I'm nervous about damaging my card with overclocking. Can someone please clear a few things up for a newbie? [7950]

first of all, what CPU do you have?

To begin with, what CPU do you have? On topic, you won't get the most out of your card using AMD overdrive, but you certainly won't damage it. Damage caused when overclocking is usually a result of setting the voltage too high, as overdrive doesn't have a voltage setting, the worst that will happen is your PC will crash and you'll need to lower the settings.

When overclocking the GPU and the memory, you only do one at a time. I usually start with a jump of 100mhz to save time, then once I've gauged if that's stable, increase by 25mhz at a time. Obviously if a 100mhz jump isn't stable then you'll need to reduce it slightly, however, I'd be very surprised if you can't increase the GPU and mem by at least 100mhz.

The power control setting by itself doesn't actually change anything initially, what it does is allow the graphics card to draw more power (according to the percentage) if it needs it. There's no problems with sticking it straight to 20%.

As for fan speeds, I'd set it reasonably high on manual while stress testing just to make sure the card stays cool. Once you've obtained a stable overclock you can try lowering the manual speed or even putting it back on automatic. If your setup doesn't run too hot, I would imagine you could leave it on automatic as it's voltage that increases temperature and as you're using AMD overdrive, you won't be increasing that. As for temperatures, the card is rated at 100 or 105c, however, I'd try and keep the maximum load temperatures under 80c.

To stress test, use a benchmark program like Heaven Valley (http://unigine.com/products/valley/), it's free and certainly puts GPU's through their paces. What you're looking for as far as stability goes, is any weird glitches (artifacts), like black squares or black tears across the screen or just large slabs of out of place blackness! Alternatively, if your PC freezes or crashes, that's an indication that your overclock isn't stable. As you're increasing the speeds, I'd just give it 15 minutes or so on the benchmark while keeping an eye on it for any problems, if it's ok then increase it some more and run the benchmark again.

When you want to finalise your overclock, if you can run it for an hour or so and the temperature stays under 80c and there are no artifacts or crashes, then you're good! However, as there's no fool proof way of knowing if an overclock is stable, you may find that a game just randomly crashes or displays the artifacts I mentioned, if that's the case then you need to start reducing speeds gradually until it goes away.

I reckon that's everything to get you started, but if you need more help just let me know.