And quick question... how do I downgrade drivers?

reinstall drivers maybe, i have an asus gtx480 and i've had to screw around with the drivers a lot, the 2xx series drivers casue this wierd pixelation effect, but only in full screen mode, so i'm rolling the 19775. I have my card overclocked to 800mhz only side effect is super loud fan.

simpsonv2

^

If this turns out to be the problem then you are a life saver. If not... well I'll be back.

I've got a pretty annoying problem on my hands here. Two hours ago I decided to finally test out my newly overclocked system. So, I started up Crysis Warhead. Running everything on the "enthusiast" setting with 16xAA, the first level started up, but from the get-go, I did notice something a bit odd. It's hard to explain, but the pixels seemed a bit... grainy. Of course, it still looked very good, and it seemed to be running solidly FPS-wise, so I continued on. It was only five minutes later that I began seeing artifacting, at which point I immediately quit the game. From there, I checked my GPU temps, which were fine (65-70 C), and restarted the game to see if it was just a fluke. Unfortunately, it wasn't, as I began experiencing the same problem once again.

Now, at this point, I had been overclocking my GPU at a 840MHz core clock speed and a 2099MHz memory clock speed, so I decided to turn it down a notch, even though it should be perfectly fine running at the latter speeds (especially since I was able to run FurMark with the same settings). Again, I restarted the game, this time with my GPU running at 800MHz (core) and 2050MHz (memory). Same problem. It was at this point that I started to get frustrated. There did not seem to be any reason for the speeds I was running my GPU at not to work, especially with the relatively low temps I was getting. So, just for the heck of it, I set it to stock speeds, re-booted the game (once again), and, you guessed it, I got the same problem again.

And it's not as if I didn't screw around with the game's settings either. On all four occasions that I restarted the game, I tried switching to no AA, and, in all four occasions, it didn't make a difference. I still got that same grainy screen, on top of artifacting and lower framerates than normal. I'm somewhat boggled by this because my GPU seems fine (again, able to run FurMark without any problems), yet it is having a very hard time running Warhead.

I'm not expecting someone to flat out solve this problem for me, but any advice would be a great help. Thanks.

Well, the problem has been solved. Last night I went and re-applied my fan, and this morning, when I booted up, my temps were much lower. Now I'm overclocking at 3.3GHz with idle temps of 40-45C, and when I run Prime95, the max temp I reach is 73C (on my lead core) with a maximum average temp of 69C. Thanks for the help.

Mind me asking what speed your CPU is running at and what your idle temps are? Just to compare.

Ah... that would make sense. If I recall correctly though, I read in more than one place that 1.65V for memory should be the absolute max to set it at. Both ways, I'm going to go try it out. Thanks.

1.3V? Nope, that's what it was set at, although 1.3 really isn't very high.

So, just ten minutes ago when I was testing the stability of my overclock with Prime95, my computer crashed and I got blue screened. I know that this definitely has something to do with my RAM, but I can't seem to pinpoint it. Thus far, my overclock settings are as follows: i7-930 core clock 150 with multiplier of 22=3.3GHz at 1.3V, RAM speed at 1805MHz at 1.3V. The memory I have is http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145236, and I've read that many people have been able to get it to the speed I set it at. Apart from that, I can't see why the system would crash because I really haven't pushed anything too far. On paper, this really seems like it should work, but every time I run Prim95 something crashes or an error message comes up. Any type of help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Also, this is the CPU cooler I have.

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103057

Well I think I figured out the fatal error problem. I went back into BIOS and lowered the RAM speed to 1604MHz. I also lowered the multiplier to 20 and upped the BCLK to 160 to get an overclock of 3.2GHz. I was able to run Prime95 for a good twenty minutes after that with no errors, but the CPU temps were still in between 74-79 C. As long as I don't go over 80 C, I think I'll be fine, and anyways, the only time it will ever get that high is when I put it through a torture test.