5870 OC Question

[liquid_mage]

Just got an AMD 5870 when it was $145 shipped. Quick question about OC do TR regulars prefer AMD Overdrive or After Burner to OC their AMD cards?

This might be a separate issue but when I bumped the clock speeds on the 5870 at all in After Burner, my screen seemed to flicker a little bit. I changed my settings back to default and it went away. Even if I bumped the card 3% on the core this happened, I wasn't trying for some crazy overclock.

Thanks

[Yeats]

Are you running dual monitors, by any chance? It's been a bug with Catalyst drivers over the last year +, that overclocking 5000/6000 series cards while using dual monitors can cause flickering/screen corruption. Some Catalyst releases are worse than others.

[Jigar]

Look at my sig, i am using MSI afterburn to OC my card. Card fan profiling is the best feature of that application.

[liquid_mage]

@Yeats, Yes i'm using two monitors. Hmm i'm using 11.11 I can try 11.12 and see if they are better.

@Jigar, I agree I like the fan control in After Burner. I was thinking of trying AMD Overdrive because I thought it my be on less thing I have to have running in the background.

[Yeats]

As a test, you can try to hunt down the 10.10 drivers (yes, last year!) and see how they do. They are the last release that worked consistently flicker-free with my 5770. Subsequent drivers all presented corruption to a greater or lesser degree whenever I tried even the slightest overclock.

[liquid_mage]

I play BF3 so going back to 10.10 drivers is a no go for me.

Thanks for the input guys.

[liquid_mage]

I googled the screen flickering issue while overclocking with two monitors. I used After Burner and setup two profiles. The first I bumped the voltage to 1220(was 1160) and left the clocks at default, then made it my 2d profile. For the second profile I set the voltage at 1220, bumped my clocks where I want them and saved it as my 3d profile. What I read said the base voltage is so low it doesn't handle any tinkering with the clocks, and a slight vcore bump fixes the issue. So far it seemed to work.