How can you tell if a GPU overclock is stable?

mike2012

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Mar 15, 2012
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Hi, Mike2012 here. I have a Sapphire HD 7850 OC. It's stock clocks are 900mhz on the core and 1200mhz on the memory.

I OC'd the card to 1000mhz and 1250mhz. It worked pretty well on Sleeping Dogs and I got no errors.

I also played Civilization V at those clocks with no problems.

However, after that I tested BF3 on ultra on Operation Guilottine. It was working pretty well with a constant 60fps the whole level. But after that, I started noticing FPS drops in some areas. There was also one point where it froze for a brief second.

The temp of the card was at only at 73C; so I know the card isn't overheating.

But yeah; were those issues caused by the high overclock or is it something to do with BF3 on ultra?
 
Solution
Gaming will be the ultimate test but some people run 3DMark or Heaven a few times. If it doesn't crash and you don't see any artifacts you're probably good to go.

mike2012

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The stock voltage.

It didn't crash or artifact; but running BF3 on ultra I did see some freezes and points where the fps would drop down to 30fps, then go back to 60fps.

But for all I know, this could just be a problem with BF3 and have nothing to do with overclocking.