Integrated graphics overclocking.

Hey all! My Asus motherboard has an ATI Radeon HD 3000 built in that can access a gig of the system DDR3 memory and all. It also can be over clocked to a gigahertz and can stay relatively cool. The thing is is when it comes to gaming, like Grand Theft Automobile 4. (Yes, I can run GTA 4 on rather goods settings too) After a few minutes of game play, the screen kind of flickers to black a bit. Or sometimes out of nowhere, the screens goes real dark and I have to wait a few seconds for it normalize out.

That only really seems to happen when the graphics chipset gets over clocked closer to a gigahertz. At 925ghz, it's all great. I have my drivers all updated too.

So is there a specific reason or reason in general why this is happening?

are you using ( Catalyst Control Center) that comes with the ati drivers?
if you are there is a setting that you can use to make the fan speedup and cool down the chip.
on the one that i have the fan speed was set to 50% (why i don't no) but it ran at 55c. i turned it up to
75% and it cooled down to 48c. so that may help you aswell.

scrooge

well.... firstly

GTA4 is one of the worst coded games in existance (great game) but its very buggy, so performance vary's greatly even with machines using matching HW.

secondly....

overclocking your intergrated GFX is a minefield..... in general theyre not designed to be OCed, even if your temps are good the chip simply may not like running a 1ghz frequency.

:)

I am also no O/Cing expert, but I second the overheating theory.
Another cause could also be insufficient power; maybe the motherboard is not designed to feed more than the 'normal' maximum power to the chip, and an O/Ced GPU would require more power than 'normal'.

If you're a serious gamer, you could always pick up one of the newer ATI/NV cards....the price to performance ratio seems to be rather good for GPUs these days, even more so if you don't mind buying slightly used.

Overclocking an onboard graphics card is like trying to make a skateboard go faster in an autombile race. You aren't going to yield anything considered "good" yet you run the risk of an unstable system, or even damaging the motherboard.

It's very obvious from your post that you've pushed the card past what it can handle. Assuming you can go to 925 Mhz stable, there's no reason to consider going farther, if it becomes unstable. If you plan to be gaming, invest in a discrete video card.

DeaconFrost said:

Overclocking an onboard graphics card is like trying to make a skateboard go faster in an autombile race. You aren't going to yield anything considered "good" yet you run the risk of an unstable system, or even damaging the motherboard.

It's very obvious from your post that you've pushed the card past what it can handle. Assuming you can go to 925 Mhz stable, there's no reason to consider going farther, if it becomes unstable. If you plan to be gaming, invest in a discrete video card.

This. A PCI-E dedicated GPU will ALWAYS be better than an onboard graphics card. Not only will your motherboard thank you, but you'll get much better performance in your games. Just make sure your power supply is adequate to handle any card you buy.

Hmm, well thanks for the responses!

I doubt that there would be a power issue since I have a 500 watt PSU, and I also doubt that ASUS would built their motherboard to not sustain an overlock on that. I have investigated any heating issues, there isn't any. Over clocked, it only reaches to about 36 degrees and my cooling set up is two Vantec 92mm Tornadoes currently running on the 5V rail.

I am going to buy a dedicated card soon when I have enough money to do so...actually, since we're on the topic of dedicated cards, how about this one?

Newegg.com - ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCU TOP/DI/1GD5 GeForce GTS 450 (Fermi) 1GB 128-bit DDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

I'm buying an ASUS card so I can take advantage of the EPU-4 control for it, gotta saves that them there energy! I'm not planning to do hard core gaming, but I do want it to be able to run some games at decent levels, such as Mafia II. I've read that it's a clusterflock on graphics cards all around, even ones that are specified to run it.

Nope, I rechecked to be sure, 400 watt minimum.