I bought a ASUS HD 7970 Matrix Platinum a few months ago and at first I was really happy with the frame rates.
However over time I always noticed flimmering. It's just a split second every few hours I would notice it so it's not a big deal. After some googling I found out that the cause was that the card was stock overclocked and that many AMD cards had this kind of occasional flimmering if they were stock overclocked. It said that I could fix this by simply downclocking the card to the real stock values and I considered it but then I remembered reading that underclocking your card can be damaging and I wasn't sure if it would be bad to downclock a stock overclocked card.
Again after a few months I've ran a benchmark on the card. I don't remember the name of the program but it's a heavy load GPU benchmark that runs without any visual and is supposed to run for hours and hours. It shows errors while it runs and most graphic cards should only receive a few errors after a few hours of running this program. The program gave my card a few hundred errors after less than an hour. I assumed this was because it was stock overclocked and that my card simply wasn't really stable at these clocks. Again I didn't underclock.
Last weekend I've joined the The Elder Scrolls Online beta weekend and got visual errors sometimes which were only fixed after reopening the game. I know that you will say that it's because the game is in beta but I very much doubt this since I get this in other games as well sometimes. I don't remember the name for it but what happened was that whole textures were simply completely off.
Is Matrix Platinum just a terrible buy? I really wish I could go back in time and not buy it. It's such a brilliant AMD card and yet I feel like replacing it all the time even though there aren't even real affordable upgrades and I wouldn't want to spend money on a card that doesn't give any improvements.
Should I downclock the card? Would that stablize it and stop giving visual problems?
