When is a video card truly stable?

[Rinne]

With the recent problems arising in FC2 where people had to downclock their cards to sub-stock clocks to achieve stability, I am now wondering what the point is when you can call your card truly stable?

The most common way today seems to be running furmark (and renaming the exe for ATI drivers), but I found for myself that a furmark stable clock doesn't necessarily need to be stable for games, such as, of course FarCry2, but also less clock reliant games like Company of Heroes, which crashed on me every now and then with a BSOD (Brown screen of death :P ).. As it was furmark stable for more than an hour, it took me some time to figure the GPU out as the source of the problem..

So I wonder now, at what point can you actually call your graphics card stable?

Any opinions, or maybe hints?

From my experience, the most OC sensitive application that I have seen so far was Crysis, as it will crash almost immediately if you use a too high OC..
FC2 on the other hand needs a lot of time to crash even at high clocks, but will also crash on much lower clocks than Crysis by then..

[chevro1et]

Stability is a relative term. There are many factors at play here, including (but not exclusive to)
1. the hardware itself has limits and capabilities. This includes power issues.
2. temps of hardware components. we all hate excessive heat.
3. drivers.
4. games/ applications. all are coded differently, so the nearly infinite combination of driver and application can have different outcomes.
5. overclocking. what this site is all about. pushing that hardware to the max. add this into the mix with different drivers and applications, and we a ridiculous number of outcomes.

IMO, there really is no such thing as 100% rock stable. You just have to try and achieve a level of stability that you are content with. ;)

[Nhut Pham]

I agree. You have to really test it out in the games you play, furmark, atitool and the others just give you a gauge of what you're working with.

I recently had problems oc'ing my video card as it didn't seem to like higher clocks so much. Thing is, it would run fine for crysis, or farcry 2, but I would get driver resets for GRID or pure when I played those. I would even get artifacts in COD4, and that was probably the least stressing hardware wise.

Other factors come into play, I was running those games at higher resolutions or higher settings, so that could have been it too. Furmark has been a fishy app to try too with some of the recent driver releases.

I think you should use some of the game demo loops to test, or just play the games. If you got extra time try out the furmarks and 3dmark kind of programs, but the stuff you use the video card for should make up the test right?

[ps2cho]

I consider stable to the point where you test all games prior and there are no indications of artifacts or crashing.

Increase until crashing or artifacts then back off by 10-15MHz and I call that stable.

FUR is one the best programs to get stability and testing from.