Screen artifacts after about 2 hrs of gaming

[bujeezus]

specs

asrock core 2 duo sataII
e2160 oc'd slightly to 2ghz
2gb mushkin ddr667
hd 3870 with slight oc to 820 gpu an 990 memory
10gb maxtor ide operating system hdd
250gb seagate sata game hdd
generic 600w power supply
3 120mm fans

so i'm playin grid for 30 minutes an then switched over to wow for an hr an a 1/2 when all of a sudden i get full screen artifacts. the 2d action bars, menu, chat etc display fine, but 3d is shit. anything i can double check, maybe in the bios, or is my video card shittin the bed? my proc hovers around 45*c full load and my video card get up to maybe 50*+ which all seems pretty reasonable to me. i immediately ran 3d mark 06 after loggin out of wow an it completed the bench with no issues. any ideas?

 

[badnewcastle]

Games are often more demanding the 3dmark 06... what did the artifacts look like? If they are Checkerboard and covering the entire screen or you can barely see anything then you are probably looking at too much OC on the gpu. If they are lines or shifted items in the picture etc, then it's more likely the oc on your ram.

Read about it here. It's an old article but may help you.

 

[bujeezus]

thanks for the reply. i used the ati overclock featur so i figured it was cool. i'm gettin the fullscreen effect so i'll try comin back down on the gpu.

 

[imported_wired247]

your overclock is probably too high. it's generally not worth it to mess with the clock on your GPU... barely any benefit and you already seem to have found the major drawback.

 

[nyker96]

Originally posted by: wired247
your overclock is probably too high. it's generally not worth it to mess with the clock on your GPU... barely any benefit and you already seem to have found the major drawback.

i second that.