I tried to use AMD Auto Overclock, and now my PC has been freezing up sometimes. Afterwards, the screen goes black or displays artifacts.

[Segundoh]

Computer Type: Desktop

GPU: Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX 6800 XT 16 GB Video Card

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600 3.8 GHz 6-Core Processor

Motherboard: Asus TUF GAMING B650-PLUS WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard

BIOS Version: 3024

RAM: G.Skill Flare X5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory

PSU: Super Flower Leadex V Pro 1000 W 80+ Gold Fully Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

Case: Fractal Design Meshify 2 Compact

Operating System & Version: WINDOWS 10 Education 10.0.19045 Build 19045

GPU Drivers: AMD Adrenalin 25.3.1

Chipset Drivers: AMD B650 6.07.22.037

Background Applications: Chrome, Steam, various idle games like Spirit City: Lo-Fi Sessions (sometimes)

I tried to use the Auto-Overclock feature in AMD Adrenalin. I had a manual OC before that and I have it now. Anyway, Auto-Overclock really messed up my PC. I don't know if that means my system is unstable in general.

It seems that it overclocked both my GPU and my CPU; afterwards, my PC would not boot. I had to turn it on and off multiple times, and it would eventually boot up. I got a bunch of Windows BSODs when I was booting up my PC; I probably should've kept track of them. I kept trying to use the BIOS flashback feature on my motherboard to reflash my BIOS with my PC off, but it kept getting stuck; the BIOS definitely got messed up a lot, but I updated it with the latest version as soon as I got my PC working.

Eventually, my PC started working again, and I disabled Auto Overclock and changed it back to my manual OC. I suppose I should go back to the base GPU settings, but I just think it's weird that my issues got worse right after I had these boot-up issues. It seems that my PC freezes up for a bit. Then, either some staticy artifacts appear or my screen goes black for a second. I've only noticed this when I'm alt-tabbing to an idle game, Steam, or Windows Security which is interesting; I haven't noticed it in anything else yet.

I tried to uninstall my graphics driver and then updated it to the latest version. I also updated Windows to the latest version. I ran sfc /scannow and the DISM commands. I'll try to update my chipset driver right now since I forgot about that one. What could be wrong with this? Thanks in advance!

 

[Chrispy_]

Step 1:
Clear the cmos via shorting the two jumper pins and then confirm everything is fine at bone-stock, 100% default settings. No XMP, no DOCP/EXPO, everything else set to Auto.

Forget about tuning or overclocking, just go for a week at out-of-the-box settings and run the odd stability test. If you can get through a week that's rock-solid, your hardware is fine.

Step 2:
Assuming everything is okay from there, start with DOCP or EXPO to get your RAM at DDR5-6000, and leave everything else alone for a few days.

Step 3:
If that's stable, enable a modest PBO profile depending on your cooling setup. Off the top of my head I would go for 125/85/125W settings for PPT/TDC/EDC respectively using a 7600 with an typical air cooler. Of course you can push further but at a 125W PPT you are well into diminishing returns with a 7600.

Step 4:
Finally, if your CPU overclock is stable for a few days, lop 100mv off your GPU using the Adrenaline drivers and touch nothing else, then if it's stable keep dropping by 10mv per day of gaming until you get a game crash, at which point your should back it off by 25-35mv and call it a day.

Congratulations, your system is now 95% optimal and you can either stop there or tear your hair out as you chase those last few percent.

 

[Segundoh]

Step 1:
Clear the cmos via shorting the two jumper pins and then confirm everything is fine at bone-stock, 100% default settings. No XMP, no DOCP/EXPO, everything else set to Auto.

Forget about tuning or overclocking, just go for a week at out-of-the-box settings and run the odd stability test. If you can get through a week that's rock-solid, your hardware is fine.

Step 2:
Assuming everything is okay from there, start with DOCP or EXPO to get your RAM at DDR5-6000, and leave everything else alone for a few days.

