OCCT Almost killed my Gpu

[PrivateXTC]

Seriously this programme needs an update. It's fine with my overclocked 8350 CPU but when I tested the waters using this for GPU stressing I made sure it was stock to see what it does. Anyway, within 2 minutes my GPU (R9 280x) was being throttled so hard by it my temps hit 85 degrees, on stock settings, was going crazy making the loudest fan noises. I had to turn the power off it worried me that much. As soon as I went back to fur mark and and my old stress testers nothing like that happened. Also my most demanding stress tester Crysis 3 doesn't even break 50 degress on maximum as the cooler on my card (it's from HiS and they call it the iceQX2) is so dam big and long I never got above 70 with my usual overclock.

Dont use this with an R9 GPU I guess is what I'm saying. Never trusting OCCT again, be careful. If I left the room and left it on, my GPU would be dead.

[_I_]

protip, overclock in small steps and test

the gpu should throttle before it overheats

[PrivateXTC]

Mine's already overclocked to 1200 core and 1700 memory. This happened at stock factory speeds as I was testing OCCT as not used it for a GPU before, only for my CPU

I don't think it works well with R9's . Could be my beta drivers fault don't know but furmark which I'm also wary of now due to hearing what it does to your power supply and 3DMark, Crysis 3, Metro benchmarks can be run all day at my overclocked settings at not go past 60. Lesson learnt for me I think. Even Rome 2 on extreme don't break a sweat.

[Azza ☠]

Why bother with overclocking - we can run pc games at high/ultra with 60fps+ anyways without any overclock... all overclocking does these days is add heat and shorten lifespans. If you want to overclock, go back to 1999 (or before, when we had 1st Gen PCs and GPUs) where it made an actual notable difference.

[PrivateXTC]

Believe me going from 4.0 to 4.5GHz on my 8350 has added a lot of performance in my games. And with my R9 280x on stock it struggles with some games, especially Rome 2, but overclocked with an oveclocked CPU the difference is a lot. The performance gains is a side effect though, overclocking is just something that I love. Will get the CPU to 5GHz with the Asus Sabertooth mobo.

But overclocking really does make a difference. Check out the +10 and more FPS differences in this article and the 3D Mark score is way bigger:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/his-radeon-r9-280x-iceq-x2-turbo-review,26.html

they say between 5 and 10% performance difference from overclocking the card now you'll be looking at around 20% perofrmance difference if you add in an overclocked CPU too. More than worth it.

[Azza ☠]

Real world - If i already get between 60-120 fps... what is 5-10 fps going to do? I personally won't even notice. Back in the days when it was struggling 24-36 fps, adding 5-10 extra fps would of been huge and made it feel a lot smoother, but it's meaningless now. Also components use to be a lot more bulky, which allowed for better overheating due to the heat displacement size was larger to escape from.

4th Gen Intel CPU + Motherboard removes all the bottlenecking with more direct access between CPU and memory as well as CPU and graphic processing. The only thing left is the graphics card - which a Nvidia GTX 780 or GTX 970/980 can own with at 1440p resolutions. Rather than increasing power usage and heat, that lowers it to half and still performs better.

If I wanted to overclock Intel, I would have to use a 1st Gen or 2nd Gen (Sandy Bridge) which components aren't as compressed to avoid overheating with a decend performance increase to make it worth while... then on top of that CPU Cooler and Liquid Cooling costs. Sure, it's a fun hobby and might make it look/appear kewl, but it's not actually adding to it more value than it's taking away.

AMD might be better for overclocking I guess, never tried with those so can't say.

[PrivateXTC]

yeah but in my real world my rig is slowly ageing. That's why I overclock. And it stops my favourite game Rome 2 from dropping below 35FPS in big battles. Without overclocking on a big battle I'd be hitting low 20's, the overclock keeps the smoothness and immersion going for me. Sometimes that extra performance matters for a smooth experience.

I never done liquid cooling yet, just good fan placement and a good amount of them and using an Evo 212 CPU cooler which set me back less than £20 It doesnt' cost much but it's quite risky. Only really pushing it now as my mobo is getting changed at the end of the month so not afraid if it fails.

But I agree with you it doesn't add massive amounts of extra performance but does add that little bit of a boost in games when it starts to struggle