Artifacts from CPU overclock?

[mikecoscia]

I had my i7 920 OCed to 3.8 @ 1.35V, ran 100 passes with Linx and Prime95 (at the same time) without issues. Played about 30min of Crysis and started to get flashing white specks and a few small flashing textures. Ran ATI tool and it had errors the second it started. Lowered 920 OC to 3.2 @ 1.25V and have been playing crysis all day (3-4 hours) without any issues. The card is a 4870x2 @ stock speeds and fan up to 50% speed.

I thought a GPU would would be the root cause of the artifacts? And at first I thought the card was bad. Am I missing something here?

 

[Nenu]

2 possibilities.

1) When overclocked, the PSU is being pushed to its limit and is struggling to give the graphics card enough power. (ie the PSU is faulty)
2) With a faster CPU, the graphics card can be pushed harder and thus now gets hotter.

 

[mikecoscia]

Is it possible that another display driver caused the issue? I had a USB monitor hooked up showing a yahoo widget that monitors the computer. I uninstalled and played for about 2 hours without any artifacts, but did lock up on me once.

 

[Nenu]

On Vista, no, you can only load one display driver.

 

[mikecoscia]

Hmmm, guess that might have been the cause then. Running Linux/Prime95 at various OCs with ATItool running too make sure everything is stable now. Guess I will have to use my Mimo display on a non gaming machine.