Step 3:
If that's stable, enable a modest PBO profile depending on your cooling setup. Off the top of my head I would go for 125/85/125W settings for PPT/TDC/EDC respectively using a 7600 with an typical air cooler. Of course you can push further but at a 125W PPT you are well into diminishing returns with a 7600.

Step 4:
Finally, if your CPU overclock is stable for a few days, lop 100mv off your GPU using the Adrenaline drivers and touch nothing else, then if it's stable keep dropping by 10mv per day of gaming until you get a game crash, at which point your should back it off by 25-35mv and call it a day.

Congratulations, your system is now 95% optimal and you can either stop there or tear your hair out as you chase those last few percent.

Thanks! I'll try that right now and get back to you in a bit. That plan definitely makes sense; hopefully, my hardware is completely fine then.

Step 1:
Clear the cmos via shorting the two jumper pins and then confirm everything is fine at bone-stock, 100% default settings. No XMP, no DOCP/EXPO, everything else set to Auto.

Forget about tuning or overclocking, just go for a week at out-of-the-box settings and run the odd stability test. If you can get through a week that's rock-solid, your hardware is fine.

Step 2:
Assuming everything is okay from there, start with DOCP or EXPO to get your RAM at DDR5-6000, and leave everything else alone for a few days.

Step 3:
If that's stable, enable a modest PBO profile depending on your cooling setup. Off the top of my head I would go for 125/85/125W settings for PPT/TDC/EDC respectively using a 7600 with an typical air cooler. Of course you can push further but at a 125W PPT you are well into diminishing returns with a 7600.

Step 4:
Finally, if your CPU overclock is stable for a few days, lop 100mv off your GPU using the Adrenaline drivers and touch nothing else, then if it's stable keep dropping by 10mv per day of gaming until you get a game crash, at which point your should back it off by 25-35mv and call it a day.

Congratulations, your system is now 95% optimal and you can either stop there or tear your hair out as you chase those last few percent.

Is it okay if I just load my optimized defaults on the BIOS, or is that not recommended? That's what I did, and everything is back to the default settings. Alternatively, could I update my BIOS to reset my settings? I'm worried that I'll accidentally short out the wrong pins and break something... it's unlikely, but I've done dumber stuff before lol

Edit: Well, just loading the defaults didn't work, so never mind there. That is not good enough then, it'd seem. I'll try the alternative.

 

[Segundoh]

Step 1:
Clear the cmos via shorting the two jumper pins and then confirm everything is fine at bone-stock, 100% default settings. No XMP, no DOCP/EXPO, everything else set to Auto.

I was experimenting a bit, and it seems that these issues stop happening if I change my refresh rate to 120 Hz instead of 144 Hz. I updated my BIOS to reset all of my CPU, RAM, and GPU settings (in Adrenalin for the last one) although that didn’t help on its own. Does this indicate that something is definitely wrong with my GPU or monitor then?

 

[ir_cow]

Could be drivers. AMD drivers seem like they are perpetually always in beta and your the Guinea pig.

 

[R-T-B]

Could be drivers. AMD drivers seem like they are perpetually always in beta and your the Guinea pig.

It's not as bad as it's made out to be honestly, but yes there are moments on certain builds that leave you... flustered.

 

[Toothless]

Could be drivers. AMD drivers seem like they are perpetually always in beta and your the Guinea pig.

Team red for red in the face.

To be fair, two tools and two reboots is all that's needed to reset drivers and start clean. Fixes 99% of problems.

Main issue is OP used auto-anything.

 

[Segundoh]

Could be drivers. AMD drivers seem like they are perpetually always in beta and your the Guinea pig.

It's not as bad as it's made out to be honestly, but yes there are moments on certain builds that leave you... flustered.

