i was running furmark 1.7 and i got a huge amount of articfacs on my OC HIS radeon 6790. but when in games like BC2 or BF3 or even in 3D mark its fine is my card bad or is furmark killing it?
Ack Ack is correct, benchmark programs are designed to stress your hardware to the limit.
This useful when overclocking to test for stability.
Most hardware has "headroom" (not a room in your house Silat) built into it for stability and longevity.
When overclocking (as I do) we see how much of that we can get away with using.
That's where programs such as furmark are useful.
All hardware is NOT created equal. Differences in quality of ram, capacitors, ic's, VRM's, in fact all of the electrical components of a given piece of hardware determine how overclockable a component is, or is not.
When it comes to video cards brands like XFX, EVGA and Sapphire use fairly high quality components.
Lower brands such as HIS in particular do not. The actual graphics chip is made by ATI, the rest, well you get the point.
Herein lies your issue. You have an OC version of a card made by a brand known for using inferior components.
As well as inferior cooling.
On a factory OC component the bios are flashed to run higher than a standard card. Meaning its overclocked a bit and there is nothing you can do about it that I would recommend.
The artifacts you are seeing I would bet are from poor quality overclocked memory with cooling not up to the task.
Stop benching that card, it will kill it.
Yama