So I finally got a second monitor, but my GPU likes to stay at 500/1600. OC is 1200/1600. Now when I run flash player it actually underclocks the ram to 1375. This right here is telling me I don't need such clocked ram for 2d. So for now I am downclocking with a MSI AB profile. Setting 500/800 with 1v. Wondering how safe that is. I know I can't kill it with underclocking but I am not totally sure. So far its been fine. I can't use automatic profile switching with MSI AB either since it thinks some apps need 3D profiles and they don't. TL: DR is 500/800 1v (stock is 1.13v) ok to run with a dual monitor setup, and is there a way to make MSI AB overlook some apps that it thinks needs 3D but do not. edit: New development. When I run flash player my Vram usage fluctuates heavily between 2 numbers. The number is dependant on other things running but the gap is normally 30MB or so vram. It won't sit on a solid number. Happens on stock clocks and only when flash runs. Doesn't seem to cause any issues but it bugs me. And to top it off the GPU usage fluctuates a bit too but hardware acceleration is off. Only on firefox.
I've been doing the same for about a year now with my 6950 and everything is fine. For apps that automatically switch to a 3D profile, you can configure that through the MSI On-Screen Display server app that runs alongside Afterburner. Just add an executable to that list and set Application detection level to none, and that should do the trick. Regarding flash, however, I've found that disabling HW Acceleration for it is actually the best practice in our case. The CPU is more than capable of displaying 1080p content, without the need for GPU acceleration.
Vram usage is only freaking out when flash is not fullscreen on firefox. Chrome is fine. Not sure why its doing this. maybe FF update, I don't know. Everything seems to work solid though. Setting the app to low seems to have fixed the profile switching.
This is confirmed to only happen with Adobe's flash player under default conditions. There's a rather lengthy thread about the flash player issue somewhere, but in-short, anything that does hardware-accelerated video decoding and uses UVD clocks, will cause the clocks to drop. A solution is to just disable hardware acceleration on Flash. "If" I recall correctly though, this only affected GPUs that don't use reference clocks. This includes user-OC'd GPUs, along with factory OC'd GPUs that use reference UVD clocks.
-CUT- I fixed flash problems in FF by changing gfx.direct2d.disabled to TRUE. Now my clocks don't fluctuate between 300 and 500 and the Vram sits much more stable. The profile switching works swimmingly and I normally keep hardware acceleration off anyway as its silly. Thanks for the tips guys. I got my dual monitors without too much heat.
