles to say a day or 2 later I fired up Crysis 3 only for it to give me a driver crash in the tutorial

I'm curious but does this mean that the overclock is still unstable or is there something with Crysis 3 going on that I don't know ?

 

[VirtualLarry]

You OC is "Crysis 3 unstable".

It's not totally unusual, to have "stable" OCs, that work in MOST programs / games, but crash on only one or two that are particularly intensive in some spots. That does mean that your OC isn't FULLY stable, however.

 

[OC-CO]

Should I then reduce the OC or stay on it while avoiding some games ?

Also I don't know why but I just tried running the game again without touching the clocks (and through the tutorial again) and the game didn't crash while playing it (3 hour playtime), so I'm not really sure what is going on here.

 

[AdamK47]

I'd reduce the overclock. It's not worth a few frames per second when you know it's not stable.

 

[indydude345]

With my 980Ti, I found that +110 on both core and memory give very decent performance, and give the benefit of not worrying about a driver crash!

 

[Face2Face]

If it crashes in anything...It's not stable. Dial it down. Heaven does a great job for finding quick overclocks, but it's never should be used as the only source. Games like Crysis 3, DEUSX MKD and Rise of the Tomb Raider do a great job at uncovering unstable overclocks in my experience.