Screen went purple-ish color while running heaven benchmark

[KingAce]

So mostly for a learning experience and slightly to try and squeeze a lil more juice out of my graphics card (Sapphire Radeon HD 6970) i decided i wanted to learn to overclock.

Stock the card is 880 core, 1375 memory(Reference speeds). So i used heaven and ran it several times, increasing my memory in mild amounts as i go, checking for artifacts and getting a few points added to my heaven score with each run. I finally settled on 1475 for my memory, seemed to work ok,going higher seemed to have caused my min fps to go lower in favor of adding avg and max fps,also no visible changes in heaven, nothing going ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I start on gpu core. add 10 to go to 890, run benchmark and half way through, boom, whole screen goes a magenta colored purplish pink. Any idea why that happened? I am mostly curious as to why such a thing would occur more so than wanting to fix it and continue tweaking, again this is a learning experience and i don't plan to keep the 6970 for too awfully long. Just seemed like a good idea to cut my teeth on something inexspensive should the worst occur and it'd help me with the knowledge to do so on something more modern and exspensive. and the few fps gain in some games would be nice while i'm debating my card choices or waiting for a next release. anyway lemme know what went wrong if you'd be so kind :D

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Most likely; Unstable OC or it got way too hot.

[KingAce]

So did i push memory too far? surely the core would survive 10mhz, right? lol.

Also temps not an issue.I monitored and always keep the card under 60C at all times. Shoulda mentioned the temps sorry :P

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Were u changing the clocks while benchmark was running actively?
Often times, apps DO NOT like that at all.

[KingAce]

i changed them in between benchmarks...it was still running though... i bet that's exactly what you mean huh? lol.To be honest i felt uneasy doing it the way that guide i read said with it running. the screen always did a weird popping artifacts dance thingy when i did it before chilling out and getting back to work. yeah the more i think of this changing clocks in program was a bad idea.lol.

I'll give it another go, the magenta noob screen won't kill the gpu should it happen again right? lol.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Yes, when u wish to check the stability of clock changing; close any 3D active app; such as that benchmark. Make your adjustments, then re-run it.

Now since Heaven and Valley have a launcher screen, it should be safe if it is just this that remains open; but changing CPU/GPU clocks while the 3d-bench is running; not a good idea. As it will usually just crash the app.

[KingAce]

good to know, i shall return in a few to let you know how it turns out :P fingers crossed.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

and I would try an App such as MSI Afterburner to mess with GPU Clocks, Monitoring, GPU Fan Speed % rather than using AMD Catalyst to do that.

MSI Afterburner + RivaTuner bundle is known to work on a majority of AMD/NVIDIA Desktop & Mobile GPUs.

[KingAce]

Thank You ^_^ so i'm back, and my pc is still functional... obviously or i would not be typing this. lol. So no magenta noob screen. but now i have another curiousity. :P my last three test scores looked something like this.

880/1450 Score- 620 Min-11 Avg-24.6 Max-61.1
880/1475 Score- 622 Min-11 Avg-24.7 Max-61.5
880/1485 Score- 626 Min-10.7 Avg-24.9 Max-61.5

And most recently:
890/1475 Score- 630 Min-10.7 Avg-25.0 Max-61.9
900/1475 Score- 635 Min-10.8 Avg-25.2 Max-62.2

So what i was saying is still happening, my min is dropping or refusing to go up while avg and max go up and raise my score... to be honest i'm confused by what the results mean as a whole. Is the min just a limitation i can't overcome on this card? i know when they came out they weren't known for oc ability, and were pretty much hailed as disappointing. Would these numbers translate to any real world performance gains? :P or is heaven just having a laugh at my expense :P

Another thought i had was... and i really hate to ask this... could my cpu be bottlenecking?... *whispers to not bring in the Intel lynch mob* AMD FX-6300

[Bad 💀 Motha]

So u see; OC of that little u only gain MAYBE 1-3 FPS average at best. It's not even worth it.

But if the Min & Average are raising up though; that is what counts really; as that means higher margin for your overall minimum FPS, which is what u really want. U can't expect everything to shoot way up.

I have to ask though; since the Max FPS was right around "60" are you sure you didn't have any forced instance of V-Sync enabled anywhere? Either in AMD Catalyst or within the Unigine Launcher (where it gives you quality/resolution options)?

Also, please ensure to select "Full Screen" for the test.