Possible to permanently break a 9500 with a marginal overclock?

[grifterspawn]

My friend just bought a new sapphire 9500, I installed it. He decided to try out powerstrip for overclocking. Ive overclocked cards in the past and usually if you get visual artifacts or crashing you clock it back, or to be safe just go back to default. Now ive never had a problem before. He had some artifacts, but no crashes, so just ran a few loops of 3d mark for giggles...now the pixelation he was seeing during 3d mark wont go away in anything. Is it possible that this broke the video card? For the curious he went from 275/270 to 300/300...not the largest overclock if you ask me. He hasnt said its gotten better yet so I'd figure I'd ask on here and see what you guys recommended.

 

[Insomniak]

did he go up slowly, at 5 mhz intervals?

I have to say, it would be unusual to break a card by OCing too high, especially that low, but then all chips are different, so if your bud got a particularly sensitive card, he may have hurt it.

Try cleaning out the drivers and doing a fresh install and seeing if that helps. Also, turn off or uninstall any third party tweak utilities you may be using.

If those don't fix it, you may very well have a hardware problem, although it could be that the monitor is just dying. Try connecting a new monitor to the card too.

 

[modedepe]

I'd say that his card was probably already faulty and would have started having artifacts anyway. The overclocking might have just sped this up. You could always try underclocking the card and see if that helps any.