[Help] Graphics Card Settings

[Atticus]

Good day all.

Well, I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to all these graphic card settings, as my prior card was a Geforce 5700le, need I say more :)

However karma looked fondly upon me and beginning of the year I got an upgrade.
Right, onto my questions...

Ok so I currently have a Radeon HD3870 and I was playing round in the Ati Catalyst Centre. Now I don't really have an idea what I should customize so I've pretty much left all the settings at default.

But then I stumbled upon the Ati Overdrive option. So I clicked on the Auto-tune option. It was doing it's thing when all of a sudden the screen went totally white and it froze. And I recall it saying if it freezes, reboot the pc.

Ok so like I said I'm a NOOB when it comes to these speeds and so before I clicked on Auto-tune these were the settings:
GPU Clock: 777MHz
Memory Clock: 1126Mhz

I have -no idea- if that is good or bad?

And after I rebooted the settings are now:

GPU Clock: 862Mhz
Memory Clock: 1126MHz

Now can someone please just advise me what to do? I'm worried firstly because it froze and didn't finish properly. And secondly I'd hate to fry my card or something.So is that 862MHz too high? Can I leave those settings?HELP! And once again apologies if I'm being silly or something but ya, I'm in the dark here.

Much appreciated to any help :)

Oh and not sure if it matters but
2.4GHz Quad core
2GB ram
Runnin Windows XP

[Chevron]

Did you check the before and after temps under load?

[Atticus]

Did you check the before and after temps under load?

By under load I assume you mean when a game or something is running? No I didn't want to try run anything to prevent doing more damage if there was a possibility I had already.

Eish I guess I should have left that lil Auto-tune button alone.

[Turkish]

I think he meant temps before the overclock and temps after the overclock. All temps test should be done under load (a game will suffice).

[Atticus]

Ah ok well no I haven't. So I'll test it out in a game and then see the temps... much appreciated guys

[Wesley]

Try booting into safe mode (by pressing F8 when your computer boots) and see if you cant access the Catalyst Control Center in safe mode (I'm not sure myself whether that will work or not). Then deselect the Overdrive function and return the card's clocks to zero. Then reboot and see if you get the same frame stuttering and white blank-out screens. If not, then you're all ok.

The next time you decide to overclock your GPU, you should do some research on your card and see what frequencies others have been coming up with, and what problems they faced and how they solved them. The Overdrive function may have overclocked your card, but it went a bit high for the overclock to be useful, so if you want to do it again in future, you'll have to do some manual tweaking.

[Atticus]

Well I played Cod4 and then Crysis on High and the temp was 80 degrees.

@ Snow Patrol see the thing is I never realised it was going to -overclock- I thought it would just set it at optimum settings you know? But I realise now I was a bit of an egghead.

Thanks so much for your help I'm going to do what you said and rather leave it at how I got it. :)

[Turkish]

No worries boet. To be safe, you could try and increase your frequencies in small increments (10-20mhz) to test which settings will give you stable performance.