Well....not the overclock. But still renders just randomly lock up.. No warning, no error notification. It seems as though certain parts of the scene are far more regular offenders than others, and any frame that fails to render, can be tried again and will either fail at a different point, or maybe even complete...all of which made me think it's a hardware problem. BUT, there is an ocean in the scene, and a boat. Neither of which are even in view at the worst places for crashes.
But it's at least a mechanism by which the same exact view of the same frame from the same camera, can behave differently on multiple renders. It doesn't appear to be cached (the ocean and boat) it seems like a more or less random simulation every time. Is there a way to cache that? I tried making a geometry cache, but isn't that just for deformations of the mesh itself? I remember caching physics simulations with rigid bodies, but that's going way back. I guess all I can do for now, is keep saving versions with different stuff deleted