Gigabyte RTX 3080 Eagle OC clock stuck at 1755mhz.

colma · November 30, 2020

Hi,

my RTX 3080 started acting weird overnight. Booted my PC today and noticed the GPU fans revving up very loudly every 20 seconds, so I ran HWinfo and found out that the clock is stuck at 1755Mhz (even when idle) which caused the card to overheat; in response, the fans revved up loud to cool it down back below the treshold. The GPU also started to coil whine every now and then, even when idle, which in games is getting quite loud and annoying.

I managed to fix the clock issue by setting power management mode to adaptive (optimal also works) and restarting my PC. My clock is unstuck, but the noticeable coil whine persits which got me thinking that perhaps changing the power mode only covers up a deeper issue.

I can recreate the issue by switching back to "prefer maximum performance" setting. What puzzles me the most, however, is that until now it had been working flawlessy for weeks now with prefer maximum performance mode. I have not tinkered with GPU drivers at any point. I did however install some weird stuff like Docker and Linux Subsystem for Windows yesterday before I turned off my PC, which lead me to believe that these may be the actual culprits, but it's apparently not the case since I tried safe booting today, with most of the processes and services off and if the power management is set to max performance the clock will still lock itself at 1755mhz, which again causes it to overheat really quickly and the fans rev up.

I feel like there must be something running in the background that's requesting the clock to run at 1755mhz, because that'd be the only (?) reason why it happened overnight. There could be a priority issue where one hidden process forces it at 1755mhz and nvidia power management being able to overwrite that.

Some of other things I tried:

- malwarebytes scan;

- lowering refresh rate;

- clean GPU driver reinstall;

Specs:

PSU: SeaSonic Focus GX-850W hybrid

CPU: i7-10700K, not OCed

MOBO: MSI MAG z490 TOMAHAWK

RAM: 16GB

At this point I'm really confused and would appreciate any suggestions.