6950 being throttled at stock?

[james888]

I have a 6950 I have thought was dead. After 6 months it just started giving me random colored pixel artifacts even on the desktop, and what is shown in the picture below.



I was testing with furmark and monitoring with msi afterburner.
1- 800 clock speed. Running inconsistently just above 600
2- 600 clock speed
3- 650 clockspeed
4- 600 again
5- bitcoin mining at 800

I tried everything I could think of and all advice people could give. As I said, I thought it was dead. So out of boredom, I started playing with it again. It was doing its usual problems. I then upped the cards power control settings to 20% in amd's software. It now runs fine even overclocked.

So... was this headache of a gpu just being throttled at stock?