Several questions

[don_svetlio]

I was looking at a few overclocking videos and I was curious as to several things
1 - are artifacts constant when they appear - do they happen randomly for 1-2 seconds then disappear for days or do they stick?
2 - are there any power-related bios options I should be acquainted with?
3 - can someone run Valley extreme preset on a 770 for me? Thanks in advance

[amp88]

1 - are artifacts constant when they appear - do they happen randomly for 1-2 seconds then disappear for days or do they stick?

By their very nature, artifacts take many forms. Typically you might see things like textures flickering different colours or large triangular polygons across parts of the screen. They might only appear in very demanding sections (e.g. where your VRAM is being used almost entirely) or they might appear everywhere, depending on the root cause.

 

2 - are there any power-related bios options I should be acquainted with?

It depends how you intend to overclock. Modern 'enthusiast' motherboards (including those marketed to gamers) will often have an easy overclocking tool available (either in the BIOS or accessible from within Windows) which will allow you to hit a pre-set overclock with minimal effort. If you want more control, and your motherboard provides it, you could have access to a wide range of options to control individual voltages and frequencies with granularity. You should be able to find information on overclocking for your specific motherboard by searching here or on Google - someone will probably have used the same board as you and established some kind of plan. However, it's important to note that no two sets of hardware are identical, and neither are the limits they can reach. You could buy two CPUs and two GPUs from the same shop at the same time and they might hit different stable overclocks. One of the most important things you can learn about overclocking is to be patient, make small changes and validate them before pushing on.

 

3 - can someone run Valley extreme preset on a 770 for me? Thanks in advance

[don_svetlio]

By their very nature, artifacts take many forms. Typically you might see things like textures flickering different colours or large triangular polygons across parts of the screen. They might only appear in very demanding sections (e.g. where your VRAM is being used almost entirely) or they might appear everywhere, depending on the root cause.

 

It depends how you intend to overclock. Modern 'enthusiast' motherboards (including those marketed to gamers) will often have an easy overclocking tool available (either in the BIOS or accessible from within Windows) which will allow you to hit a pre-set overclock with minimal effort. If you want more control, and your motherboard provides it, you could have access to a wide range of options to control individual voltages and frequencies with granularity. You should be able to find information on overclocking for your specific motherboard by searching here or on Google - someone will probably have used the same board as you and established some kind of plan. However, it's important to note that no two sets of hardware are identical, and neither are the limits they can reach. You could buy two CPUs and two GPUs from the same shop at the same time and they might hit different stable overclocks. One of the most important things you can learn about overclocking is to be patient, make small changes and validate them before pushing on.

 

Thank you very much for the informative post

It helps quite a bit since I've never really played around with clock speeds or any of the options altogether.

The question regarding artifacts was rather more oriented towards my own paranoia I believe - you see, I've noted some bugs or glitches, not confident it's artifacts, and was curious since, occasionally - on the same siege map in Shogun 2 I will get a shadow bugged on a wall and not dosplaying properly - always the same - hence why I am ready to write it off as a game bug/glitch or maybe even a driver one. I've also had 1 instnace of Hearthstone bugging out last week where the crafting mode had card art not visible but simply replaced by a blue bubble. This has only happened once and upon restarting the game I've not seen it again - I've noted an instance or two of odd lighting in Witcher 3 - say when I enter the sewer area under a city  I, at one area, get a very rash shift of lighting from light to dark and vice versa - fully replecatable and only in that area - I've had several render glitches with Mozilla as well but I am writing those off as driver-related as they just don't make sense otherwise since once I scroll past them it's all normal.

I wanted to ask - am I too paranoid or is there anything concerning? I've not had crashes/overheating/reboots and those are the only times I remember seing anything close to artifacts - that and 2 instances of corrupted frames in LoL which I am told several times are driver related and have been seen on other people's machines as well.

[don_svetlio]

Before I mark this as solved, can someone please reasure me I'm not seeing artifacts and, much like all software, the games spaz out every now and again. Thanks.

[xAcid9]

Before I mark this as solved, can someone please reasure me I'm not seeing artifacts and, much like all software, the games spaz out every now and again. Thanks.

Yeah, most probably just the game/driver went retarded

[don_svetlio]

Yeah, most probably just the game/driver went retarded

Okay, thanks. Puts my mind at ease