Overclocking: Performance not increasing

[Jackofspades0]

Hi guys,

I have finally decided to start overclocking my hardware. At first I wanted to OC my CPU, but since it has a fixed miltuplier and I don't want to play around with voltages yet, I have decided to OC my GTX 260.

Here is the default speeds speeds of my graphics card:
Core ClocK: 576 MHz. I pushed my core clock to 700 MHz and then decided to stop.
Shader clock: 1242 MHz. OCed it to 1511 MHz
Memory: 1000 MHz. Only changed it to 1050 MHz so far.

Instead of my performance increasing, I'm experiencing lower frame rates. CoD4 is a bit choppy and Crysis doesn't even want to start if the graphics settings is too high. I then decided to look at the MSI Afterburner graph and discovered that while I was playing CoD4 with Max settings my Core Clock speed remained constant at 400 MHz, even slower than the default clock. Shaders were 800 MHz and memory only 300 MHz! Temperature remained less tan 50 oC.

Can anyone please tell me what's wrong and how I can fix it?

Thank you.

PS: My System Specs:
AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz
4 GB DDR3-1333
One 500 GB SATA Hard Drive
550W Power Supply.

 

[acer0169]

Your cards have different power settings. If you open rivatuner you'll see they have 3d performance mode and a 2D mode. It seems after your tweaking your cards are staying in 2D mode which is why you're at a lower clock.

What drivers are you using?

I've found with the GTX260 that overclocking with some drivers gives really good results, but with some of the later drivers that have come out; I actually lose FPS when overclocking. I get best results now leave my cards at stock.

 

[Jackofspades0]

Thanks for your reply acer0169. I'm using MSI Afterburner to overclock my card at the moment. When I click Settings > Profiles I can select at which speed I want my card to run during 2D and 3D applications. I have set them both to 700MHz/1048 and launched a game of Cod4. During the test the frame rated are really smooth then suddenly the screen turns black, and then back again. After this the frame rate is reduced. After that I decided to see what my card was doing using the Afterburner hardware monitor.
At first the card runs at 700MHz, but after the screen turned black it drops to 400MHz, and stays there untill I reboot my computer. When I enter the CPUZ-ID thing it shows that my card runs at three different speeds:

Default: Core 300 MHz Shaders 600 MHz 100 MHz
2D Applications: Core 400 MHz Shaders 800 MHz Memory 300 MHz
3D Applications: Core 576 MHz Shaders 1242 MHz Memory 999 MHz

When I overclock my GPU the 3D Applications thing dissapears and "Unknown" replaces it with my Core 700 MHz Shaders 1511 MHz and Memory 1048 MHz. It seems like my GPU jumps back to 2D after playing CoD4 for a few seconds, even though 2D is set to the same speeds in the MSI Afterburner.

Any idea why?

 

[rofl_my_waffle]

I think the clocks you set isn't stable so the card crashed (hence blacking out your screen) and then reverted back to default until you OC it again.

You probably need extra voltage or cooling.

 

[wolfram23]

^+1
Definitely sounds like an unstable OC.

You need to test your OCs out, use something like FurMark or Kombustor with Afterburner. If you can unlock the voltage, then you'll be able to push core speed up quite a bit (assuming you can keep the temps ok). Memory speed can be tricky. Especially if it's GDDR5, I guess it's less susceptible to crashing because it can resend the data, so it's hard to know exactly how high you can push it but generally if your FPS is lower from a higher mem speed, that's why and it needs to be lowered. I've been running my 5850s at 1200 mem speed for a while, but a couple games recently have been giving me freezing issues so I dropped them to 1190. So far so good but I have to test more.

 

[Jackofspades0]

Overclocking is tricky...

Thanks guys I have started from the beginning again, all the way back to 576 MHz. Every time I increased the speed by 25 MHz and completed the first mission from CoD4 every time to ensure it doesn't happen. I have reached 675, Crysis is still unstable depending which game I load. Funny, if I load certain safed games first it crashes, but if I load certain safed games it doesn't happen and I'm able to load the unstable safed games without a problem after that lol.

I'm going to start overclocking my memory now (DDR3). I have reached 1100 MHz so far. Thanks for your help! I'm too scared to start messing with voltages right now.