Gigabyte 7850 overclocking Problem?

[radN3X]

So I think I may have a problem and I'm not quiet sure what it is....

 

              I will start off by saying I don't really know anything about overclocking other than what I have seen on tech videos hear and there. I have had my PC in it's current form for over a year now and I have messed around with AMD Overdrive a few times but never really did too much with it because I wanted the warranty to still be there if I ever needed it. Well now I am pretty sure there is no more warranty so I want to try and overclock a little. Nothing crazy, just see if I can get a little more out of this card.

 

             My problem is this, the card does not seem to want to overclock. It's not even as if it can't do it, it just will not. It's like it's a little kid looking at you with its arms crossed saying "I WONT, I WONT, I WONT!!!" So I've got GPU-Z loaded up, along with MSI Afterburner and my new copy of 3D Mark. I originally started out using MSI Afterburner but switched thinking it might work if I used the AMD software. So I have all this stuff loaded and I make a frequency change. At first I started with +25MHz, I look at the 'Graphics Card' tab of GPU-Z and the GPU Clock changes to match my new setting, all is going well.

             I had maxed out the power limit setting because every vid says its fine as long as you don't max out voltage so...yeah. Now it's time to run my benchmark to see if it worked. Benchmark looks fine, there are no artifacts or any kind of weird things happening, it looks pretty much like the base benchmark, It didn't score any better than the first one but it was only a 25MHz overclock I thought to my self. So I give it another +25.

            This continues until I get to 1200MHz. I put in the setting, run my benchmark and it is identical to the first benchmark just like every one before it. Something's wrong. The PC mark score has gone down a few points each time and I'm not getting any kind of artifacting or anything that would suggest the card is being pushed, not to mention the fact that my 7850 probably shouldn't be able to reach that clock speed.  I mean I'm just guessing but aren't the new 290X's only clocked around 1040MHz? It seems kinda ridiculous that my measly 7850 could get to 1200 with only a stock cooler, even though I hear windforce is a pretty decent stock cooler.

             So I'm a little baffled now. I take a look at GPU-z and the GPU Clock is still reading 1200 in the 'Graphics Card' tab. Then I switch to the 'Sensors' tab and it told a different story. Every time I ran a benchmark the GPU never went above its stock clock of 975MHz. And that has been the theme of my experiences everytime I have tried to OC it since. I have tried to update the drivers to the new omega version to no avail, I have tried using AMD system monitor and AMD Overdrive incase GPU-z wasn't reading it right and Afterburner wasn't working because of some weird incompatibility or something which didn't work. I have even considered updating the BIOS of my graphics card even though gigabyte clearly states that it is a bad idea to flash your card if there is nothing wrong with it but I just can't help but think that there is something that is allowing the clock speed to be changed but not allowing the card to actually run at that speed.

               I mean I have tried increasing the speed by only +10, +5, hell, I have even tried to DECREASE the speed and no matter what the speed always stays at 975 even though the clock speed in the 'Graphics Card' tab of GPU-z says that it has changed. There was ONE time that I actually saw the speed reported in the 'Sensors' tab change to 1000MHz for a benchmark but as soon as it was over it never went past 975 again.

               I can't really remember but several months ago I was messing around in AMD Overdrive with my graphics card trying to see if overclocking would get me better performance in game. I didn't have any way of benchmarking then so I was just alt tabing out of skyrim to change the frequency then tabing back in to see if it changed anything. I mess with both GPU and Mem frequency and I didn't notice any improvements but I did eventually get a Blue Screen which would suggest that I pushed the card too hard but like I said, I don't really remember if the frequency was actually changing at the time. For one thing I didn't have GPU-z so I was using AMD system Monitor which for me at least, is not very good at showing 'Other-Than-Stock-Frequency' at least for the CPU anyway. it never shows my turbo clock on my CPU. One thing I do remember from that day is that after my system crashed and I rebooted System Monitor was acting really strange. All the values it was giving me were like nothing to do with anything, like they were in the eight (8) to ten (10) digit range and just randomly changing all the time for both the CPU and GPU, possibly the RAM too but that I'm not sure about. I think I restarted my PC one more time and either checked system monitor again and it was fine or I didn't even bother and haven't used it until now. It seems to be working fine now so I don't know what went wrong last time.

             

                I know that this card already came overclocked from Gigabyte and that the original clock was something like 850MHz but this card doesn't  even underclock which to me suggests there is something wrong so if any one has some helpful insight about this topic I would appreciate any help.

 

 

MOBO: Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0

CPU:    AMD FX6350 3.9GHz (4.2GHz)

GPU:    Gigabyte Radeon HD 7850 2GB DRAM

PSU:    Cooler Master Silent Pro 720

SSD:    Samsung 840 120GB

HDD:    Seagate 1TB

CASE:  Xigmatek Something???

[Laputacake]

What are the temperatures the graphics card is reaching?

[radN3X]

Right! I knew I forgot something. The card never goes above 55C under full load during the benchmark