280 GTX overclocking and artifacts

Vlad_13

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 22, 2006
Messages
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Hi guys, need your advice real quick.

I have 280 GTX SC OCed to 650 yes a minor OC considering most of the 280s go up to 675-700. When i play L4D sometimes, rarely i get these little squares that appears on the model of the character or sometimes on random stuff. (not bumped on the model but over the character, flat) They are about 4x4mm usually, checkers/chess board look like. The same texture from the game, nothing extra ordinary out of color. It lasts, 0.2-0.5 seconds. And maybe repeats itself two more times in interval of 2 seconds.

Thing is I tested the card in every possible way, with FurMark, ATI Tools (i think this would be the most accurate tool to check for artifacts?) Crysis, Vantage etc... Nothing brings these artifacts except L4D.

Also this started when i placed the Video Ram @ 1200... but might be the engine of the L4D itself, i remember they patched L4D at that time...


My question is, is this the main OC that gives these artifacts or w/e they are called, the RAM issue (one of the chips got fucked up?) or the Valve's engine itself... Keep in mind i switched everything to stock speeds, and i still see the same crap SOMETIMES :(


Thanks!
 
i would get on with some tech support and see if they have any ideas, they might have some software or something, if not then you can ask for an rma from them ;)
 
Have you set it back to the default clocks and checked if its still happening?
 
Meh... most of the support is useless, i'm sure they will tell me to RMA it. But i don't want a 285 in return :(

Anhyway i had more time to play with the card yesterday, with ATI Tool. Everything droped to stock. Occasionally i would get a small tiny dot outside the box, in the shade area, not the furry cube, my guess would be that's the ram area? But also i noticed when i ram up the fan to 75-100% i could not spot the damn dot no matter what! Unfortunately did not had oportunity to test the thing with L4D...

I do know 280 got a shit loads of RAM chips, can it be the fact that there are so many + 1.4billion HOT chip makes the RAM unstable? And i know for sure that during gaming Fan kicks in only 50% and the card goes to 80-87C...

Heat makes my artifacts?
 
Last edited:
I assumed you know how your PC components work.
You cant return a card because it wont overclock.

Onto the problem:
If the memory gets too hot it wont work properly.
Your gfx card heatsink also cools the gfx card memory.
Clocking the ram higher caused it to overheat.
You then noticed that when you increase the fan speed it works better, no surprise really ;)

We know it is the memory because the graphics cards GPU doesnt draw things in blocks but the memory is organised in blocks which is the shape of the error you saw.
This failure occuring at the same time as your increasing the memory speed is no co-incidence.
 
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