Low core clock while gaming

[Dirk Diggler]

I just finished playing Far Cry 3 for over an hour. I had GPU-Z open to monitor temps, and is noticed that my core clock had maxed at 750, it will usually max at 1267. It's a GTX670 overclocked.

I opened Firestrike and run a benchmark and the max was the same, 750, and the bench score was much lower than it should have been.

I then rebooted system and repeated some game play and benchmark, and core clock was maxed as it should have been, 1267.

Obviously I'm going to monitor this, but wondering what would cause the low clock?

 

[Gregster]

Gremlins

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Gremlins

Hoping so! I wouldn't normally bother too much about this unless it was happening a lot, but I just installed a water block on the card recently (first time I've fitted one) so I'm being a bit cautious.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Seems this wasn't a blip. Playing Skyrim today and max core clock was 980.

Anyone any idea why clock is getting randomly restricted like this? Max core temp was 39c.

 

[psychas]

if your monitor is 60 hz or even 120 hz or more , and you have vsync enabled or limited your fps , and if your gpu doesn't need to run 99 % the core clock will adjust automatically on nvidia cards.

e.g when i play cs:go my fps is limited to 130 fps , my core clocks jumps from somewhere as far i remember 600 ~ 1000 depends what is going on .

use msi afterburner overlay (rivatuner) to check your clock speeds and gpu usage in games.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

I know the nvidia cards throttle when core temp is above 70c, but this card is under water and barely scrapes 40c under load.

I'm going to run it at stock and see if maybe the overclock is causing it. I'll also attach a couple of the Lamptron temp sensors between the EK backplate and the PCB, particularly around the VRM section, and make sure temps are OK there. If that's all OK, then I can only assume it's a driver issue.

 

[psychas]

i wasn't talking about trotting, if u limited your fps and the card doesn't need to produce more it will clock down, by it self.

my card only goes full speed in bf4 and other demanding games then it uses 1267 core and 99 % of usage.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

i wasn't talking about trotting, if u limited your fps and the card doesn't need to produce more it will clock down, by it self.

my card only goes full speed in bf4 and other demanding games then it uses 1267 core and 99 % of usage.

I haven't limited FPS as far as I know, and vsynch is set in nvidia settings to be determined by the 3d application.

When this cap appears to be in place, if I run a benchmark like Firestrike, the benchmark application is affected by the cap also. But, when I reboot and repeat the benchmark the cap is gone and I get maximum core frequency as expected.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Been reading up on this (haven't had a chance to test yet) and I think the penny has dropped for me in terms of how this card is supposed to work!

At stock, this card has a base clock of 980mhz (the speed it was maxing at with Skyrim the other day) and a boost clock of 1058mhz. I can disregard temperature because it's under water and so should never hit the thermal threshold (70c). The only factor is power consumption. So, if the game is demanding and power consumption is max then the card will run at base clock. If the game is not demanding and power consumption is lower, then the clock will be increased until the card either reaches max power or reaches boost clock.

The game I was playing couldn't go above base clock because it had reached max power consumption. Have I got this right?

 

[rajravat]

this used to happen to me a lot when i was using the evga precision oc tool...... not happened since i uninstalled it and went with afterburner

 

[Dirk Diggler]

this used to happen to me a lot when i was using the evga precision oc tool...... not happened since i uninstalled it and went with afterburner

EVGA Precision X happens to be the OC tool I'm using! Ok, thanks for that... Once I satisfy my geek OCD and convince myself it's running fine at stock settings, I'll install afterburner and reconfigure the OC.

Cheers.