That’s true. I’ve had issues before. Perhaps it’d be a good idea to revert to an even older driver; I was previously using the December driver and just updated to the latest March driver. However, it does seem that setting Spirit City to high performance in the Windows graphics settings resolved this problem. I haven’t seen it in Steam again, but I don’t think that would fix it in Steam. I’ll definitely have to test this out even more though. Is this just a band-aid fix? It seems it shouldn’t be happening at all though.

Team red for red in the face.

To be fair, two tools and two reboots is all that's needed to reset drivers and start clean. Fixes 99% of problems.

Main issue is OP used auto-anything.

Yeah, I’ve never used auto Overclock before this and I definitely will not use it anymore. I had a momentary memory lapse and tried to set Manual Tuning in Tuning Control rather than the GPU Tuning Control; it didn’t work, so I thought something got messed up and tried to use Auto Overclock to enable Manual Overclock… I realized pretty soon that I was being an idiot, but yeah. Anyway, I was saying right above that I may have fixed the problem, but it’s probably just a bandaid fix. Do you think this is still an issue?

 

[R0H1T]

It's not that bad, if you get a somewhat stable OC you can always undervolt/add more juice to test stability. Having said that BIOS/manual tuning is almost always superior!

 

[ir_cow]

Main issue is OP used auto-anything.

Often auto can be hit or miss. I agree.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I tried to use the Auto-Overclock

Modern video cards(and even your 6800XT) are so powerful and pushed to their limits from the factory, that OCing benefits are very marginal and really not worth the time. You would be better served and make far better performance gains by tweaking your in game settings to suit your tastes, while turning some settings down or off. You'd be surprised how good games still look when some FX are turned down or off.

FSR for example is really very good for increasing the frame rate while not sacrificing visual fidelity. FSR has come a long way and is an excellent feature to utilize to increase performance.

Often auto can be hit or miss. I agree.

This.

 

[Chrispy_]

I was experimenting a bit, and it seems that these issues stop happening if I change my refresh rate to 120 Hz instead of 144 Hz. I updated my BIOS to reset all of my CPU, RAM, and GPU settings (in Adrenalin for the last one) although that didn’t help on its own. Does this indicate that something is definitely wrong with my GPU or monitor then?

Not necessarily.

If you haven't already, do a driver uninstall using DDU in safe mode, then reinstall. I think the Adrenaline driver resets the GPU side of things pretty well, but Windows remembers display information, including potentially something that went wrong.

It doesn't hurt to reseat your display cables, and if your monitor and GPU have multiple ports, switch the output port on the GPU and the input port on the monitor. Even if nothing is faulty it ensures different hardware IDs that eliminate yet more potential conflicts somewhere deep within the OS and driver that go far beyond my own understanding.

 

[Segundoh]

It's not that bad, if you get a somewhat stable OC you can always undervolt/add more juice to test stability. Having said that BIOS/manual tuning is almost always superior!

True, I've been using manual tuning for my GPU. I've been more scared of manually tuning my CPU and RAM since I heard they're easier to break, but I will follow Chrispy_'s tips to tune my CPU, at least.

Often auto can be hit or miss. I agree.

I've been using auto-tuning for my CPU and RAM, though I should start following Chrispy_'s tips to tune my CPU. I've generally been using manual tuning for my GPU, and I definitely won't use auto overclock again after this disaster.

Modern video cards(and even your 6800XT) are so powerful and pushed to their limits from the factory, that OCing benefits are very marginal and really not worth the time. You would be better served and make far better performance gains by tweaking your in game settings to suit your tastes, while turning some settings down or off. You'd be surprised how good games still look when some FX are turned down or off.

FSR for example is really very good for increasing the frame rate while not sacrificing visual fidelity. FSR has come a long way and is an excellent feature to utilize to increase performance.

This.

That makes sense. I do like FSR a lot; people say the image quality is worse and all, but I generally do not notice it too much unless I go down to High Performance or something like that. That's a good point for sure. Thanks!

Not necessarily.

