GTX 980 locked at 405 MHZ

[PinheadLarry96]

Recently my GTX 980 has been locking itself from 405-540 MHZ after a few hours of use. I read some other threads and learned that this normally happens when overclocking. Neither my card nor my CPU (4790k) are currently overclocked and I'm still having these issues. I checked power settings in Windows control panel and Nvidia control panel and both are set to high performance. I have included screenshots from GPU-Z if that helps. I would greatly appreciate any help I could receive.

[awesomeness10120]

This has happened to me before, as well. What I did was uninstall the drivers and then install them again. Try that and see if it works.

[PinheadLarry96]

1 minute ago, awesomeness10120 said:

This has happened to me before, as well. What I did was uninstall the drivers and then install them again. Try that and see if it works.

Thanks for your reply. I have tried reinstalling the current drivers as well as rolling back to older drivers. Doing so brings the core clock back up to 1190 but still drops down after a few hours.

[awesomeness10120]

1 minute ago, PinheadLarry96 said:

Thanks for your reply. I have tried reinstalling the current drivers as well as rolling back to older drivers. Doing so brings the core clock back up to 1190 but still drops down after a few hours.

Have you checked power and thermals? Is your GPU over 90 degrees?

 

[PinheadLarry96]

1 minute ago, awesomeness10120 said:

Have you checked power and thermals? Is your GPU over 90 degrees?

 

From what I've seen, the GPU has never exceeded ~75 C. The core clock drop happens no matter what value I have my voltage set at.

[SeanAngelo]

3 minutes ago, PinheadLarry96 said:

From what I've seen, the GPU has never exceeded ~75 C. The core clock drop happens no matter what value I have my voltage set at.

whats your power management in windows and nvidia control panel?

[PinheadLarry96]

1 minute ago, SeanAngelo said:

whats your power management in windows and nvidia control panel?

Both are set to high performance.

[callum92]

Does the same thing happen when the card is under load?

[PinheadLarry96]

1 minute ago, callum92 said:

Does the same thing happen when the card is under load?

Thank you for the reply. Yes, the core clock will still be locked when the GPU usage is at 100%.

[callum92]

Try this, go to windows power options and click "Change advanced power settings", then scroll down to where it says "PCI Express" then "Link State Power Management" and check what this is set to, it's probably set to off if you have high performance active. Change it to "Maximum power savings" and restart, then go back and change it to "Off" again and restart once more. See if that helps. May just be an issue with that setting. 

 

[PinheadLarry96]

5 minutes ago, callum92 said:

Try this, go to windows power options and click "Change advanced power settings", then scroll down to where it says "PCI Express" then "Link State Power Management" and check what this is set to, it's probably set to off if you have high performance active. Change it to "Maximum power savings" and restart, then go back and change it to "Off" again and restart once more. See if that helps. May just be an issue with that setting. 

 

Done, core clock is at 1190 at startup as usual. I'll have to wait a little bit to see if it drops down again. Thanks

[PinheadLarry96]

4 hours ago, PinheadLarry96 said:

Done, core clock is at 1190 at startup as usual. I'll have to wait a little bit to see if it drops down again. Thanks

4 hours later and its still stable. I did uninstall MSI Afterburner in the meantime, I wonder if that had something to do with it.

[Imakuni]

33 minutes ago, PinheadLarry96 said:

4 hours later and its still stable. I did uninstall MSI Afterburner in the meantime, I wonder if that had something to do with it.

This problem is at least about 2 years old (aka ever since the 980 launched). For some stupid reason, the driver THINKS the card doesn't need much power and locks it to P state 5, which is a low clock state. No one ever found out a way to reliably reproduce the bug yet, which is why Nvidia hasn't fixed it by now.

 

I honestly don't expect afterburner to be the reason. Rather than uninstalling afterburner fixing it, I'd say you just got lucky and whatever is causing the locks just didn't decide to trigger it.

[PinheadLarry96]

1 hour ago, Imakuni said:

This problem is at least about 2 years old (aka ever since the 980 launched). For some stupid reason, the driver THINKS the card doesn't need much power and locks it to P state 5, which is a low clock state. No one ever found out a way to reliably reproduce the bug yet, which is why Nvidia hasn't fixed it by now.

 

I honestly don't expect afterburner to be the reason. Rather than uninstalling afterburner fixing it, I'd say you just got lucky and whatever is causing the locks just didn't decide to trigger it.

The strange thing is, is that I've had this card pretty much since launch and it only started doing it recently.

[Imakuni]

8 minutes ago, PinheadLarry96 said:

The strange thing is, is that I've had this card pretty much since launch and it only started doing it recently.

As I've said, the true cause is unknown. You bet it would be fixed by now if we knew where the problem was.

[Vengeance_K1ng]

.

[Imakuni]

4 minutes ago, Vengeance_K1ng said:

Try to RMA i guess?

You can't RMA your drivers....

[PinheadLarry96]

I haven't been having any issues since applying callum92's "fix", so I'm going to mark it as solved for now. I even managed to get a stable overclock out of the card without any hiccups. Thank you everyone for your contribution.

[Equlizer]

Were you overclocking per chance and this happened?

[PinheadLarry96]

10 hours ago, Equlizer said:

Were you overclocking per chance and this happened?

No, this happened when I was running at stock speeds.