What are Artifacts and when should I stop increasing speeds?

[omnirowdy]

Overclocking virgin here, been watching some videos and looking around some forums on how to overclock but still have one questions I can't seem to find an answer to. I was at +140Mhz Core Clock and when I tick it up to 150 Mhz MSI Kombuster starts to slowly get artifacts. I was at 0/309 so I took it back down to 140 and then the number only increased every once and a while.

I have now had my Core Clock to +135 and my Memory Clock to +250 and after 20 mins Kombustor is now showing 0/1 for artifacts. Is this safe to leave it at this? Or should artifacts always be at 0/0? Thanks!

Update after 26 mins of Kombuster run at Core Clock to +135 and my Memory Clock to +250 artifacts is now at 0/5.


GPU: MSI GTX 970

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

reset memory overclock.

Start with gpu overclock and do stress tests and stress test benchmarks like heaven, valley, and superposition to make sure your clock speed is stable.

Once you've determined the clock speed is stable without crashing or hiccups, move on to memory overclock.

start with a +50mhz offset on memory. Run your stress test for about 30min at least but up to an hour to make sure there's not artifacting. then move up the speed of the memory again by 50mhz at a time doing stress test/benchmarking between each increase. rinse and repeat until artifacting occurs. once you get artifacting, drop it back down 50mhz and run an extended stress test on all benchmarks to make sure it's good to go.

If you're going to run a benchmark stress like heaven then make it run for about 4 hours. Make sure you're using MSI Afterburner to overclock.

After the 4 hours, consult the graphs in MSI afterburner to see if there was any spikes. also you can just of course keep an eye out on the stress by checking in every now and again to see if it is artifacting.