If you haven't already, do a driver uninstall using DDU in safe mode, then reinstall. I think the Adrenaline driver resets the GPU side of things pretty well, but Windows remembers display information, including potentially something that went wrong.

It doesn't hurt to reseat your display cables, and if your monitor and GPU have multiple ports, switch the output port on the GPU and the input port on the monitor. Even if nothing is faulty it ensures different hardware IDs that eliminate yet more potential conflicts somewhere deep within the OS and driver that go far beyond my own understanding.

Thanks! I tried to do a few driver uninstalls and reinstalls with the latest driver and the December driver which was the one I was using before this disaster happened. I just tried to revert to the October 2024 driver since I was hoping it was a driver issue; unfortunately, I was still having this issue. I tried to use all 3 of my GPU's DP output ports as well as the HDMI output port, but I still had the same issue; I obviously would never use HDMI over DP, but I was curious whether it was just a DP issue. I was still having that issue regardless. I did try to use my motherboard ports though to see if I had issues with Radeon integrated graphics. These problems went away, but I suppose that's not a good comparison. I'll try to reseat my GPU display cables in my case. Thanks!

 

[AusWolf]

Could be drivers. AMD drivers seem like they are perpetually always in beta and your the Guinea pig.

No.

But with that said, the auto overclock function is broken, it has always been.

 

[fevgatos]

Computer Type: Desktop

GPU: Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX 6800 XT 16 GB Video Card

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600 3.8 GHz 6-Core Processor

Motherboard: Asus TUF GAMING B650-PLUS WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard

BIOS Version: 3024

RAM: G.Skill Flare X5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory

PSU: Super Flower Leadex V Pro 1000 W 80+ Gold Fully Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

Case: Fractal Design Meshify 2 Compact

Operating System & Version: WINDOWS 10 Education 10.0.19045 Build 19045

GPU Drivers: AMD Adrenalin 25.3.1

Chipset Drivers: AMD B650 6.07.22.037

Background Applications: Chrome, Steam, various idle games like Spirit City: Lo-Fi Sessions (sometimes)

I tried to use the Auto-Overclock feature in AMD Adrenalin. I had a manual OC before that and I have it now. Anyway, Auto-Overclock really messed up my PC. I don't know if that means my system is unstable in general.

It seems that it overclocked both my GPU and my CPU; afterwards, my PC would not boot. I had to turn it on and off multiple times, and it would eventually boot up. I got a bunch of Windows BSODs when I was booting up my PC; I probably should've kept track of them. I kept trying to use the BIOS flashback feature on my motherboard to reflash my BIOS with my PC off, but it kept getting stuck; the BIOS definitely got messed up a lot, but I updated it with the latest version as soon as I got my PC working.

Eventually, my PC started working again, and I disabled Auto Overclock and changed it back to my manual OC. I suppose I should go back to the base GPU settings, but I just think it's weird that my issues got worse right after I had these boot-up issues. It seems that my PC freezes up for a bit. Then, either some staticy artifacts appear or my screen goes black for a second. I've only noticed this when I'm alt-tabbing to an idle game, Steam, or Windows Security which is interesting; I haven't noticed it in anything else yet.

I tried to uninstall my graphics driver and then updated it to the latest version. I also updated Windows to the latest version. I ran sfc /scannow and the DISM commands. I'll try to update my chipset driver right now since I forgot about that one. What could be wrong with this? Thanks in advance!

lol,

that is why the overclocking guides recommend raising one parameter at a time, throught stability tests (so you dont overclock too high) and eventually try more

 

[Segundoh]

No.

