Is my graphics card defective?

rajey

Honorable
Jan 23, 2013
16
0
10,510
Hello guys, bit of a noob question I suppose but I've been having problems with my graphics recently.

First of all my specs:

I5-3570K
2x4 GB RAM 1600Mhz
Sapphire HD 7850 OC 2GB
CM 550W PSU


So, the problem I'm facing is that my graphics seem to stutter and lag alot during gaming and benchmarking.

Examples :

FIFA 13, I am able to play for about 10-12 minutes, smooth as butter, then the game starts getting laggy. This happens everytime I play. (On single player as well)

Skyrim, on 4x AA and 8x AF, I seem to get stuttering when exploring areas slightly heavier in detail (Whiterun for example).

Unigine Heaven 4.0 - A constant lag throughout the benchmark with my max FPS only going up to 60, the min being a depressing 8.


Is there something wrong with my graphics card? Or am I expecting way too much out of it. I doubt its the latter, as the HD 7850 tested on a similiar set-up by a few others have returned better results.

OC-ing the GPU Clock to 1000 and the Memory Clock to 5.2k~5.3k hasnt helped. Even tried amping up the voltage very slightly from 1.138 to 1.152.

Am I missing something? New to overclocking and graphics cards thus the perhaps noob question.

Hope I could get some help, cheers.