Death Inc

Yohohohoho, i just got a new Alienware Aurora and its nothing short of a beast, just that the graphics cards arent the latest, on BF3 ultra with antialising deferring on 4x its a bit choppy, if i take it off its all smoove... i spent a lot of money on this thing and I want it to run whatever game on whatever graphics, so i tried overclocking. It worked. Purely smoove. For 10 minutes, and then it froze, and i had to cold restart, this happened several times... can anyone assist on the problem???
Thanks, any ideas would be helpful :)

Using dual AMD Radeon HD 7950 3GB with crossfireX enabled btw

see with over clocking you need to bench it for a while to see if it is stable and by the sound of it, it is not a stable overclock. what is the cpu?? and those cards from memory should be ok for BF3 on ulta.

I got Intel Core i7-3960X CPU @ 3.30 GHz

Max turbo boost speed of 4.20 Ghz

should not need to overclock that mate should run everything fine on stock

Did you overclock the graphics cards or the CPU? Something is overheating. That would explain the delay before lock up.
You've got a few options;
Back the overclock off until it's stable.
Take the side off the case, and add extra fans blowing fresh air on the overclocked parts.
Or get freaky and watercool the shit out of the fuckers.

I've done each of those options in the past. Haven't overclocked in years though, so can't help with any specifics for your situation.

TL;DR: Computer is getting too hot.

hmmm id hold off on taking the side of the case off.  ive had experiences where it has decreased my cooling as there isnt a proper flow through the case.

As i mentioned in another post, i used to get black screen lockups (stillsound playing etc) and would be forced to cold reboot when i overclocked my card.
turned out to be the modular cable i was using was faulty, and the vid card would get a good supply of power, then obviously get  surge / spike and then go blank.

but listen to Al,  overclocking should be a last resort "i cant afford to upgrade right now so lets OC"
your unnecessarily putting increased strain on your Hardware. :(

Best option would have been to buy from Bohica's store. He'd assemble and test it all for you, and you'd have a superbeast compared to the Alienware for the same money. The case would most likely not look as flash though...

I'd be careful saying that around here mate ;)

Anyway, what kind of overclocking knowledge do you have? Do you have enough to answer the following questions:
 - How much (%) higher did you push each of the clocks on your cards?
 - How much did you increase the voltage to the cards cores to accommodate these changes?
 - How much power supply headroom did you have before tryong to overclock?
 - Are both of the cards overclocked identically?
 - Did you stress test each of your overclocks with 3Dmark or FurMark or some such program for over 12 hours?

This is the sort of information we need to be able to help mate.

From my experience, overclocking is about electricity and heat. If you can keep supplying more electricity to a component (overvolting) then you can push the clocks higher and higher (to a point), but, more juice = more heat. Parts are rearely designed to bleed off any more heat than absolutely necessary. This goes doubly for a prebuilt system like an alienware rig where they cut corners in every way possible to lower manufacturing price. Your either heating up too much or your cards dont have enough power.

To be brutally honest, you dont sound like you have enough technical knowledge to really be messing around with your components in the first place. I'm not saying dont overclock, I am just saying that you should do a lot of reading on the subject before you even attempt it. If we give you advice on here but you dont know the fundamentals of overclocking, then you will more than likely break one of your components, and I don't want that to happen.

I just read Alienware and "I spent a lot of money". These do go hand I hand I say.

But you come to the right place. Chat to the boys and girl here for help.

Thanks for the help, but its all good now, if indeed i ever need to do it again i will get back to yas :)