OC stability testing

[Rbomb1340]

Any rules of thumb regarding OC stability testing? Run Furmark or Kombustor for x amount of time, or just start throwing games at it and if nothing crashes/artifacts, it's all good? Just got my GTX 460 yesterday and it's been a while since I've done much vid card OC'ing. Sorry for the noobishness but appreciate the help.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Never use furmark or any of its kind. Its just not realistic because NO games/programs will ever load the GPU like those "stability" softwares are capable of.

The best way of finding a stable overclock is by running couple of game benchmarks, such as crysis. Games also tend to use up the vram alot, so its good for memory overclock testing as well (unlike furmark).

As long as you dont see any artifacts or crashes during gaming, then the overclock is stable. For me I used heaven and crysis warhead as my stability tester.

 

[Rifter]

I use furmark or kombuster(same thing really) but only for 15 min runs, never longer. If it will take furmark for 15 min its stable. watch your temps while stress testing.

 

[Rbomb1340]

Cool--thanks guys. Appreciate the quick responses.

 

[Kenmitch]

Furmark is pretty hard on a video card and will push your cooling to it's limits. If you use it just make sure you keep an eye on your temps. As long as you can keep your card cool it won't hurt it...Although it will stress it more than any game will.

Just use Furmark for some quick testing for clocks and then just play your games. As with all overclocking your mileage will very. It's possible that your card could be Furmark stable at a certain clock and crash in game X still. Just gotta play around with it and see

 

[solofly]

Never use furmark or any of its kind. Its just not realistic because NO games/programs will ever load the GPU like those "stability" softwares are capable of.

Bad advice...

 

[Shilohen]

Never use furmark or any of its kind. Its just not realistic because NO games/programs will ever load the GPU like those "stability" softwares are capable of.

Just a little jab: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=177353

 

[tweakboy]

Play different games, once there is a freeze or crash then your OC is too high,, do it like this. Give each game 1 hour time,, thx gg and gl

 

[nitromullet]

I posted this on another forum, but I'll re-post it here. This is my method. I don't always get the highest clocks, but they are always rock stable.

Using ATI Tool, Kombustor, or EVGA's OC checker by itself isn't enough to find stable clocks with any certainty IMO. My GTX 470 will run higher clocks in the OC checker that it won't sustain in real world scenarios.

What I usually do is use something like ATI tool to determine what clocks the card won't do. Basically, ramp up the clocks relatively quickly (say 25MHz every 30 secs) until I get errors. Once I get errors, I back off the clocks a bit - say 50MHz. I do this for both the gpu and memory independently - meaning when I work on RAM clocks the gpu is at stock and vice versa.

Once I have some baseline gpu/RAM clocks I start running something much more intensive, say the Heaven benchmark maxed out/full screen, and slowly work the clocks back up in 10MHz increments every 5-10mins until it gives me the slightest artifact or lockup. Once, I get an error, I back it down at least 10MHz and then I bench intensely at these clocks for about an hour. If I get any sort of error, I back down another 10MHz and start over.

Heaven is good for this, or grab the Crysis Warhead benchmark tool (if you have Warhead, of course) and setup up each bench in say a 5x loop. If your clocks are stable at running Warhead or Heaven full screen at max settings for an hour, your OC is most likely stable.