Alternatives to furmark for overclocking?

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Furmark may have just shit on my sapphire card :/
 
I get flickering at stock after a nice 5 minutes session of furmark :/ any other alternatives to furmark :/ rma here I come (most likely)
 
well maybe not an rma, may just need drivers :/
 
5 min of furmark is stressful. I have failed in furmark and been able to game for hours with no problem at the same speed I failed furmark. d.
 
yeah, if this fucking flickering would just go away now.
 
It's probably just overheating your card around that time. I know after about a minute, it pushes my gts 250 over 80c.
 
but right now it's flickering at stock so I may be screwed because of furmark.
 
I really wouldn't blame Furmark. I've stressed my 260 for over half an hour with it and temps only hit like 83c I think. Well within limits. GPU silicon can take quite a lot of heat.

I've heard about flickering issues because of drivers though. Have you ruled that out?
 
maybe your card got too hot man. i know it use to make my hd4850 get extremely hot really quick. i like it since u will know if u clock the card too high or not in just a matteer of minutes
 
Amd 4800 cards power circuit can not handle furmark.
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That's weird, because my 4850 topped out a couple of degrees cooler in Furmark than it did in games. ~64C vs ~66C, IIRC, at 730/1035MHz.
 
Maybe drivers but I hear stories of people bricking their cards in furmark.
 
Mark_Warner said:
I've given many, many, video cards the furmark treatment, and I have not seen it destroy anything.
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Exactly. This is just as stupid as people claiming that IBT killed their cpu/mobo/dog. If your hardware becomes defective after running a stress program then it was probably defective to begin with. If not, then your OC/volts were too extreme or your cooling is inadequate.

RADEoN said:
Amd 4800 cards power circuit can not handle furmark.
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More bullshit. I've ran both an oc'd 4850 and an oc'd 4870 and tested them with furmark numerous times (sometimes for up to an hour) and they both passed and continued to work fine afterword.
 
It's just a lot more stressful of the video card than most (any?) other application. But the video card hould have no problems handling it, if you're getting artifacts or problems with stock clock speeds then you need to RMA your card.

if you overclock and it causes problems then your card isn't 100% stable at them clock speeds, although it may never show in games as a problem it's really just down to how hard you want to push your card, the extra benefit of overclocks that push the card past furmark failure is probably negligable so it's not really worth it.
 
serpretetsky said:
have you tried renaming the furmark exe or using older ati drivers? I'm not saying i have, im just curious

sources:
http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?69799
http://www.geeks3d.com/20090916/furmark-slowdown-by-catalyst-graphics-drivers-is-intentional/
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I did the rename trick b/c people we're suggesting it at the time but it made no difference with the regular exe. As for the drivers, I used w/e was available when I first got the cards (about 2 weeks after they came out).

Both of them heated up A LOT, but neither became damaged. Guess I must've got good cards.

Still it's pretty appalling to see companies selling defective hardware and then trying to blame their failure on stress tests. If it cant run stable at 100% load then it should've never been released in the first place.
 
You dont have to run furmark....just game on it all you want. Facts are, if you do stress it with furmark and it's messed up at stock now, the card obviously had a bad capacitor or ic or just an altogether faulty memory module. Straight up. These cards are designed with thermal barriers. The card will shut down if it reaches a critical point or downclock itself before it melts. Honestly, stability tests are up to you. Just because you don't run one doesnt mean your comp wont run smooth. It just may! But some people crave that extreme stability, that piece of mind. That is what a stress test is for. Same thing with people. If you have a suspect heart, they will pump you full of dyes and do a stress test on your heart. Some people make it, others drop dead. They had a suspect heart in the first place, which is why they dropped dead. So perhaps you have a memory module that was assembled suspect and the stress to it pushed it over the edge. RMA it. Any videocard worth its salt should be able to at least pull off 30 minutes to and hour under furmark, period. Accept no less.
 
Mark_Warner said:
I've given many, many, video cards the furmark treatment, and I have not seen it destroy anything.




Yet.
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Over at B3D there is ample talk about insufficent PVR that overheats and that Furmark can break RV770 cards...AMD even has called Furmark for a "powervirus"..and altered their r800 cards, so this cannot happen.

