Is this caused by my PSU running out of juice?

[fourdegrees11]

Ok, when I run whats in my sig everything is fine. I upped the OC to 4.1 @1.45V and increased the cpu/nb vid to 1.25V. Stability test passed and everything, temps topped out at 46C. I know this cpu pulls an obscene amount of power past 3.8ghz, I also have my GPU oc'd. When I play games the screen shifts to the right and the video quality severly decreases? I have to restart the system to get it to go away. It does that eveytime untill I drop the OC back to 3.8. Am I right thinking its the PSU? I just got the X6 and 6850 few weeks ago, in the few years I've had this PSU it's never been taxed by an oc'd cpu or gpu.

 

[TemjinGold]

Sounds more like a messed up 6850 or messed up graphics drivers. If it was your PSU, you should see it power off.

 

[BoomerD]

Dammit...I had a nice long post...and deleted it.:|

Let's see if I can remember what I had.

First, I agree Temjin that this sounds more like a graphics card issue than a power supply issue, BUT, you list a 630 watt Rosewill PSU in your signature. AFAIK, there are two 630 watt Rosewill power supplies...both made by ATNG, neither is great, but one is decent, the other...not so decent.

You mention that this stops when your CPU overclock is reduced to 3.8. What gets changed in this reduction?
Also, you say that your GPU is overclocked...how much? Have you tried taking the GPU back to stock clocks and leaving the CPU at its overclock?

It's always possible that with a crappy power supply, you're drawing too much on one of the 12v+ rails and that's causing glitches or power drops on another 12v+ rails...but I'd also expect to see the system shut off rather than have gremlins.

Of course, I'm not an electrical engineer, and many things are possible with cheaply built power supplies...which is also why I don't buy any power supply that's not built on a Seasonic chassis.

If this was my system, I'd try dropping the clocks on the video card first...then I'd start looking at the power supply.

 

[fourdegrees11]

Dammit...I had a nice long post...and deleted it.:|

Let's see if I can remember what I had.

First, I agree Temjin that this sounds more like a graphics card issue than a power supply issue, BUT, you list a 630 watt Rosewill PSU in your signature. AFAIK, there are two 630 watt Rosewill power supplies...both made by ATNG, neither is great, but one is decent, the other...not so decent.

You mention that this stops when your CPU overclock is reduced to 3.8. What gets changed in this reduction?
Also, you say that your GPU is overclocked...how much? Have you tried taking the GPU back to stock clocks and leaving the CPU at its overclock?

It's always possible that with a crappy power supply, you're drawing too much on one of the 12v+ rails and that's causing glitches or power drops on another 12v+ rails...but I'd also expect to see the system shut off rather than have gremlins.

Of course, I'm not an electrical engineer, and many things are possible with cheaply built power supplies...which is also why I don't buy any power supply that's not built on a Seasonic chassis.

If this was my system, I'd try dropping the clocks on the video card first...then I'd start looking at the power supply.

The 6850 is oc'd to 850mhz core, 1200mhz ram. I had it oc'd to 950mhz with sapphire's "trixx" utility, but I got driver errors with that. It was running with my cpu at 3.8ghz and gpu at 950mhz without any of the video issues that have came up. The cpu at 3.8ghz is all stock voltages, at 4.1ghz voltage is increased by 0.1 on the cpu and cpu/northbridge vid.

I believe the PSU has a single 12v 50a rail. I purchased it in early 2009, so I'm not sure if the model is current.

 

[deimos3428]

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I'm just gonna throw this out there.

It sounds like a GPU issue to me, but you're relieving it by lowering your CPU clock. Could it be the case that the 6850 OC is not 100% stable? I'm guessing at 3.8 Ghz the CPU is the bottleneck, so the GPU instability doesn't show, but at 4.1 Ghz you clear the bottle neck and the GPU is stressed too much.

I'd suggest lowering the GPU ram to 1100Mhz or less, test throughly, then add 25Mhz at a time. I've had a hard time reliably hitting 1200 Mhz on my 6850s -- it seemed to work at first but ultimately I had to dial it back a bit.

 

[fourdegrees11]

I oc'd the cpu back to 4.1 and dropped the GPU to 775 core 1150 ram. That seems to have removed the issue. Thanks guys!