ATI tool - what would cause this?

D

dbunder

n00b
Joined
Sep 11, 2005
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Have an eVGA 6800GT with a Zalman vf700 cooler applied with AS5, and the Zalman aluminum ramsinks applied with the arctic silver epoxy. GPU idles at 24-27, depending on room temp, no way to test how hot the memory runs but it'll only OC to 1100 (+100mhz).

The other night I ran ATI Tool on the card to see what I could push it to. My PSU at the time (got a new one today, woo) was already pretty maxed out. I came back an hour and a half later and my screen had turned blocks of colors, EGA style. Simply rebooted and everything was fine.

Would that be caused by extra power usage caused by ATI Tool stress testing it, and overloading my already stressed PSU? Or... what else would cause that? I can safely play FEAR, Condemned, Oblivion at 427 (+77 over stock) core, 1090 (+90) memory for hours at a time and no such thing happens. Not even artifacts. I know that ATI Tool didn't used to support nvidia cards, but now it apparently does. Possibly a bug in there? It scared the hell out of me. Anyone seen similar behaviour? If so, in what conditions?

Thanks.
 
from atitool site:

Major changes to the latest stable version are:

* Added support for NVIDIA video cards

;)
 
The 'blocks of colors' you saw was from your card going WAY over it's limits.
Generally, graphic corruption is VERY bad, but only if it happens for a long time...you can actually burn up components of your card by pushing it too far. (happens when too high an overclock is forced, and the card overheats)
As a general rule, I NEVER walk out of the room when testing something. You never know what's going to happen, and you certainly cant trust that software monitoring is going to save you!

Psychlone
 
I remember when I had an ATI card it automatically stopped when it was at its limit. I guess the nvidia code is just too new and the checks aren't in place yet. Admittedly, my bad. Was just expecting the same behaviour that I've seen in the past.
 
best way to use ati tool would be to manually increase the clocks yourself. I've used various ATI cards and the "find max core" sometimes works, sometimes doens't. i think i almost burned out my x800pro when i left for an hour, came back, and the comp was dead. Luckily it was fine.
 
I've had that happen when using ATItool a little too liberally on my laptop, them having the cord come unplugged accidentally while gaming it up. Power conserving mode kicks in, fans drop and color bars come up. Not fun.

Just be a bit more conservative on the oc, and for goodness sakes, if you use a laptop, pay attention to that power cord..;)

 
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