In the course of some mild overclocking I got my Intel quad core Q9550 up from the stock speed of 2.83 ghz to 3.4 ghz, and stable. It can of course be pushed considerably higher than that, but I'm not into extreme overclocking and all the hassle I have to go through to get it stable where it's working with everything and not surprising me somewhere along the way when I least expect it. It is alot of work to OC a processor to a much higher speed and then get it all just right where it's stable.

But as I said I had it pretty good and stable at 3.4 ghz and did a bunch of tests with Lightwave and 3DMark and some stress test utilities.

It was doing well. I decided to test it with Poser. No go. The best I could do with Poser Pro was 2.97 ghz. Anything higher caused instability, OpenGL weirdness, and crashes. The crashes all occurred while moving the camera, not during rendering, which makes me think it's in how Poser deals with OpenGL. OpenGL in Poser is controlled more by the CPU than the GPU, like in most 3D apps.

Is anyone here successfully overclocking with Poser?

What were your Preview Render Settings?

I had a Q6600 running @ 3.2GHz for a couple of years with no problem and now an i7 @ 3.8GHz. Seems stable so far in ppro, as well as the other apps i use (XSI, vue, photoshop)

Make sure that you aren't accidentally OCing your GPU as well. This can happen in some mobos that don't let you set PCI-E clocks independantly so when you raise the FSB, the PCI-E slot also gets overclocked, which in turn OCs your GPU.

ratscloset, my preview render setting was nothing special, just everything set at default without hardware shading on, except textures @ 1024, and a window of 1100x900 in size. I was testing it on a test scene I made that uses 5 GB of RAM, and has something like 30 textures in it. OpenGL, not SreeD.

But I don't know if that matters any because for one, my video card can handle that and plenty more, and it's always been rock solid stable at normal CPU and GPU settings.

Ghonma, I think you're on to something there. My board (which is brand new and which I just installed yesterday) has all kinds of OC options, so it's not that, but I did have the GPU overclocked too, through the EVGA precision tool, not the BIOS. I actually forgot about that. ;-)

Anyhow, everything was fine with Lightwave and 3DMark and Sandra, so I don't understand why Poser had problems. I'm going to have to try it out again some more, if you say you've been OCing Poser for a while. Knowing that it's something on my end and not a Poser flaw makes me want to. Gotta figure it out, you know, can't just let this rest. ;-)

Yeah, it's the Nvidia driver that caused the crashes. Still, it's puzzling why it was OK with LW and 3DMark, but not Poser, and why it's OK with a slight OC, but over 3.0 ghz and it gets really unstable.

Vista Ultimate x64, if that makes a difference. Fresh install, too, although fully updated.

I'm using an 8800 GTS with 640 MB RAM right now. I just ordered an EVGA GTX 285 SC with 1 GB RAM, literally just minutes ago. Maybe things will be different with that card.

I don't have any idea what the problem is, but I would not be surprised to find out that A) Poser is using a bit older set of OpenGL protocols (say, rev 1.0 of the shading language) and that B) the fine programmers at nVidia don't test their drivers at high speed with older protocols as much as they test newer stuff.

Wild guess, that, but as I say, wouldn't surprise me a bit.

I'd imagine you're probably right on both counts, Captain.

Personally I would suggest not using OpenGL and switching to Scree3D for preview. That should make you less dependent on the communication between the CPU and GPU. You will have the advantage of faster processing where it counts and the small reduction in preview speed shouldn't really matter.

I thin generaly poserpro dont like the quad core under xp64 ... Since two day i've a phenom x4 and 8go, poserpro dont know render textures with the external render, and with internal render the render speed is like poser 6 on an Athlon ... ( all that with 4 threads in the render config ) In an other side, poser 7 is faster than ever !

Trying under Vista 64 ...

Quote - Personally I would suggest not using OpenGL and switching to Scree3D for preview. That should make you less dependent on the communication between the CPU and GPU. You will have the advantage of faster processing where it counts and the small reduction in preview speed shouldn't really matter.

"Small reduction in preview speed"? :blink:

Surely ye jest!
Dude! My working preview window is typically between 1000x1000 and 1200x1200 and anywhere in between , but never smaller.
I have 500 MB Poser .pz3 files, with many characters, 3-5 GB of geometry and textures and transparencies and sometimes hardware shading.... and.... and there's no way in Hell SreeD can keep up with that. The screen doesn't even budge... maybe 1/4 FPS if I'm lucky...

And my 8800 GTS has kept up with it all really nicely, and on Monday the nice people at FedEx are delivering an EVGA Nvidia GTX 285 SC with 1 GB of VRAM to my door....
..and I would have simply thrown Poser away long ago if it didn't have OpenGL.

Use SreeD... I might as well just take out some paper and draw my own preview. :woot:

Quote - I thin generaly poserpro dont like the quad core under xp64 ... Since two day i've a phenom x4 and 8go, poserpro dont know render textures with the external render, and with internal render the render speed is like poser 6 on an Athlon ... ( all that with 4 threads in the render config ) In an other side, poser 7 is faster than ever !

Trying under Vista 64 ...

Try setting the render to "separate processes" in the render options. Depending on the scene setup, it can make a huge difference in render time, and can speed it up by as much as double or maybe more.