Odd Overclocking Issues

[StuS]

I have a Gigabyte Windforce x3 7950 that is currently less than a month old. I have overclocked it using Afterburner (v2.3.0) to 1100/1575 at 1.25v. After running Kombuster for a few hours the maximum temperature is 57c.

I was hoping to overclock further, but if I enable the unofficial overclocking mode in Afterburner, there is extreme jitter even without increasing the voltage or speeds. This has been a bit of a disappointment, but nothing I can't get over.

More importantly, after rebooting the computer, Afterburner and GPU-Z will report 1100/1575 but I have an extreme drop in performance until I tweak one of the settings in Afterburner and apply it again. This causes my FPS in Far Cry 3 to go from 20 to 45+.

​I have manually uninstalled the Catalyst 12.10 drivers and tried the Beta drivers with negative performance the result. I also tried running the Beta of Afterburner but there seems to be a conflict between the Catalyst drivers and the Afterburner Beta (Missing Files).

The carding is running at PCI-E 3.0 16x.

Relevant Parts

XFX XXX 750w PS

Asus P8Z77-V Pro

Any and all help is appreciated. I'd love to get the clock speeds to set properly and increasing the overclock would just be nice to have.

[Helltech]

Do you have "apply overclocking at startup" set in Afterburner? I would like to note that going much farther with your card probably won't net you enough performance gains to be worth the effort (except for synthetic benchmarking).

[StuS]

Yes I do have "Apply Overclocking at Startup" checked. It appears to be clocked properly as well, the performance just isn't there. I managed to have it stable at a lower voltage as well, but I increased it to be sure it wasn't an issue (before I realized applying the oc again fixed it).

[Helltech]

It is possible you have your card overclocked too much, which is causing performance decreases. Try downclocking slightly and see if that improved performance.

[Bramm17]

You can try downloading a other overclocking program? I had problems overclocking my 7850 with Asus GPU Tweak, and then I overclocked with an other overclocking program and it was all good .... Maybe worth a shot?

[StuS]

Well I started running some tests based on a lower overclock which led me the conclusion that I am a dumbass. The FPS was being limited to 30 until I Alt-Tabbed out of the game to record the FPS and went back in because it seemed odd it would run at the same speeds. So that part is solved, but I'd still like to fix the Afterburner issue because this card runs extremely cool.

[StuS]

I've found someone else that has the same problem and it is an Afterburner conflict with the drivers. So any recommendations on an alternate overclocking program?