NVIDIA 1070 - High idle clocks 144Hz monitor

[Dave2150]

Installed my 1070 FE yesterday, cracking card and very happy with it, but noticed today that it's running almost 1Ghz clock speeds at idle on the desktop:



I was aware of this 144Hz high idle speed issue many months ago on Maxwell, though I was led to believe that this had been fixed in drivers.

Anyone else getting this problem with Pascal?

My 390X ran at 150Mhz or something at idle.

 

[Dave2150]

I have the same problem and it is unfortunately due to the 144hz even on pascal and no it has not been fixed yet. If you put your monitor to 120hz for desktop use it will resolve the issue.

Thats what works for me anyway and to be honest for the desktop there is a minute difference between 120-144hz.

Well that's disappointing - I remember that several diehard NVIDIA posters were insisting that this issue had been fixed a few months ago with a new driver.

So you are manually changing your refresh rate to 144Hz when you play games, then manually swapping it back to 120Hz when you finish playing? Or is there some way of doing this automatically in the drivers? I'm new to this NVIDAI stuff

 

[Dave2150]

You can have higher refresh rates in games than the desktop.

How? I only see one option for refresh rate in the NVIDIA control panel.

Where are these posts you talk about?

To be clear, I meant posters such as D.P, Gregster and other pro NVIDIA users who show up in every thread to defend nvidia and attack AMD etc. I can't be bothered to go and find the quotes from a few months ago to quote, but rest assured that they were posting in many threads saying this issue had been fixed.

 

[Dave2150]

in 3d settings set preferred refresh rate to highest available and you can set your refresh rate to 120 and it will go to 144 in games.

Thanks for that, will give it a go.

 

[Dave2150]

(You also have the factor that you can't directly equate MHz to MHz AMD and nVidia due to a number of reasons it is best to look at the power draw at idle).

The problem is that the reviewers are setting their monitors to 60Hz, as the power draw and idle temperatures they report are obviously done at 2D clock speeds - something no end user will get out of the box if they have a 144Hz monitor.

Here's the HardOCP review power draw/temperatures data:



It's not intuitive for the user to have to set their 144Hz monitor to 120Hz, then set 3d settings to 'prefer highest available' in order for the best power efficiency - it should just work out of the box like that IMO.

Hopefully this is fixed soon. With the popularity of high refresh rate monitors, we can bet that many users are unaware. Sure some won't care - but others will. I prefer my cards to run as cool as possible especially in the Summer time etc.

 

[Dave2150]

1080 here, 144hz working fine.

Spoiler

From what I remember this issue only affects 1440P 144Hz montitors, so your lower resolution monitor would be unaffected.

 

[Dave2150]

144hz monitor here at 1440p.

Spoiler

Albeit im still on an older driver version.

Is that on a 980ti? I'm using a 1070, perhaps the issue is fixed on Maxwell but still bugged on Pascal.

 

[Dave2150]

It worked fine on my Swift too.

With a 1070 or 1080?

 

[Dave2150]

It is on a 980ti, i did have the same issue that you are experiencing. But a driver update fixed this on maxwell quite a while ago. Likely just needs sorting on pascal.

Yea most likely. If it got fixed on Maxwell, then you'd assume it won't take long to get fixed on Pascal.

Still though, strange that no reviewers picked up on this bug, but with all the nonsense going around with them lately I can't say it's unexpected.

 

[Dave2150]

Are you running just a single screen or do you have a secondary display as well ?

Single screen.

Issue continues today - as soon as I boot my PC, with nothing running but GpuZ, over 900Mhz core clock.

I do have a Logitech G600 mouse, with the drivers installed - someone mentioned that these caused high idle clocks, I'll d some testing later to remove it. My 390X could idle fine though with the exact setup, so would be strange if it was my logitech mouse drivers.

Also it's not just me with this issue, found a few threads with a quick google search, here's one:

https://m.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/4nqd3v/144hz_downclock_problem_is_back/

 

[Dave2150]

1440p and 144hz here. i had this problem but i set my refresh rate to 120hz in desktop mode and that fixed my clocks ramping up and causing temps to rise. Never had this problem with my 290x mind you.

Yeh looks like I'll have to do this, as I just uninstalled my logitech mouse drivers and I still idle at almost 1Ghz.

Using 120Hz on the desktop is actually noticeable after getting used to 144Hz though! Not the end of the world of course, but still I don't like having to resort to fixes such as this.

Hopefully NVIDIA will fix this soon, though must be a hard problem to troubleshoot if it only affects certain setups, as quite a few people on Pascal cards have no problems in this thread.

 

[Dave2150]

If I had the enable enhanced graphics box ticked then it use to increase my GPU clocks when on on the desktop

Thanks for that, though seems mine defaulted to off for that setting.

I just did a few reboots with every user installed application disabled. Ran GPU-Z and as soon as I launch it I'm at almost 1Ghz every time.

I did use DDU to remove all the AMD drivers, though perhaps a fresh install would do the trick. Was hoping to wait for the new 1TB 950 pro's to be released before secure erasing this SSD, but I'll give it a try this weekend.

 

[Dave2150]

I've been doing some more testing and I've noticed that if I set my desktop refresh rate to 120Hz, then set the NVIDIA control panel preferred refresh rate to maximum, most of my games still only run at 120Hz. Some run at 144hz, though not all. I'm checking my monitor's menu info to see what refresh rate it's actually running at in games.

I don't like this solution, as I want all my games to run at 144Hz. So I've had to go back to running 144Hz on the desktop, which results in a 1Ghz core clock while idle.

Anyone else on a Pascal (1070/1080) having similar problems with a 1440P 144Hz monitor?

 

[Dave2150]

Ahha - found this thread: https://m.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/4nqd3v/144hz_downclock_problem_is_back/

Apparently if you use the 368.25 drivers the 144Hz bug goes away, going to try this later.