The GTX 970 Power-saving bug is back!

[BonzaiDuck]

Yo. I apologize for starting a new thread on this. I had originally described the phenomenon in an earlier recent thread. I'm guessing there are other forums with threads about it, and it might have come up here, but I can only read so much stuff trying to deal with other projects and difficulties.

I had observed a low power-saving clock for a single card, maybe 135/350, and converting to 2x SLI showed idle clocks of 912/3000. We thought I had a driver problem, so I reinstalled v. 347.52 attentive to "clean installation" and the clocks returned to 135/350 for both cards.


http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2420760

Since then, I've begun to configure WMC/Media Center, run the MSI standalone version of Kombustor -- installed my SiliconDust drivers and software.

The clocks are back to 912/3000 idle, and the idle power consumption has increased from 85W shown with 135/350 to around 156W.

Afterburner shows the GTX 970s are now drawing 40% of TDP. Temperatures are 42 and 37C respectively in idle. I had been running the fans with a 35% floor, and they're now running 44%.

Is there some way to tweak the SLI'd GPUs' power/performance profile? I can't find anything in AfterBurner that would address it. And there are few tweaks I'd made in NVidia Ctrl Panl "Manage 3D" or related settings.

Wha hoppen? I can't be reinstalling the driver every time this happens. Maybe there are links to fixes and solutions -- maybe somebody knows.

I want to get this little annoyance off my plate because I was working on other stuff . . . I'll keep looking for a fix, but if anybody knows -- has any suggestions -- please let me know.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Something is using the cards. It has to be in use somewhere.

Look at the software you installed since it was working.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Something is using the cards. It has to be in use somewhere.

Look at the software you installed since it was working.

I did a quick web-search and came across forums discussing the very same thing.

The cards seem to get stuck in 3D settings -- it seems to be a problem that occurs in SLI. I would never have noticed if it occurred with a single card, but I don't think it did.

The forum posters discovered that the cards reset to their power-saving idle of 135/324 by entering NVidia Control Panel, disabling SLI, and then re-enabling it. (may not be the exact numbers -- old-person's memory ya see . . ). But that forced things back to normal. I think those posts were dated late last year -- September to December.

I tried it, and -- yeah -- it resets to lower clocks.

It seemed I ran this box for days after I thought I'd resolved the trouble with the driver re-install, and it was well-behaved. It's a rock-stable system -- no crashes or anything that would foul something up. I'm guessing it could have been Media Center, the MSI standalone Kombustor -- but not the Silicon-Dust software.

Until they fix it in the 347.52 driver, that's the only thing I've found so far that corrects it. Disable SLI then Enable SLI . . . Sooner or later I'll figure out whether and which other software caused it to happen.

But it is a known issue among the "GTX 970 community."

 

[cmdrdredd]

It's probably related to yours and others' specific setup. If it was an SLI problem in general I would think that I'd see it as well.