Temperature too high at idle

[mpelley92]

I have an MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6GB and because of stuttering, throttling and temperature issues, I decided to modify the BIOS using "Maxwell BIOS Tweaker". It was successful, I upped my power limit to 134% and upped my voltage to 1.23 V. I realize with higher voltages, comes higher temperatures, but my idle temps I believe are a little too high.

Ambient: 21 C
Card at idle: Core 1265 MHz, Memory 1984 MHz, 57 C, 1.112 V

This was an issue even before the flash. I was able to modify the fan profile and make it so at idle, my fan speed is around 43%. This problem confuses me, because I thought these "Twin Frozr" coolers were supposed to be efficient. Right now, my card throttles at 88 C, which is nicer than throttling due to power.

I'm thinking that I may have an issue with thermal paste being bad, so I'm going to try and apply some new stuff tomorrow.

As for the temperature issue, is there any way to use Maxwell BIOS Tweaker to down clock the core and memory at idle? I run dual 144 Hz monitors, so that may also be causing the issue of the card not properly idling. I have used Nvidia Inspector in the past force a down clock, but I had so many issues with it that I had to give it up. It would randomly down clock during gaming, which obviously isn't desirable.

I'm not all that familiar with Maxwell BIOS Tweaker. There are some guides I have found from Google, but none of them really explain what I need to change in order to achieve my goal.

I basically want to be able to down clock the card to 300 MHz at idle, and lower the memory at a respective amount, as well as the voltage, so the card isn't consuming a lot of power and can actually run at a lower temperature.

Thanks in advanced to anyone who is able to help.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I have an MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6GB and because of stuttering, throttling and temperature issues, I decided to modify the BIOS using "Maxwell BIOS Tweaker". It was successful, I upped my power limit to 134% and upped my voltage to 1.23 V. I realize with higher voltages, comes higher temperatures, but my idle temps I believe are a little too high.

Ambient: 21 C
Card at idle: Core 1265 MHz, Memory 1984 MHz, 57 C, 1.112 V

This was an issue even before the flash. I was able to modify the fan profile and make it so at idle, my fan speed is around 43%. This problem confuses me, because I thought these "Twin Frozr" coolers were supposed to be efficient. Right now, my card throttles at 88 C, which is nicer than throttling due to power.

I'm thinking that I may have an issue with thermal paste being bad, so I'm going to try and apply some new stuff tomorrow.

As for the temperature issue, is there any way to use Maxwell BIOS Tweaker to down clock the core and memory at idle? I run dual 144 Hz monitors, so that may also be causing the issue of the card not properly idling. I have used Nvidia Inspector in the past force a down clock, but I had so many issues with it that I had to give it up. It would randomly down clock during gaming, which obviously isn't desirable.

I'm not all that familiar with Maxwell BIOS Tweaker. There are some guides I have found from Google, but none of them really explain what I need to change in order to achieve my goal.

I basically want to be able to down clock the card to 300 MHz at idle, and lower the memory at a respective amount, as well as the voltage, so the card isn't consuming a lot of power and can actually run at a lower temperature.

Thanks in advanced to anyone who is able to help.

Does this BIOS Tweaker negate the default or usual power-saving of the 980 with a spectrum of power-states?

I've got a 2x SLI with GTX-970s. These are OC'd. Even for playing LiveTV or videos, it still only clocks up to the second or third-lowest power state, which indeed increases idle temperatures noticeable even more because there are two cards in close proximity.

It just sounds to me that your tweaks are leaving the 980 card perpetually running at that higher clock. Is that true?

But I think you would've tried Afterburner. If your tweaks don't allow for traversing all the card's power states, I would review your priorities. But I don't see why they shouldn't.

 

[mpelley92]

The Maxwell BIOS Tweaker does not change any integrated safety functions aside for hardware power limit and temperature limit. Both can only be dangerous by not setting the proper limits. For me, I had the maximum temperature set to 93C, this was more for flexibility. Didn't have to do it. Power limit, this is the one that slows a lot of people down. My default limit was 108% I believe, which ended up throttling me all the time. Now, it throttles on temperature instead. And, the voltage has been upped to a maximum of 1.230.

The tweaks I have performed on my video card are essentially only for maximum overclockability of the card. With the standard BIOS, things tend to throttle way too quick. As soon as power limit is reached, it throttles.

I can't comment directly to your own set up, but what I can say about mine is with stock BIOS, stock drivers, no overclocking program, my video card will stay at a default clock level. (for my card I believe this is 1030 MHz on the core, 1470 on the RAM.)

Even with tweaking the BIOS, all the power states are still available. For some reason, the MSI GTX 980 Ti with dual 1080P 144 Hz monitors, chooses not to naturally enter the P8 (Idle) state.


