When is it safe to use AMD Overdrive?

Question

I have a Radeon HD 6950, and its temperatures seem okay, so I was wondering what I would have to do to use AMD Overdrive. Would it be safe? Could I set all the adjusters to their maximums? What would this mean in terms of power output? I have an 800W power supply.

Specs:
CPU: Quad Q6600 @ 3.2GHz
GPU: Radeon HD 6950
Mobo: Asus P5Q P45
RAM: OCZ 4GB 1066GHz
HDD: 2x 1TB Samsung

Answer 1

What I found was to first find what the average overclock of the card is. If you want to keep it on stock volts (which I recommend) then have a look at this thread. It'll help you know what limits your card can reach.

The next thing to do is just bump up your core clock up by 5 or 10mhz at a time and after every bump make sure you stress test the card.

You can do this with playing a game, Furmark or MSI Kombustor (Which I believe is bundled with MSI Afterburner (A great GPU Utility!))

During stress tests, have a look at the GPU Temperature and also if you see any problems with the display, usually you can see blocks in the picture that shouldn't be there. If you do see any artifacts then you need to drop your core clock until the display is back to normal. You'll then be able to find your max overclock for your card.

Answer 2

You'll probably fry the graphics card if you set everything to max in AMD Overdrive. Start off by using the "Auto Tune" button, and slowly work your way up from there.

Good cooling is essential as well. If you're using stock cooling on the card, you won't be able to go much higher than factory defaults without seeing artifacts and perhaps even crashes.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure it voids your warranty too. Be careful.