Overclocking Quadro M6000 with bios tweaking

Drakorius · May 19, 2020

I've recently bought a Quadro M6000 and I wanted to boost its performance. As far as I know there is no way of controlling the clocks with programs like afterburner so I decided to take the risk and do some Bios tweaking.

All the informations I'm sharing are just to tell what I've done, to share the experience, I'm not taking any responsability on how you will use the informations - everything you do with the informations on this page are at you own risk, you can break the card.

Lets start by summarizing what I've done:

I've managed to increase the boost clock to 1342.0Mhz (from 1114,0), the base to 1152,0Mhz (from 987.5) and the memory clock to 3553 Mhz (from 3305).

To be able to do that I also had to increase the power limit to 292W from the stock 250W (This extra power of 42W will be taken from the 8 PIN connector) and increase the maximum voltage to 1250,0mV.

I had some headroom left but I figured that that was the maximum at which I can push the card with the stock blower cooler on it (after 1 hour of stress test with the TDP to about 96-97% and the fan at 91%, the temperature remained stable at 80°C [ambient temperature was 25°C]).

Now the procedure:

The programs I used are:

GPU-Z
Maxwell II BIOS Tweaker
nvflash
MSI Afterburner
MSI Kombustor

At first I backed up the original bios using nvflash by typing in the CMD as administrator: nvflash --save biosname.rom

Once that was done I started the overclocking process.

To start you need to wrote in the CMD as administrator: nvflash --protectoff (to disable write protection).

Then i created a copy of the original bios to work on. I opened the copy on Maxwell Bios Tweaker and started by increasing the Core clock by 50 Mhz.

Then I flashed the new bios by:

disabling the GPU from device manager;
typing in the cmd (as administrator): nvflash -6 nameofyournewbios.rom (and then you need to press y to confirm);
after that you need to reboot the system, enable the device, reboot the system again and then test for stability.

I repeated this procedure for about a dozens of time in order to make small modifications each time.

At one point I reached power limit, the GPU was power throttling and the clock was reduced to about 1Ghz thus reducing the performance. I then edited the power table; that was the scariest part because all the informations I found on the internet about editing the power table didn't really match the numbers I saw from the bios. After some test I managed to get it working. I will now attach the pictures of the power tables, first the original ones and than the edited ones:

ORIGINAL POWER TABLES

EDITED POWER TABLES

In the first three lines you can see the TDP limits. In this particular card you can't increase maximum TDP over 100% with the slide on an overclocking program (like afterburner) so you need to set the same value for maximum TDP and default TDP. Write in the first two lines 300000 (thats the maximum TDP).

75000 is the maximum PWR the GPU can take from the PCIE lane (you don't need to change it).

The MAXIMUM PWR the GPU can take from the 8 PIN connector is 217000mW, the 300000 in the line under it does't change the maximum amount it can take, the maximim amount, in this GPU at least, is configured by changing the middle value (the one that has 217000 in this chart). 300000 is the absolute max it can take from the 8 pin conector, just set it to something higher than the middle value, the middle value is the real maximum power it will draw.

The block with the lines 12000,87000,126000 I've no idea of what it does, I've just increased the maximum of a few watt but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

The block with 150000,300000,300000 is the power limit, you can set it with a Def and a Max that are the same as TDP.

So now after the bios flashing I increased the maximum power this gpu can take from 250000mW (75000+175000) to 292000mW (75000+217000).

To handle this power I changed the fan curve with aferburner allowing the fan to reach 93% speed.

I then increased the core frequency and also the Core voltage from a max of 1218,8mV to 1250mV to make it stable.

Once I was happy with the Clock frequency I started overclocking the Ram, this process was relatively painless, I was able to increase ram frequency from 3305 to 3553Mhz without noticing any artifact or other driver problems. I stopped to 3553 because of the temperature, the card was starting to heat up to 80+°C and I wasn't confortable with such a high temperature.

I will now attach the pictures of the Common table of Maxwell BIOS Tweaker before and after overclocking:

BEFORE OVERCLOCKING

AFTER OVERCLOKING

As you can notice, to enable the boost clock you need to set the boost limit a little higher than the boost clock by moving the slider.

Now i will attach the voltage table. As I said i needed to change the maximum voltage to 1250,0mV and also to move all the sliders before the one relative to the boost clock voltage in order to avoid a big voltage drop beetwen the one I changed and the ones with the original values. That was important, as I discovered, beacause a big voltage drop can cause problems such as screen freezing.

ORIGINAL VOLTAGE TABLE

AFTER OVERCLOCKING

As you will see from the next pictures these voltages (CLK 06, CLK 07 ecc) seems to refer to the numbers on the boost table.

BOOST TABLE BEFORE OVERCLOCK

BOOST TABLE AFTER OVERCLOCK

IMPORTANT: as you change the boost clock you need to move to the boost table and move the slider to match the max table clock with your boost clock (not the boost limit). You don't need to touch anything else on the table.

So now the overclock is completed. As i said I could increase both core frequency and memory clock further than the value I've decided to use, but the temperature was starting to get out of control with the blower style cooler.

As you can see from GPU-Z, at the end I was able to get this:

I will now attach some pictures of the values during the benchmark (MSI Kombustor - (GL) msi-01) to show temperature, power consumpion and more:

As you can see the TDP on GPU-Z is lower than the one displayed on Afterburner and that is because Afterburber is considering the 292W the card could actually take, while GPU-Z is considering the 300W maximum TDP that I've inserted in the bios (300W is just the teorycal maximum that I would allow the card to take, now I'm allowing it to take 292W which is enough as I saw beacause in different benchmarks the power usage never rised above 282W).

So, in conclusion, how much performance I gained with this overclock?

I've done several benchmarks and I will now attach the results from 3D Mark TIME SPY before and after overclock (only GPU score) and SPECviewperf [all at default settings]: