Settings: Artifact Scanning

The actual scanning and clock changing process during Find Max takes a little rendering stress off your GPU, that’s why it often helps to run heat up phases in between during which no scanning takes place - only rendering at maximum speed. This leads to increased temperatures of the card.
When the heatup phase is over and the artifact scanning starts again, there is a high chance that some artifacts will be picked up now.

Heatup phases get longer and longer if no artifacts are detected.
If you take the numbers from the screenshot above, which are the installation defaults:

Time   Action
00:00  Scanning starts, set heatup timer to 30 seconds
00:30  No errors found yet, start a heatup phase with length 30 seconds
01:00  First heatup phase is over, continue with scanning, set heatup timer to 30 * 1.20 = 36 seconds
01:36  No errors found yet, start a heatup phase with length 36 seconds
02:12  Second heatup phase is over, continue with scanning, set heatup timer to 36 * 1.20 = 43 seconds 
02:55  No errors found yet, start a heatup phase with length 43 seconds
03:37  Third heatup phase is over, continue with scanning, set heatup timer to 43 * 1.20 = 52 seconds
and so on...

If an error is found during scanning, the heatup timer will be reset to 30 seconds, so it starts getting bigger again, as long as there are no new errors.

You can manually initiate a Heat Up Phase by left clicking into the rendering window while Find Max is active. Right clicking reduces the duration of the currently running Heat Up Phase.

This controls how fast ATITool ramps up the clock speeds during Find Max. This does not affect reducing clocks, which is done instantly once an error is detected.

By default ATITool uses the ‘new scanning method’. This method should greatly improve heat output and scanning accuracy.

However, if you experience problems like false positives, or your card does not properly support it, you can use the old method here.

Here you can set a limit after which scanning will stop and optionally reset clock speeds or shutdown the system.
You can use this for running ATItool unattended.

While it does not have any effect on scanning accuracy/speed/stability whether the screensaver is running, it is more convenient for many people to see if ATITool is still working.

Play a beep sound if an artifact is detected. This is useful if you run ATITool in the background or on another PC. Helpful if you’re not at the PC, but still want to know when you get an artifact.

With this slider you can control the sensitivity of the ATITool artifact detection engine.
The further the slider to the left, the smaller the number/size of artifacts that ATITool lets pass as “no error”. When you move the slider to the right, you will get a higher overall overclock, but the chance of artifacts appearing in games will increase.

The reason the slider is not all the way to the left in its default position is that with some Catalyst versions sometimes there are 1 pixel sized “artifacts” detected which are in fact not artifacts but driver bugs/optimizations(?), which are not visible to the human eye. In order to make sure that these do not break the find max. functions (they can appear at any time at any clock), such small artifacts will be ignored. This should have no effect on the scanning when the scanning is run for a sufficient time.
If the card creates artifacts, even if only the slightest ones, there is always a statistical chance that there will be errors bigger than 1 pixel, which will be detected. The longer you let it run, the higher the probability of these errors to appear.