Games crash when overclocked

[CarbonzzX]

Hi guys!
So basically, I have pretty much had my AMD Phenom II Black Edition Multi-Core processor for 3 years, and i have always had it on 4 cores instead of 2. It has done me great through 3 years, but recently, I have had some problems playing games such as Black Ops 2 or Lego Lord Of The Rings or pretty much any other good looking game for that matter. Basically, on 4 cores, i am able to play the game perfectly for about 10 minutes then all of a sudden my screen goes black and puts me straight back to my desktop. It then comes up with an error in the bottom right of my screen reading "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered. Display driver AMD driver stopped responding and has successfully recovered." I then tried putting my Processor down to 3 cores. Same problem. I put it on 2 cores and it runs but it runs terrible, no where near as good as 4 cores Some things that i have tried to fix it are:

Malwarebytes Full scan
AVG Full scan
CC Cleaner (Cleaning my registry out)
Deleting all of my games and re installing them

My PC specs are =
AMD Phenom II Black Edition (Clocked to AMD Phenom II X4 B55 Processor)
Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 2GB OC edition
8GB (2x4gb) G Skill Rip Jaw ram
Asus M5A78L-MLX3
500W PSU
Barracuda 500GB Hard Drive

Any help would be much appreciated 🙂

 

[Danbuscus25]

ok, setting the cpu to run at its full 4 cores isnt overclocking, its just stock. and the problem isnt because of the cpu, or atleast it is very unlikely your cpu, and most likely a problem with the games being too demanding for your graphics card. what temps are you getting?

 

[bgunner]

first thing to do is uninstall and reinstall the GPU driver to be sure the driver is not corrupted. IF the problem persists then download OCCT and test the GPU with error checking enabled.

If you have OCed the GPU remove the OC and try. the GPU driver is crashing so this is not a CPU issue at all. It is a GPU issue.

 

[CarbonzzX]

ok, setting the cpu to run at its full 4 cores isnt overclocking, its just stock. and the problem isnt because of the cpu, or atleast it is very unlikely your cpu, and most likely a problem with the games being too demanding for your graphics card. what temps are you getting?

Thanks but my previous graphics card (GeForce GTX 550 ti) ran black ops 2 fine so i don't see how a HD 7850 should struggle in the game. The temps i get are around 60 degrees. Thanks for the reply

 

[CarbonzzX]

first thing to do is uninstall and reinstall the GPU driver to be sure the driver is not corrupted. IF the problem persists then download OCCT and test the GPU with error checking enabled.

If you have OCed the GPU remove the OC and try. the GPU driver is crashing so this is not a CPU issue at all. It is a GPU issue.

I have just uninstalled the drivers and i'm installing the 14.4 beta so let's see what happens
Thanks for the reply

 

[bgunner]

I had an issue with the new beta with my card. It would crash Sniper Ghost Warrior 2. swapped back to the 13.9 driver and issue disappeared.

edit: the 7970 that is.

 

[CarbonzzX]

I had an issue with the new beta with my card. It would crash Sniper Ghost Warrior 2. swapped back to the 13.9 driver and issue disappeared.

edit: the 7970 that is.

Hmm, could you please send me a link to the 13.9 driver because i can't find it anywhere 🙁 I can only find the 14.4 driver Thanks for the reply

 

[bgunner]

here is the link to the 13.9 driver.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous/detail?os=Windows%207%20-%2064&rev=13.9

 

[CarbonzzX]

here is the link to the 13.9 driver.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous/detail?os=Windows%207%20-%2064&rev=13.9

Thanks, it worked for a while but then i got the same error again 🙁

 

[bgunner]

then test the GPU with OCCT on GPU test with error check enabled. IF it errors then (as long as you are not OCed ) the GPU is bad and needs to be replaced. Oh you need to not use the PC while test is running as a false positive can happen.

Do not use OCCT for any other test as it is unreliable except for the GPU. the CPU test and PSU test is extremely unreliable so only use it for GPU testing.

 

[CarbonzzX]

So yeah, i've taken a photo of the temperature of the cpu just while i was on the windows desktop and i'm not sure if it's too high or not, i think it might be the temp that's causing the issue. http://gyazo.com/0024e98725647f147bc236f55db3a40d

 

[bgunner]

would you mind checking the temp with another monitor to check for accuracy. HWmonitor, Open HWmonitor or even GPU-Z will be fine.

please let us know if the temps are high with one of these monitors. If they are your fans should be spinning at max speed. If for some reason the fan is not spinning up like it should you can use a program like MSI Afterburner to make a custom fan curve to force the fan to speedup with the temp.