But with that said, the auto overclock function is broken, it has always been.

lol,

that is why the overclocking guides recommend raising one parameter at a time, throught stability tests (so you dont overclock too high) and eventually try more

I learned my lesson now for sure… no more auto-Overclock for my GPU. Back to manual tuning. I’ll go back to the stability tests I was using before. I was just trying it out once and it messed up so much…

 

[Segundoh]

I was using two monitors, and I realized I'm not encountering this issue anymore. Is FreeSync disabled when you're using two monitors or something? If so, that would make sense since turning off FreeSync fixed this problem. It even works when I don't even have my second monitor on and just have it plugged in. It's a really old monitor I got for free a while back, and it's 1920x1080p 60Hz. It's good that there's an easy fix, but what could be causing this issue?

 

[harm9963]

Modern video cards(and even your 6800XT) are so powerful and pushed to their limits from the factory, that OCing benefits are very marginal and really not worth the time. You would be better served and make far better performance gains by tweaking your in game settings to suit your tastes, while turning some settings down or off. You'd be surprised how good games still look when some FX are turned down or off.

FSR for example is really very good for increasing the frame rate while not sacrificing visual fidelity. FSR has come a long way and is an excellent feature to utilize to increase performance.

This.

Every since I got my 4090 over two years ago, never saw the need to OC, still runs great , the way things are now. Probably two more years or more .

 

[mama]

Install a clean, up to date BIOS.

 

[ratirt]

I would try undervolting instead of OC. You can get much better results. I got a 6900xt and when I lower the voltage the cards ramps up clocks higher and stays cooler.

 

[Segundoh]

Install a clean, up to date BIOS.

Thanks! I tried that, but it unfortunately didn’t work. What else could be wrong here?

I would try undervolting instead of OC. You can get much better results. I got a 6900xt and when I lower the voltage the cards ramps up clocks higher and stays cooler.

That makes sense. I’ll try to undervolt now to make this better.

 

[redeye]

it means the overclock is unstable. I don’t think AMD guarantees the overclock it determines…

 

[AusWolf]

it means the overclock is unstable. I don’t think AMD guarantees the overclock it determines…

No overclock, underclock or undervolt is guaranteed, ever. That's why you're presented with a disclaimer that you're doing it at your own risk upon enabling the feature.

 

[Segundoh]

it means the overclock is unstable. I don’t think AMD guarantees the overclock it determines…

I turned off my OC and cleared my CMOS, but I'm unfortunately still having this issue.

No overclock, underclock or undervolt is guaranteed, ever. That's why you're presented with a disclaimer that you're doing it at your own risk upon enabling the feature.

That's true. I guess auto overclock is especially unstable though since I was doing just fine with my manual OCs even when I went beyond what auto overclock did. Well, my PC crashed a few times whiel I was testing, of course, but it was always just fine after it turned back on. With that said, I realized I forgot to say that this issue was happening in Spirit City even before I used auto OC. It got worse afterwards though since it started happening with Steam and Discord. Does this mean my PC was slightly messed up even before that?

 

[ShrimpBrime]

I was experimenting a bit, and it seems that these issues stop happening if I change my refresh rate to 120 Hz instead of 144 Hz. I updated my BIOS to reset all of my CPU, RAM, and GPU settings (in Adrenalin for the last one) although that didn’t help on its own. Does this indicate that something is definitely wrong with my GPU or monitor then?

Based on all of your posts, this one with the most actual useful information. You tried something and received a result.

I am unclear what the actual symptoms are to further assist actually.
meaning What instability happened and When did it happen.
If you clear cmos, system should be error free otherwise,
Does the AMD software open everytime you start windows and apply this automatic overclock? Did you turn the AMD startup feature off?

If you really suspect the GPU to be the problem, you uninstall all GPU drivers, turn off PC, remove the GPU, install a different GPU and continue diagnostics. If the issues are then gone, perhaps the video card is bad after the overclock and you should RMA the card. Is there something wrong with your monitor? Perhaps it's just the cable is going bad? Who's to know unless you swap these parts out with different ones for testing. We cannot answer these questions for you. Some of these, you have to swap parts out and tell us what the outcome of it was.

I wish you good Luck!