RED screen of death from overclocking?

[Red Hawk]

Something really odd just happened when I was playing Tomb Raider, and I figured I'd share it here in case it means anything. I just picked up Tomb Raider off of Steam, and I figured I'd try overclocking my 7870. I don't regularly overclock, as none of the games I have really call for it, but I have tried overclocking before, and hit the usual artifacting/game crashing when I pushed it too high, but I rarely would get a hard crash of my PC.

So, what happened: First I tried bumping the GPU clock to 1100 MHz and the memory clock to 1300 MHz. Played for an hour, didn't see any issues. I came back to the game later and decided to nudge it up to 1150 Mhz/ 1350 MHz. I booted up the game, and I was only swapping between a few menus before loading my save when suddenly the screen went entirely red. No patterns, no error message, just a blank red screen. After a few seconds, the screen went blank (the monitor actually lost the signal) and the next thing I'm looking at is the normal BIOS screen as the computer boots back up. It boots into Windows like normal and I'm not given any "Your computer just recovered from a serious error" message like I would with recovering from a normal BSOD.

My specs are the same as in my sig, except I'm currently using the Windows 8.1 preview with the official AMD Catalyst Windows 8.1 Preview drivers. I've been on the 8.1 preview for a couple of weeks now and have been playing games the whole time without any noticeable issues.

So, is this "red screen of death" indicative of anything serious, or was it just a particularly harsh crash from overclocking?

Edit: Upon a quick Google search, it seems like the beta version of Windows Vista used a "red screen of death", but it still had text whereas I got no text from this crash. There's no mention of it being used in the beta versions of Windows 7, 8, or the 8.1 preview.

 

[Jaydip]

Remove ASUS gpu tweak if you are using it.Earlier the same thing happened with my 680 as well.

 

[Red Hawk]

Remove ASUS gpu tweak if you are using it.Earlier the same thing happened with my 680 as well.

I don't have GPU Tweak installed. A bit of Googling revealed that early in the release of the Geforce 600 series, those cards (and not just ASUS brand) would have a rare crash just like I described, but it seems even stranger that an AMD card is doing it.

 

[Jaydip]

I don't have GPU Tweak installed. A bit of Googling revealed that early in the release of the Geforce 600 series, those cards (and not just ASUS brand) would have a rare crash just like I described, but it seems even stranger that an AMD card is doing it.

Hmm and after removing GPU tweak it stopped for me.

 

[Ben90]

The pre-unified shader cards were the most fun to overclock. They could be pushed so far without actually crashing, and your screen would be filled with all this snow and stretched polygons. Nowadays everything is so complex they just strait up crash at the first sign of instability.

 

[railven]

I'd have to guess it is related to the new OS and what not.

I just installed Preview 8.1 on Saturday and experienced two hard locks with no BSOD screen (nor a red screen) that were 100% related to the driver.

First one was after I installed the drivers and went into CCC to turn on CFX. The driver failed to restart.

Second one was after I got CFX on and loaded up a game, I did my usual clocks and game locked up immediately (however, I can't safely say this wasn't related to the OC since it was a new area in the game and it was definitely more taxing.)

End of the day, dropped clocks 50mhz on core/memory and ran game fine, haven't had any hard locks since.

 

[tweakboy]

I had this with my 8800 GT. Card is gonners, Do a RMA. gl

 

[Red Hawk]

It might be a combination of the OS/driver, overclocking, and a quirk of the game itself. Just now I tried overclocking the core clock alone to 1150 MHz, launched Tomb Raider and tried the in-game benchmark. Same exact crash five seconds in.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I've generally had red screens from graphics memory.

You could pick up "WhoCrashed" and see if it's CPU or GPU, but my guess would be vram.

I would try dropping memory to stock then running core at 1150 and see what happens.

 

[Red Hawk]

Thanks, though that's what I just did; I was running the core clock at 1150 and the memory at the factory overclock of 1210 MHz. I've never had any instability problems with the memory at the factory overclock.

I tried nudging the clock down to 1125 MHz. Got through the benchmark, but got a plain "Tomb Raider has stopped working" message/crash to desktop when I tried actually playing the game for a minute. But I've played for a couple hours with 1100 MHz core/1300 MHz memory, and haven't had any problems. Looks like that's what I'm sticking with.