I loaded Afterburner yesterday and through testing was able to get a respectable OC out of my Aging 9800m gtx. Today about 30 minutes into a 3d game or using Kombuster the card will drop to below normal operating speeds and stay there until a restart. The 9800m gtx normally runs at a 500mhz core clock. I got mine to a 600mhz along with raising the shader and the memory. It ran totally stable yesterday. I went as far as to uninstall Afterburner, Konbuster and my Nvidia drivers( 285.62) and reboot then do a complete reinstall. I set my OC and tested. The OC speeds held for 9 minutes and then everything dropped to below stock speeds. I uninstall Afterburner and speeds held at stock in a 3d game. Temps are good. Max core temp was 82°c and the 9800m GTX is good to about 92° before it starts flaking. room is cooler than yesterday as well. Any suggestions?
ok just to clarify it's an OC issue that is UNDERCLOCKING my GPU, Shader and Memory. a 12 hour burn in with no crashes is what I ran and the next day any OC is underclocking my card. I've had Overclocking Freeze up or Blue Screen my computer but never Underclock my cards and I've been doing this since you milled our own waterblocks. Well it just goes to show you that you have never seen it all.
That's NVIDIA's SAFE sentinel kicking in, overvolt, overpower or overclock too far and it will throttle down your GPU to safe values to prevent it from frying.
Some drivers are more likely to cause "downclocking". I have seen proof of this in my own systems (many f@h users know all too much about it). Experiment with some different driver versions.