GPU Idle (or not?)

[xeopherith]

How can I tell if my GTX 570's GPU is idle?

My PC has really become a beast in the past week (new hardware). I would really like to use my PC for more tasks and the tasks in mind involve a couple tuner cards and video encoding for media center purposes. I don't want to use CUDA or anything for the encoding so I would really like for the card to be idle and the PC to be on all the time.

I just don't want to waste a godzilla amount of power because I don't feel it is justified (just for over the air television).

Of course I'm also a heavy gamer so removing the card isn't really an option.

 

[xeopherith]

I just wanted to bump this since there were almost 50 views and nobody has answered about some kind of monitor to tell me if my gpu is idle.

 

[Qbah]

Download MSI Afterburner. There's a monitoring window in it where you can see current temps, usage and clocks for pretty much everything. You might need a beta from Guru3D - no idea if version 2.0.0 supports GTX570.

 

[Concillian]

GPU-z will show what instantaneous clock speeds and voltage are. Can also give running output to a file so you can datalog what your GPU clocks / voltage are doing.

When it's idle, clocks and voltage will be reduced signficantly.