I have since fixed the problem. The program I was using before is a part of NVIDIA Inspector. It's called "Multi Display Power Saver". I was using this program before, but did not understand how to properly use it. I never added programs to the list, instead I chose to "Activate Full 3D by GPU Usage - Threshold". This caused the card to change power states very frequently, which was not the desired effect.

I simply added each of my Full 3D applications, which were mostly all video games.

Problem solved. When no games are running, it reverts to the P8 state which is 135.0 MHz core, and 202.5 MHz Memory. Idling at 32 Celsius, which is what I wanted it to do in the first place. It's a shame NVidia won't fix this problem in their drivers. Everything runs wonderfully (1080P and 4K movies, Google Chrome) at 135/202, there is absolutely no reason they cannot make this the default behavior.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Oh. . I see now . . .

You're running two monitors, and at 144 Hz.

That's going to kick up the power-state. I have a GTX 970 2x SLI for my 2700K system, and it does that. It drops back if I don't have active TV displaying on the HDTV. They're only configured at 60Hz with the HDTV and desktop monitor.

I went through a few months trying to troubleshoot what I thought was a power-state interaction with Afterburner. It turned out that was all it was, depending on whether TV was running, whether there were apps that kicked up the power-state, possibly even for having the TV connected. I got a lot of (GeForce!) experience uninstalling or clean-installing the drivers and Afterburner, and tweaking the NVidia control-panel 3D settings.

You might want to explore some ventilation tweaks on the system.

 

[mpelley92]

My ventilation is fine, there are plenty fans and they all speed up in correlation with my video card. I use Argus Monitor which is a great application for configuring fan profiles. I can literally have every fan in my case increase in speed, the same as the GPU. Which is what I do, because most of what I do with the PC is GPU intensive, and not CPU intensive.

Power states seem to be something that isn't understood too well. A video card like ours, both the 970 and 980ti are very capable of doing a lot of things at low core clocks. Just because the refresh rate is high, or there are two displays connected, doesn't mean it needs to be full speed. Like I said in my post above, at 135/202.5 I'm able to use Chrome, watch Netflix, play music, watch 1080p MKV files and it doesn't miss a beat.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

My ventilation is fine, there are plenty fans and they all speed up in correlation with my video card. I use Argus Monitor which is a great application for configuring fan profiles. I can literally have every fan in my case increase in speed, the same as the GPU. Which is what I do, because most of what I do with the PC is GPU intensive, and not CPU intensive.

Power states seem to be something that isn't understood too well. A video card like ours, both the 970 and 980ti are very capable of doing a lot of things at low core clocks. Just because the refresh rate is high, or there are two displays connected, doesn't mean it needs to be full speed. Like I said in my post above, at 135/202.5 I'm able to use Chrome, watch Netflix, play music, watch 1080p MKV files and it doesn't miss a beat.

Well, like I said, I've crossed into this territory in the last couple years -- updating to the GTX 970. But one can monitor three generations -- from 780 to 1070 -- and get more familiar with the behaviors. Right now, everything I have operates optimally under a range of conditions. I had been chasing all over for a problem with the 970 that was easily explained by the dual-monitor connection and the refresh-rate in Hz. And I can only say from vague memory that the refresh rate also has an impact.

Next thing I would do, just because the exercise allowed me to get more familiar with the hardware and custom software configurations -- look in NVidia Control Panel at the 3D settings on both the Global and [?] Local (installed software). Tweaks can be made. Take a look, unless you've scoured over it already.

 

[mpelley92]

Well, like I said, I've crossed into this territory in the last couple years -- updating to the GTX 970. But one can monitor three generations -- from 780 to 1070 -- and get more familiar with the behaviors. Right now, everything I have operates optimally under a range of conditions. I had been chasing all over for a problem with the 970 that was easily explained by the dual-monitor connection and the refresh-rate in Hz. And I can only say from vague memory that the refresh rate also has an impact.

Next thing I would do, just because the exercise allowed me to get more familiar with the hardware and custom software configurations -- look in NVidia Control Panel at the 3D settings on both the Global and [?] Local (installed software). Tweaks can be made. Take a look, unless you've scoured over it already.

Changing the Nvidia Control Panel global settings was one of the first things I tried to remedy the problem. It usually does the trick with older cards, but for what ever reason these power profiles are very highly linked to the BIOS of the video card and not the software that is using it for rendering/computing. It's kind of a step backwards - in my opinion - because you lose a lot of control over your card.

The program I used to fix my problem brings the power profile control back to the user by bumping up the clocks ONLY when one of the .exe files in the list are running. Which isn't exactly what I was looking to accomplish but it manages to complete the same task.