Advanced search

Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : Geforce 480 core clock drops to 405

Author Message
Team Amixa
Send message
Joined: 28 May 10
Posts: 2
Credit: 637,220,156
RAC: 0
Level
Lys
Scientific publications
watwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwat
Message 21056 - Posted: 25 Apr 2011 | 15:28:54 UTC
Last modified: 25 Apr 2011 | 15:29:50 UTC

I recently overhauled my computer (new OS install Win 7 x64, etc.) and with the Forceware 270.61 drivers I am seeing my core clock drop to 405mhz, no matter how I have it overclocked.

I have done a lot of looking around on the internet and I see other people are having this happen, but I don't know if this is detrimental for GPUGRID processing (whether I should worry) or whether when it clocks from 800mhz to 405mhz I am cutting my processing horsepower in half... whether I should roll back to an older driver or what...

Any advice would be appreciated.

Profile skgiven
Volunteer moderator
Volunteer tester
Avatar
Send message
Joined: 23 Apr 09
Posts: 3968
Credit: 1,995,359,260
RAC: 0
Level
His
Scientific publications
watwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwat
Message 21061 - Posted: 26 Apr 2011 | 0:08:34 UTC - in response to Message 21056.

Win 7 (and Vista) are at least 11% slower than XP, when optimized, which in turn is slower than Linux.

The problem with the latest driver has already been reported here, and a similar problem was reported several months ago for CC1.2 cards.

What application are you using to determine the GPU Frequency?

If the GPU Freq. drops from 800MHz to 405MHz it's going to reduce performance.

You might want to try overclocking software or to rollback to an older driver.

What is your GPU, GTX 560 Ti or GTX 570 ?

Profile skgiven
Volunteer moderator
Volunteer tester
Avatar
Send message
Joined: 23 Apr 09
Posts: 3968
Credit: 1,995,359,260
RAC: 0
Level
His
Scientific publications
watwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwat
Message 21130 - Posted: 1 May 2011 | 21:47:08 UTC - in response to Message 21061.

270.61 has recently caused my GTX470 to downclock as well :((
Tried a rollback and its still at 50MHz - Off to do a full uninstall, and reinstall.

What's worse is that this driver is clearly damaging the video card; leave it running GPUGrid or another GPU task and you start to get features on the screen.

Profile Sphynx
Send message
Joined: 7 Dec 10
Posts: 18
Credit: 519,717,317
RAC: 260,521
Level
Lys
Scientific publications
watwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwat
Message 21132 - Posted: 1 May 2011 | 22:55:11 UTC - in response to Message 21056.

Uninstall driver 270.61 and revert to 26658. The newest delivery is the problem.

Al
____________

Profile skgiven
Volunteer moderator
Volunteer tester
Avatar
Send message
Joined: 23 Apr 09
Posts: 3968
Credit: 1,995,359,260
RAC: 0
Level
His
Scientific publications
watwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwat
Message 21133 - Posted: 1 May 2011 | 23:46:31 UTC - in response to Message 21132.

Fought through the lengthy process to uninstall all the NVidia drivers and I'm now trying 26724, again; it worked before, but so far only errors for GPUGrid tasks. Also tried MW and got 2 errors; as soon as I used the system they failed.

What gets me is that the 270.61 driver worked for days, and is still working on another GTX470 on Win2003 without the problems.

Dirk
Send message
Joined: 10 Oct 08
Posts: 18
Credit: 39,100,916
RAC: 0
Level
Val
Scientific publications
watwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwat
Message 21164 - Posted: 7 May 2011 | 9:39:07 UTC

I've seen my core clock drop as well to 405 mhz on my gtx 480. Using the 270.61 driver. I've only seen it happen once though and a restart fixed it. I think it happened when the gpu was crunching gpugrid and GTA IV at the same time. When I quit GTA IV the core seems to have dropped down.

It's quite nice to be able to game and crunch at the same time though :)

Siegfried Niklas
Avatar
Send message
Joined: 23 Feb 09
Posts: 39
Credit: 144,654,294
RAC: 0
Level
Cys
Scientific publications
watwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwat
Message 21188 - Posted: 14 May 2011 | 14:05:49 UTC - in response to Message 21164.
Last modified: 14 May 2011 | 14:13:09 UTC

It seems to me, that the 270.61 driver isn't able to detect CUDA-load correctly.
After a system-restart the card is switching in "Performance" mode, but if the performance mode
is interrupted (stop and restart BOINC) it stays in "Low-Power 3D" mode.

May be that quitting a game leads to the same result - high cuda load but the Driver/card runs in "Low-Power 3D" mode.
The only way to get it back in "Performance" mode is a system-restart.

The problem has already been reported at MilkyWay@home.

http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/forum_thread.php?id=2389

Dirk
Send message
Joined: 10 Oct 08
Posts: 18
Credit: 39,100,916
RAC: 0
Level
Val
Scientific publications
watwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwat
Message 21214 - Posted: 19 May 2011 | 22:58:52 UTC

Hey, figured I'd post this here instead of creating a new thread. I have a question for GTX 480 owners who have tried overclocking. I've overclocked mine a little bit right now, mostly for gaming though. The core clock was up to 820 mhz, the linked shader clock to 1640 mhz and the memory clock to 2000 mhz.

I tested it for a while on milkyway WUs and they ran fine. Bit faster than usual but hard to tell really since they don't keep completed WUs in their database. I just changed it back to running GPUgrid tasks again but got 3 computation errors. Dropped the core clock down to 800 mhz (the shader clock went down with it to 1600) and the current WU seems to be running fine though.

Here's my question finally, how far could you overclock before WUs started getting computation errors?

For what it's worth I'm using the latest nvidia beta drivers (257.27) on win 7 64 bit.

Profile skgiven
Volunteer moderator
Volunteer tester
Avatar
Send message
Joined: 23 Apr 09
Posts: 3968
Credit: 1,995,359,260
RAC: 0
Level
His
Scientific publications
watwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwatwat
Message 21215 - Posted: 20 May 2011 | 7:50:23 UTC - in response to Message 21214.
Last modified: 28 May 2011 | 10:26:50 UTC

Different cards overclock differently. Overclock-ability can greatly depend on the manufactures design - one dual fan card is more likely to overclock well compared to 3 GPU's with single exhaust fans in the same case. On the other hand you could not have 3 overclocked dual-fan cards in a closed case without about 8 exhaust fans.

Different calculations tax the GPU in different ways, so power consumption and heat output varies from task to task.

You would be about 50 times less likely to see any errors running MW because the run time is so short, and as you say, the tasks are not viable from your MW account.

So what you need to find is a set of frequencies that work for all the apps/tasks you run; failures typically undermine overclocking (offset any gain from freq. increase). For GPUGrid there is little to nothing to be gained from overclocking the memory and a slight underclock can help stability. I suggest you limit yourself to 10% OC; it's often the case that a higher OC results in poorer performance, so you must check your task run times against similar tasks.

Always remember the more you overclock the more you stress your card, PSU and wallet. After a while the performance gain is not worth the increase in power (cost/noise).

Post to thread

Message boards : Graphics cards (GPUs) : Geforce 480 core clock drops to 405

//