How to properly test HD7000 overclocks?

dkm777

Senior member
Nov 21, 2010
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So I've been playing around with the clocks on my HD7970 Vapor-X even though I can't adjust voltage. I just wanted to voice my observations and maybe get some advice on how to properly test the overclocks on these cards.
What I found is that my card crashes when over 1200MHz core and just about anything over stock for memory, so I left that alone. At 1200MHz I get artifacts (flashing green patches on textures) and occasional crashes in Guild Wars 2 but I can run other games or Unigine Heaven for hours without a hitch. To get rid of artifacts in GW2 I had to lower the core clock to 1150MHz - 100MHz over stock. Today I found a good deal on Dirt 3 and when I first launched it I fully expected it to crash in a spectacular manner because the engine is fully DX11 and uses every trick in the book but no - it ran perfectly for a few hours fully maxed.
Something else that I noticed - I forgot to install the CAP files after the drivers and I would get glitches in just about every game and serious crashes if I overclocked even a tiny bit. When I installed the latest CAP everything was working fine even when overclocked.
So I ask everybody who overclocked their HD7000 series Radeons - how do you guys test for stability? Or maybe there is no surefire method anymore? When I mainly used Nvidia cards everything was a lot simpler: you overclock, you get glitches in all games/benchmarks - you lower the clocks until they're gone ant that was that. With this new Radeon things seem a lot more complicated.
 
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wand3r3r

Diamond Member
May 16, 2008
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I usually just try a couple benchmarks: Unigine Heaven and 3DMark11 for example just to get the ballpark figures.

Then I fire up the most demanding game I play (or a couple of them) BF3 is a good one and try it out for a while.

It's not an exact formula because different loads seem to stress it a bit differently so you need to try several benchmarks/games after you think your stable.

In general when you think you're stable just leave it. If it crashes or if you see artifacts back off slightly.