Hey!

For a couple of days I started overclocking my gtx 275 - I'm totally a noob when it comes to overclocking so naturally I googled it and found this guide right here which apparently is a guide for the gtx 275. I guess you probably could use the guide for any other video card, but still I thought, lucky me, right.

Anyways, I downloaded RivaTuner and FurMark as the tutorial says. But I have a issue I cant seem to figure out and IT IS DRIVING ME CRAZY! It seems to be a issue when I crank up the shader clock in RivaTuner. Suddenly my screen goes black and windows 7 is telling me that my latest driver (197.15) stopped working and was recovered again. Then if I launch FurMark my FPS has decreased DRASTICALLY and any game I launch is basically unplayable because of the low FPS. If I put the values on the shader clocking back to it origin the FPS is still crap...

Now, what I don't understand, is this my graphics card way of telling me that I'm pushing the overclocking too far or is this simply a issue that needs to be resolved within my system or with RivaTuner? OR am I perhaps doing something wrong. I couldn't tell you what I might be doing wrong since I'm following the tutorial every step of the way. Why I'm questioning if this might only be the overclocking being clocked too far is because the values the dude in the guide ended up with was much higher values than what I get. I know that not every computer can be clocked the same amount as others, but still I feel like I should be able to clock higher. Also, if I restart my rig everything is back to normal. The FPS is back to where it was originally before I started overclocking and games can be played again without any issue, like it was before I overclocked.

I've heard overclocking is fun and really isn't that risky if you're being careful. So far my overclocking experience has been hell and no fun at all. So, I call upon the overclocking experts of the Giant Bomb community, can you please help me turn this experience around to a positive one? And maybe shed some light on my situation so that I might get a better understanding of what is going on? ANY help is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

My specs (just in case needed, you know). 
Windows 7  64-bit
Nvidia gtx 275
Intel i7 - 860   2.80Ghz
8Gb RAM

Well first of all, that is exactly telling you that it's clocked too high for the shader clock or anything if there is a crash. Second of all your suppose to turn the fan to 100% when you do that or alot higher. If it crashes, then you turn the setting down a bit until it doesn't crash. I would test that with graphical intense games for like 10 minutes and see if it crashes, then turn the setting up slowly until you get everything higher. Then test it for an hour with a game or even 3d mark, if it doesn't crash and you pushed your card to the limit before it artifacts or crashes, then turning it down slightly before that, then you have have sucessfuly overclocked.
 
About other ppl's overclock not all cards are exactly the same, some cards has better cooling than others from the heatsink and fan. You can't say just because someone can get this overclock you can, they might even have a better gaming case than you do. For example, I usually overclock quite high, I replaced the fan with a cooler and heatsink in order to be able to do that. If you see artifacts on your screen everywhere, you have to lower your overclock, even crashing or your going to fry your videocard. The whole point of overclocking is get it to a point under it frying, that's where you get more out of your pc components. Doing it wrong will obviously fry your videocard, that's where you should do more research before you mess around with the overclock. Honestly your card is plently fast already, you only need a slight overclock, it produces alot of heat, that's why your hitting your limit.

• First of all that guide is old and Rivatuner is no longer updated.  Get EVGA Precision instead.  Trust me, it's made by the same guy, Alexey, who made Rivatuner and he has taken all the tech from one to the other but only EVGA Precision will be maintained these days.
•   Black Screen of Death is a common issue for Nvidia products when there's either too much heat, too few volts or a combination of the two.  From your description it looks more like a thermal issue because the screen is most likely going black as the card is force switching from performance 3D mode to 2D mode speeds as means to compensate for the excessive heat.  This would also explain the post Black Screen of Death poor FPS performance because the card is actually running at its lowest clock speeds.  I've had the same issue, depending on my driver version and method of OCing, with my 9600GT.  Many people have, so I would recommend you make sure you scan your 275's temps with Realtemp 3.38 beta, GPU-Z or EVGA Precision whilst the card is running some heavy GPU benchmarks (not just FurMark because that only pushes the shader/ALU side of the card, but rather games like Dirt2/Crysis on Very High and so on instead) to get an idea of what your idle and high performance temps are.  If your 275 is already exceeding 75 degrees Celsius with no overclock in place then it's highly unlikely you'll get much more out of it on the GPU side, but you should still be able to achieve some OC on the RAM speed, depending on the quality of the GDDR3 RAM chips your card uses.
• We need the actual brand and version of your GTX 275 to be able to help you further.

197.25 is the latest beta released today.
 
And holy hell, either those latest drivers or EVGA Precision have caused my GPU to spike temperature-wise, and it can't be due to a driver-caused fan error, since my GPU fan is a 120mm plugged into the motherboard itself. Same clock speeds, but I just finally ditched Rivatuner after hearing the news.

It is easier if you start by OCing your CPU. GPU OCing requires a little finesse in my opinion.

I would like to add that my 9600GT is overclocked quite aggressively (the bracketed values are the default speeds); GPU: 800mhz (625), Shader: 2000Mhz (1625), Memory: 1000mhz (900).  The reason I can overclock so aggressively, especially the core and shader speeds is due the Zalman HSF which is on my card - it offers much better cooling than the default Nvidia solution.

" We need the actual brand and version of your GTX 275 to be able to help you further. "

Yea everyone has pretty much given you the Jist of it now, just to say this once again, Stop using Rivatuner with Windows 7 it is not set up to work with it.

 And one more question! :P  Is it possible that I might not experience a differance in performance after overclocking, even if I have done it all completly right? Or is it most likely to be noticeable? Its not like I'm gonna give up overclocking if you say it might not increase my performance, cause I want to get this right! =) "  

To save you the trouble..you're not gaining much (10 FPS max) with video card overclocking. So your best bet is to boost the GPU, say, 25 MHz and for the memory, around 75 - 100 MHz. Leave it at that and you can say your video card is overclocked. Squeezing every last MHz really isn't worth the trouble.

" It also might be helpful to know what resolution you are running at.  Sometimes you don't see a significant performance difference with a more powerful GPU until you get into higher resolutions (1920x1200 or 2560x1600). What power supply do you have in your rig? "

" @SPACETURTLE said:

 And one more question! :P  Is it possible that I might not experience a differance in performance after overclocking, even if I have done it all completly right? Or is it most likely to be noticeable? Its not like I'm gonna give up overclocking if you say it might not increase my performance, cause I want to get this right! =) "  

This is absolutely possible.  CPU's can sometimes bottleneck performance, although yours is fairly powerful.  A few years ago when Crysis was all the rage I experienced this exact problem with my 8800GT.  In fact, I picked up a SECOND 8800GT and ran them in SLI.  I did extensive benchmarking and saw little difference between 1 GPU, 1 OC'd GPU, and 2 GPU's in SLI.  After I did some more research I found out that my CPU was holding everything back.  It also might be helpful to know what resolution you are running at.  Sometimes you don't see a significant performance difference with a more powerful GPU until you get into higher resolutions (1920x1200 or 2560x1600). What power supply do you have in your rig? "