ATI Catalyst Overdrive on HD2600XT - test black screened me

I was running an OD test on my HD2600XT and as the processor reached 840 out of 900 Mhz the screen went black. Also, the computer froze. I'm sure of that because no matter what I pressed there was no disk activity. I restarted and went back into OD where it asked if I want to continue the test. I proceeded and it began testing memory frequency. It decided to leave the freq. at 940 out of the maximum 950 and there were no more issues, and left the GPU where it had last died.

Personally I'm afraid to go into any games with these settings right now. Also I note that this is the first time I've overclocked anything. Is ATI's OD safe? Have there been any instances of it burning out a video card? Looking on Google I could find none, but the incident really scared me. What should I do?

 

That seems to be normal. Some videocards will dump every thing its displaying to run an internal stability test via the driver when overclocking. As long as your temps are low (below 70C preferably) it is extremely unlikely that the card will be damaged. I for one have never seen a card die or even get damaged in any way by simply overclocking it in software. Its volt modding your cards that kills them.

 

70 you say? Even when not OC'd my card is at 70C when idle, and when on full load it gets up to maximum 90C. What I find weird is that the card was at around 81C when it crashed, far from the 90C it maxes out at. What's more I continued with the test after restart and it clocked my memory from 700 to 940 out of the maximum 950 allowed. During this time the GPU temp was consistently at about 87-90C and yet there were no crashes.

I'm just about to rule out temperature as the cause of that test's crash. Do you think it was temperature or just the GPU "choking"? And as for the memory clock, it's right near the upper limit, except I have no temperature sensor for VRAM. You're saying Overdrive is safe to use and will at most to nothing but crash my system in the worst case scenario?

 

If your hitting 90c I would say thats the source of your problems, if its not it will be soon if you get my hint. Way to hot.

 

I too have a ati radeon xt 2600 HD.
I have problems when I overclock mine as well. Mine start when I increase the GPU above 840 and the mem clock above 720. So, I just leave it alone at the standard settings and I can play call of duty 4, metal of honor airborne, star trek legacy and assassins creed all on full setting without a hint of lag (lagged before I realized I was have some driver issues, but once that was fixed it was fine.)
Also, if your video card is that hot you have a serious cooling problem.
Mine never ever gets above 60C. With that being said, alot of it has to do with how my fans are set up. Three 120V fans. One pushing air in on the side panel, one pushing it from the front, and one exhausting from the rear. Full OC'd, my CPU doesn't get above 40C (I have a thermaltake cpu fan as well) and have a amd brisbane black edition oc'd from 2.6ghz to 3.2ghz.

Before I figured out that I had some software issues (about 4 days ago) I was getting bsod's with any oc'ing (gpu and cpu). I am not an expert, but maybe you should add some more ventilation.

 

I usually run my video cards stock, but I replace the (usually) poor quality cooling on them anyway. If you are overclocking one, I would invest in a better VGA cooler. Also, I have found the factory applied TIM to be poorly applied on most of the cards, so cleaning and reaplying that might help you a bit.

I agree with Ace, 90°C is way too toasty for me! :cool

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