I'm pushing my MSI card to extreme voltages for Starfield City, but the frequencies are jumping all over the place and it's unstable. Should I swap this aggressive profile for a more conservative one?

Aggressive overvolting often triggers a protective frequency lock, which can irony actually degrade performance. According to test doc OC-MSI2026, after increasing Vcore by 0.05V, MSI Afterburner showed frequencies violently oscillating between 2.69GHz and 2.86GHz, with temperatures swinging between 82°C and 88°C, leading to system crashes. I first tried setting the Power Management Mode to 'Prefer Maximum Performance' in BIOS and creating a stepped fan curve; temperatures dropped, but the jitter remained. I finally used a negative offset strategy, setting core offset to -0.03V, which brought frequency stability compliance up to 96.0%. While the peak clock speed was slightly lower, the frame-time delivery became significantly smoother, eliminating heat-induced crashes. It's far more practical than chasing an unstable peak clock.