Overclocking causing WoW to crash

Gustafsonjake

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Aug 24, 2012
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I have my i7 3770k set to 4.4Ghz & 1.256V and I also overclocked my graphics card which is a Gigabyte GTX 670. Core is set to 1200 Mhz and Mem is set to 3300 Mhz which is +100 and +300 respectively. Obviously neither of these are anything crazy and it seems stable after 10 hours of stress testing. I feel like I'm missing something or doing something wrong because an i7 running cool (70C under full load) shouldn't have any issues at 4.4Ghz.

This is the first time I overclocked and I read some stuff and watched a youtube video and went for it, so there's something I can do to fix this without underclocking this please fill me in.
 

fonzieguy

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May 26, 2012
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Are there any other games that crash? I would fault the video card overclock before the CPU overclock. Try leaving video card on stock just to determine if this is true. Then if it doesn't crash you can back down the graphics card overclock, I would back down the memory first since you have it at plus 300; that is a little much. What software are you using to overclock the video card? If it is stable in everything but WoW you can just set a lower clocked profile for when you play WoW. That should be fine considering how unnecessary the overclock would be for that game anyway.
 
I would back the video card to stock to see if the issue goes away.

All video cards clock differently. and more importantly the video card will base its MAX clock on power consumption. So if the benchmark draws more power, the card will not clock as high. At the same time if Wow is easy on the card(but not easy enough for it to clock down to "stock" non boost) the card may clock higher than the stress testing tool(this may be the issue).

Overclocking on these cards is a bit more work to check for stability.

If that does not help, try to slowly lower the cpu or add small bits of voltage(up to what you feel comfortable with).
 

duxducis

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some programs or games does not take it good when OC CPU, I have few programs which start to behave strange and crush with OC, but work normal stock.
One trick that works for me is to start program, minimize, go to task manager and find Processes for that program, right click and set affinity manually.
on 8 threats i would disable 2-4 preferably Hyper-Threading once.

Also playing with bios cpu features might help, some of those need to be disabled for OC

 

Fulgurant

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Yeah, stress-testing does not give you an iron-clad assurance of 100% stability. Some programs (sometimes surprisingly undemanding programs, even) will prove unstable. Whether you want to blame that on the programs in question, or whether you want to blame it on the overclock is a matter of preference, but if you're having crash problems on an OC'ed rig, then the OC is the first thing you should rule out.

In a multi-player game like WoW, I'd suspect the CPU before I'd suspect the GPU, but the above-quoted poster may very well be right. FWIW, back when I was still a heavy overclocking enthusiast, the last time I found a CPU instability on a heavily stress-tested rig was in an MMO. This particular MMO (City of Heroes, circa 2004) didn't accept any CPU overclock on my Opteron 165 -- no matter how small. Any other program was fine.

YMMV. For what it's worth, though, I don't see any reason to overclock an Ivy Bridge i7 at the present time, not for gaming anyway. 9 times out of 10, you're not even going to notice whatever performance gains you can achieve.
 

I miss that game :(
 

Gustafsonjake

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Aug 24, 2012
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Looks like it's my CPU. You asked why I would OC an i7 at this point. You'd be surprised how much 25 man raiding drops my frames. When I put my cpu from 3.4(3.9) to 4.4 it increased quite a bit. So is there anything I can do? Would increasing my voltage or lower my multiplier a bit help to make it more stable and stop the crashes? I know for a fact people play WoW with overclocked CPUs.
 

Fulgurant

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@Nukemaster: Me too, man. Me too :(

@Gustafsonjake:


It's certainly possible that you can find a WoW-stable overclock. Thing is, different chips give different results. Just because other people can achieve a given clock speed in a given usage scenario, it doesn't follow that you'll be able to do the same thing. Overclocking may be easier these days than it ever was before, but ultimately you're still asking the chip to perform above its rated level. And remember, no matter how much you stress test your own personal rig, you can't even scratch the surface of the testing and analysis that Intel performed to arrive at the stock value to begin with.

You are obviously welcome to experiment. I'm a bit of an old head, so do forgive me if I sound a little biased against overclocking; it's not overclocking that bothers me so much as it is the seemingly widespread perception that a given model of CPU will offer the consumer X amount of unconditional extra performance. Intel's really to blame, there; by marketing special overclocking CPUs, at an albeit small price premium, they've essentially told the consumer that he should be able to expect some arbitrary level of extra performance from those chips -- or else why buy one?

Unfortunately, the key word here is, "arbitrary." Intel makes no guarantees; it's up to the user community to come to a consensus about what constitutes a decent or minimum-standard overclock. And as you've discovered, the community doesn't even have a reasonable standard for stability. Some guys'll run their stress-test bench for a few hours, declare the system stable, and then never run into a problem afterwards. Others can run even more stressful test suites with no obvious problems, and then find out a week or a month or a year later that this-or-that application isn't stable. The question of overclocking stability can't have a standard answer because there is no standard for usage habits.

Anyway, do forgive my rambling digression. I'm happy you've at least found (apparently) the source of the problem. That's the first and most important step; now it's just a matter of deciding whether you want to spend time and effort experimenting to find a WoW-stable overclock.