MSI GTX 660 gaming edition

Question

Hi just a quick question, I overclocked my MSI GeForce GTX 660 Gaming Edition slightly from 1180mhz to 1203mhz and left the memory clock at 3005mb which is the same as MSI app OC setting that came with the card. (Overclock is so minor i just wanted to test)
Now for some reason im getting kernel driver error 331 stopped responding and has recovered which I never had before I uped the card a tiny bit and not sure if this is linked to adding more MHZ to the core clock or not
Also i noticed when the Kernal error showed MSI afterburner showed me my cards power usage hit 36,405,567 % .........
current setting of GPU
Core clock 1202MHz
Memory clock 3005MHz
Full load temp 45c-59c depending on what game
Power supply Corsair 600w gaming edition
Any help finding what caused the huge power % would help
Also is adding few more MHz onto the clock speed the cause
extra info ..... Case being cool by 3 Corsair 120mm fans so 100% not over heating

Answer 1

Don't overclock it like that.
Overclock it by using Kepler BIOS Tweaker v1.25 and nvflasher in combination and by modding the bios of the card. BUT do some reading on it before you go on with it. There are risks involved as in every kind of bios flashing. However, I have flashed my cards' BIOS so many times (like more than 30 times each lol, a bit too much yes) until I found stable settings yet I haven't seen any issues other than once where I tried to flash the TOP version's BIOS into my card and that way I had to boot using the integrated graphics card to log in to windows and reflash back to card's own modded-bios version.
OCing via card's BIOS will give you more control over your overclock.
When you increase the card's core clock the boost clock automatically increases as well and sometimes to a clock that the card cannot carry. I know this because I was OCing using Asus gpu tweak or afterburner before and I was getting the same error from even little overclocks.
I then used Kepler Bios tweaker and set the Max Boost Clock to a safe value after much testing.
Most of the time this value is at least as high as 1202Mhz. Msi is usually better in this department and gives more headroom but I don't see any need to go beyond 1202Mhz to be honest.
If you cannot get there with default voltage you can up the voltage a bit until it is stable.
I have 2 of these cards but Asus DCU2 versions in my mini atx motherboard setup where they sit like glued together. Yet still with 1.212 voltage running through the Bios modded one it does not get hotter than 70-71C. Without the voltage it is maybe 1 degree lower. I recently lowered my OC to 1136.6 max boost clocks and in games and heavy apps they run @1137 clocks both. I lowered it because it gave me smoother experience in BF4.