I'm using Afterburner to "natively" overclock a 7950, having used the "-xcl" option. From what I understand, this bypasses the need for unofficial Afterburner overclocking, and instead unlocks the limits through Catalyst Control Center, which CCC then manages/controls.
The problem is that although I have an overclock setting of 1150mhz core clock, after a little while in-game, it drops down to around 750mhz, constantly fluctuating up and down a few mhz. I'm guessing this has something to do with AMD's PowerPlay?
I've tried closing down CCC and MOM to stop this, but it continues to happen. I have to continually alt-tab out of the game, reapply an overclock in Afterburner, alt-tab back into the game, and start playing again. But it's only a matter of time before the core clock gets clocked back down to a constantly changing core clock. I have no idea why this is happening, or what the mechanics of PowerPlay are.
How do I stop this from happening? It severely kills performance. It's done this so far in Starcraft 2, and also Far Cry 3.
(NOTE: I asked this on Gaming, but was closed and pointed here)