7850 safe OC crash on daily use applications

There is no such thing as a safe OC

+1

You are also getting a what...130mhz which will bump up your FPS by 1-2? You should just set it back to stock, and buy a better card if you want better performance.

Okay, I understand. However, may you please enlighten me why it might do this?

Simply put not every chip will be able to overclock. You may have got one that just will not run stable overclocked. Plus as was stated above you are not really gaining anything as far as fps. Best thing would be to set it back to stock and enjoy your purchase.

I'll try to keep this as short and non-technical as possible.

Not all chips are fabricated equally. Fabrication is a long process that is extremely reliant on quality control. Every fabrication plant is one gigantic multi-billion dollar clean room which often has an entire floor (or more) dedicated to scrubbing particles from the air. Everything from the quality of the crystalline semiconductor substrate to the quality of the dopants, to the quality of the photoresist, deposition, etc... there are hundreds of factors that need to be tightly controlled to within a millionth of a percent.

At the end of this process even the slightest defect can render a thin slice of compound silicon with 4 billion transistors on it completely inoperable. Out of the dozens of chips fabricated on a single wafer at a new fabrication plant only a small fraction of them will work at all; the rest are garbage. Out of the few that do work some will work better than others. The chips go through a series of tests and are 'binned' appropriately. The chips with the best characteristics are selected for the best products and the worst are left to last. This is why each 'chip' that AMD/Intel produce often serve more than one marketed product. The 7970 and the 7950 are physically identical with the 7950 having part of the chip disabled for yield purposes. What this means is that two identically marketed products may have two different practical ceilings yet both are guaranteed to operate at the marketed parameters because that's all that they were tested for.

You bought a 7850 and that's all that you're guaranteed to get. If AMD could have guaranteed that all the Tahiti chips would run at 1Ghz or more reliably and within their thermal design parameters they would have shipped them as such.

Well Ihaveto say I'm having the same issue and would like better answers then just don't overclock etc...if it was simply an issue of overclock stress etc then one would expect it to crash when pushed in games. This is not the case I can go on a BF3, and or Skyrim marathon for 8 hours without issue oc at 12000, where it is crashing for me like the original op is in normal windows, esp if I leave the pc simply idle and leave room. To say it's an issue based on fabrication etc just doesn't jive with the circumstances. Also many others are oc with these cards without issue either way. More importantly when I first got the card and OC with 12.4 drivers I never had any issues in or out of games, it's only been since upgrading....I sweeped drivers, reinstalled from 12.7 beta to 12.6 but still have issues, again, this happen often while idle even.....just very strange because it's not being "stressed" at all. Feels more like a memory leak type issue.....but can't imagine why. It never did this before, wether it's because of drivers or something else I have loaded I am just not sure.

Also:

My System:
Intel i3-2120
8GB G.SKILL DDR3 1600
Asus HD7850 (oc 1200)
Asus P8H67-M Evo rv 3.0,
OCZ 250 GB Vertex 4 SSD for Operating System
Games on old WD RE2 750GB 7200 RPM drive

Pinhedd made a great point, and I also enjoyed reading about the manufacturing process  

However, I don't think this is a hardware issue. I am having this issue whether I am overclocked or not, and only in Windows, never on my linux install. I've tried different AMD drivers with no luck, so I think I'll go back to the Asus drivers provided on their website. I don't remember ever crashing with those. I'll mention if I get any more crashes with that.

I doubt it's a driver issue. It could be a problem with drivers being installed over each other. I've never once had to go "back" a driver revision, doing so can actually cause problems such as this and the only way to resolve them is to do a complete reinstall of Windows. If you haven't done that yet, now would be a good time. While you're at it, make sure that you have the latest firmware for your motherboard (aka BIOS revision) and GPU (rare but they do get released occasionally).

The "asus" drivers will be identical to the AMD reference drivers.

Yea I might reinstall Windows, I installed the video card after it was already installed. Though I used Driver Sweeper before installing my current firmware..

Driver Sweeper isn't some sort of magic program, all it does is delete stuff. By AMD's own admission it can cause more problems than it solves. It's decent enough but it won't fix underlying issues that are caused by botched installations.

Good to know!! Man you know your stuff, toms hardware is lucky to have you around. Thanks! I'll do a reinstall soon

Thanks, and good luck. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions