Do I have to worry about my video card dying?

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BardTale

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Jan 27, 2013
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Hello! I have a curious question. I have had no problems until last night with my now 5 month custom built machine. It's an AMD FX-8120 CPU, 8 gigs of memory, XFX AMD 6870 (with a custom artic cooler twin turbo 2 instead of the stock cooling), TX650 power supply running win7 64 bit.

The other night, I think I had overclocked my GPU using the AMD vision control center. Under Performance > Graphics Overdrive the default settings was 900MHz (GPU clock settings) and 1050MHz (Memory clock settings). I had set them to the max 1000/1250 and it helped improve my games alot (Guild Wars 2 specifically).

However, last night I was playing Diablo 3 with a friend and I noticed two off color pixel with parallel lines in the upper portion of the screen. Thinking this was just a fluke, I alt tabbed out. The desktop looked normally. However, after like a delay of 3-5 seconds afterwords, the entire desktop looked like every line was offset from each other. The resulting display looked like the same image being offset in two different directions by every other line. During this brief time I was able to see the screen, I opened up MSI afterburner and it was saying my temps was around 58C.

I know, long story, but, I alt tabbed back into the game and the two lines was still there. I alt tabbed out once again and it was the same results. I excused myself from the game and shut the computer down. I'm scared if this is my card dying on me. But any advise/information would be highly appreciated . Thank you.

Edit: I'm not even sure what to call this. Artifacting? Display corruption? I dunno!
 
Solution
overclocking to the max can create artifacts and crashes. It does not necessarily happen due to temperature but rather physical limits of the video card, plus it burns through a lot more energy and your power supply could be the road block there. If you overclock, u dont go from top down, u climb up by about 10-20 mhz at a time and slowly increase voltage when needed.

I have a 1200 watt power supply and my old 6870 could not be overclocked past about 970/1150. It would glitch out and crash.

EDIT: overvolting is the one thing that can damage a chip, not overclocking per se. Try to bring settings back to stock and restart the system, see if it works.

cgner

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Aug 26, 2012
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overclocking to the max can create artifacts and crashes. It does not necessarily happen due to temperature but rather physical limits of the video card, plus it burns through a lot more energy and your power supply could be the road block there. If you overclock, u dont go from top down, u climb up by about 10-20 mhz at a time and slowly increase voltage when needed.

I have a 1200 watt power supply and my old 6870 could not be overclocked past about 970/1150. It would glitch out and crash.

EDIT: overvolting is the one thing that can damage a chip, not overclocking per se. Try to bring settings back to stock and restart the system, see if it works.
 
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BardTale

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Jan 27, 2013
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I appreciate the reply cgner. Advise taken. This morning on rebooting, I did notice that the GPU clock setting seemed to of been reduced back down to 900MHz and the memory clock down to 1200MHz. Perhaps this is the system protecting itself? Anyways, I'll try it in 10MHz increments then.
 

BardTale

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Jan 27, 2013
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What I do find interesting is that there was no crash report generated. I simply shut down and things seemed fine this morning. Anyways. Thank you for the advise on the subject. As I'm sure you can tell, I am a novice at this whole OC business lol
 
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