MSI 7850 Twin Frozr III Overclocking problem

[Kanashi]

Hi everyone,

Don't want to be a nuissance but I've got a bit of a problem and I'd really appreciate some advice from more experienced people. I have some problems with my 7850 which I'd purchased recently: I wanted to OC it to 1ghz on stock voltage (that's all I need for now) but it seems that the card's unstable in a weird way. After some problems I've finally achieved 1 ghz core/1225 memory yesterday and everything seemed stable. I ran Unigine 3.0 for some time with no glitches and played Dirt 3 while playing music from my external HDD simultaneously - no problems/artifacts whatsoever. That day, I also tried to stress test it with crysis 2 dx11 and metro 2033 - also without any problems. Today, I've tried D3 again with Fraps and it glitched immediately after the built-in benchmark - the screen flickered and displayed some pink/greenish/yellow colours. When I closed the game I've also noticed that Firefox has died on me showing an error. Later in the day, I had my externall HDD hooked up and I was listening to some music while my dad was surfing the web. At some point, the music glitched and started to screech, I got the same colours as in Dirt on Winamp along with flickering and the apps weren't displayed properly (Firefox's shown the same error as previously).

I've returned to stock clocks about six hours ago and so far everything seems to be all right. I've just noticed that MSI Afterburner doesn't display the Catalyst driver number, the field is blank. I also have the issue with screen flickering while scrolling pages which is due to low 2d clocks.

Here's my rig:

Gigabyte GA-880-D2H (or something like that, I can check it)
OCZ SilentXStream 2 500 W
AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE (Deneb) 3.2 Ghz @ 3.8 Ghz with Thermalright Macho HR-02
MSI 7850 Twin Frozr III OC Edition (stock 900 Mhz core) Catalyst 12.4 (I've had 12.3 two days ago but I've had a similar glitch when overclocking so I think it's not a driver problem)
4 GB DDR3 1033

I have a couple of theories:

1. Could it be that the PSU can't cope with the load? I might be pushing it a little with the OC but I thought I have some headroom without any extreme voltage changes and a 7850 should easily hit 1 Ghz...

2. The card is faulty

3. Something's wrong with the drivers, I'll try to reinstall them using the guide somebody posted here.

4. Maybe I shouldn't overclock the memory, there were opinions that the memory is a b!tch to overclock on the 7850...

I'm terribly sorry for this wall of text but I wanted share some detailed info on the problem. Thanks in advance, I really appreciate your help.

 

[BigTerminator]

My opinion is that you need to raise the voltage if you want 1ghz. If everything is fine at stock then it means you do have stability issues even though some or even most games run well. The card should overclock past 1.2ghz so 1ghz shouldn't require much voltage at all. Make sure you are running the latest beta version of MSI Afterburner.

The memory should overclock to 1450mhz easy if not more. Memory is not the issue because you have it clocked fairly low. Make sure your CPU is 100% stable as well.

 

[Kanashi]

Hi,

Thanks for your help Yes, I'm using stock frequencies for the second day in a row and nothing is glitching out so it appears that I've went too far with the OC. Maybe my card just doesn't overclock well. I've tested the CPU with Prime95 even before i bought the card and didn't have any problems with stability. What worries me now is the fact that I wasn't able to get rid of this screen flickering issue when scrolling web pages. I've edited the profiles.xml and set the 2d clocks to 700/800 but to no avail. Then I tried to leave the clock at 300 and set the memory to 1200 but it still didn't help. It's only made my card idle at a rather ridiculous 51 C It's not a terrible flicker, it's like the screen is floating a bit and the lines are being broken into parts (just like it happens without V-sync). Turning off hardware acceleration in Firefox seems to lessen it a little but it's still present. Games seem to play rather fine. Do you think it's serious? I might be panicking a little but it pisses me off that AMD can't resolve such problems;p

I've also noticed that the small pop-up window from Winamp which shows song titles has glitched colours when it's set against a background of a web page - for example when i open up a page which was minimised to tray, the song titles' colours in the pop-up window go bonkers a little for about five seconds. However this might be an issue with Winamp.

 

[Kanashi]

A small update: As it turns out my little problem was indeed caused by driver problems. I tried once again to uninstall everything AMD-related and used regedit & Driver Sweeper combo afterwards. I've noticed that when I run the card without any drivers or AMD software there is no annoying flickering/tearing whatsoever when I'm scrolling web pages. As soon as I reinstalled the drivers the problem reappeared (I've tried 12.3, 12.4 and 12.6 beta which, quite surprisingly, gave me lower fps in games). Is there any hope that AMD will fix this by finally releasing working drivers? Seeing as raising the 2d clocks manually by editing profiles.xml didn't work for me I don't really know what else to do.

PS. I've just noticed that my card reaches 76c under load;p It turned out that my dad's installed my audio card too close to the 7850 (it was completely blocking its fans) which has severely affected heat dissipation. This might have something to do with my failed OC attempts I opened the case and removed the audio card, did some cleaning and reseated the GPU. The temps have plummeted drastically so I guess I'll have an another shot at OC Now I just hope to resolve this stupid browser flickering;p