Anand outlines the problem:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=11

That problem reared its head a lot for the RV770 in particular, with the rise in popularity of stress testing programs like FurMark and OCCT. Although stress testers on the CPU side are nothing new, FurMark and OCCT heralded a new generation of GPU stress testers that were extremely effective in generating a maximum load. Unfortunately for RV770, the maximum possible load and the TDP are pretty far apart, which becomes a problem since the VRMs used in a card only need to be spec’d to meet the TDP of a card plus some safety room. They don’t need to be able to meet whatever the true maximum load of a card can be, as it should never happen.
Why is this? AMD believes that the instruction streams generated by OCCT and FurMark are entirely unrealistic. They try to hit everything at once, and this is something that they don’t believe a game or even a GPGPU application would ever do. For this reason these programs are held in low regard by AMD, and in our discussions with them they referred to them as “power viruses”, a term that’s normally associated with malware. We don’t agree with the terminology, but in our testing we can’t disagree with AMD about the realism of their load – we can’t find anything that generates the same kind of loads as OCCT and FurMark.
Regardless of what AMD wants to call these stress testers, there was a real problem when they were run on RV770. The overcurrent situation they created was too much for the VRMs on many cards, and as a failsafe these cards would shut down to protect the VRMs. At a user level shutting down like this isn’t a very helpful failsafe mode. At a hardware level shutting down like this isn’t enough to protect the VRMs in all situations. Ultimately these programs were capable of permanently damaging RV770 cards, and AMD needed to do something about it. For RV770 they could use the drivers to throttle these programs; until Catalyst 9.8 they detected the program by name, and since 9.8 they detect the ratio of texture to ALU instructions (Ed: We’re told NVIDIA throttles similarly, but we don’t have a good control for testing this statement). This keeps RV770 safe, but it wasn’t good enough. It’s a hardware problem, the solution needs to be in hardware, particularly if anyone really did write a power virus in the future that the drivers couldn’t stop, in an attempt to break cards on a wide scale.
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And it's not just Furmark...OCCT can trip a R770 card too...
 
Atech said:
Over at B3D there is ample talk about insufficent PVR that overheats and that Furmark can break RV770 cards...AMD even has called Furmark for a "powervirus"..and altered their r800 cards, so this cannot happen.

Anand outlines the problem:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=11



And it's not just Furmark...OCCT can trip a R770 card too...
Click to expand...

This is definitely the case for my 4870x2, if I run OCCT GPU test at full screen 1920x1080p my computer simply black screens. I haven't had the same issue with Furmark but that's probably because by the time I started using it ATI already had updated its Cata drivers to safeguard against it.

In any case while these utilities may be useful don't let it go to your head and freak out if your 4xxx series Radeon can't run them because games don't cause the amount of stress that these apps can, at least not yet.
 
Atech said:
Over at B3D there is ample talk about insufficent PVR that overheats and that Furmark can break RV770 cards...AMD even has called Furmark for a "powervirus"..and altered their r800 cards, so this cannot happen.

Anand outlines the problem:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=11



And it's not just Furmark...OCCT can trip a R770 card too...
Click to expand...

Thanks. Couldn't find any links on my blackberry.
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I thought AMD addressed the overcurrent problem found in RV770 with Cypress. If I remember right, it's supposed to dynamically down-clock itself instead of suddenly shutting down in the event of an overcurrent. Now I have to remember where I read this.

edit: found it, Beyond3D of course:

Alex Voicu said:
This situation made us acquainted with ATI's new overheat protection: when a certain temperature barrier is hit by the GPU or its VRM, it down-clocks to 600E/900M, which is an improvement versus prior efforts. The VRM is also protected against over-current, dynamically reporting the the amperage going through it to the GPU, which down-clocks if necessary – in theory, this should've been present in the RV770 too, but that wasn't the case and the boards could end up overdrawing amps through the VRM and shutting down when faced with certain extreme loads, specifically tailored for the purpose.
Click to expand...
 
Atech said:
Over at B3D there is ample talk about insufficent PVR that overheats and that Furmark can break RV770 cards...AMD even has called Furmark for a "powervirus"..and altered their r800 cards, so this cannot happen.

Anand outlines the problem:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=11



And it's not just Furmark...OCCT can trip a R770 card too...
Click to expand...

Sounds reasonable enough. I didn't claim that it was not possible, only that I had not experienced it.
 
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