Overclocking my work GPU actually made things worse after 6 months

I built a rendering rig back in January and pushed the GTX 3060 to the limit thinking I'd save time on client projects. First 3 months were great, maybe 15% faster exports in Blender. But by month 4, I started getting random crashes during long renders, and last week the card started artifacting in the middle of a $2,000 logo animation job. My theory is the sustained workload just degraded the silicon faster than normal gaming use would. Has anyone else seen permanent damage from daily overclocking on production machines?

2 comments

2 Comments

sage_lewis101mo ago

Yeah, did you have any kind of active cooling on the VRAM or just the stock fans? I had a buddy who did the exact same thing with a 3070 for video editing. After about 5 months the memory chips started throwing errors because the heat just kept building up during those long overnight renders. He had to drop the clock back to stock and it still artifacts sometimes on heavy loads. That sustained heat is brutal on the chips, way different than gaming where temps spike and cool down.

anthony_fox901mo ago

@sage_lewis10 how long did your buddy run those overnight renders before the memory started failing? Did it happen all at once or get worse gradually?