PC crashed while overclocking 9600gt with atitool. Why?

Question

Normally with atitool you can just click "Find max core" and "Find max mem", but when I tried that with my 9600GT "Alpha dog edition" 740m, it immediately showed lots of yellow dots and stripes and after a while, the screen turned light-blue.

Why is this? is it the GPU, Atitool, or the fact that the gpu is factory-overclocked?

Answer 1

Going for extra on a manufacturer overclocked card is often a useless quest as they've found the maximum their card can properly support.  When they ship the product, they don't want a load of RMAs because the card isn't stable.  They've designed a heatsink to suit the speeds, and in this case they are a long way beyond stock.  Not all chips are 100% equal in grade and some will go a tiny bit further than others, but to produce an overclocked card, a maker has to pay and charge a premium for top grade chips and the higher rejection rate that will result from quality testing, to ensure that, even overclocked by such an amount, the card will work happily day in day out, and last for years.  Rejected chips probably go onto lower end 9600 cards.

What you might try to do is get more cooling going on around your card.  Or be happy with what they already achieved.  

The highest gain I could find in research was 21 on gpu and 69 on memory and whether that is sustainable for days and weeks is unknown, as is the effect on card life-span.

Answer 2

overheating.... its a safety feature to prefent further damage to your hardware

if the gpu is factory overclocked, i suggest not to overclock it anymore

form what i know, there is a specific overclocking softwares made solely for nvidia...