Help! 3090 max 200W

[KCo76]

Hello LTT community!

 

First time on the forum but long time viewer!

 

I was lucky enough to get an RTX 3090 from Best Buy a few months ago, but was just recently able to get it setup. However, it is experiencing the strangest issue.. the card seems limited at 200W power draw. Using GPU-Z and HWMonitor, I see that it's perfcap reason is Power, at 180-200W. I have EKWB water block on the card and it's temps never exceed 39c. The card sits at around 900mhz when running 3D Mark to keep the power draw down. Again always showing power as perfcap reason.

 

This is a founders edition card, and I've been contacting Nvidia for warranty purposes, but they keep mentioning that installing a water block on the founders edition voids the warranty! After 4 or 5 back and forths and multiple screenshots and logs sent in, they are saying that installing the water block can void the warranty and they are "having the concerned team look into it". My hopes are not high.

 

The troubleshooting I've tried:

Fresh install windows

Fresh install Ubuntu

DDU to reset drivers

Remounting water block

Changing Nvidia Control Panel settings to Nvidia's recommendations in troubleshoot email

MSI Afterburner/EVGA Precision overclocking (even with 114% power target, it limits it to 300-320W)

 

System specs:

Ryzen 5800x

RTX 3090 FE

GSKill 3800 CL14 Ram

Seasonic 1000W PSU

So I don't believe anything should be bottlenecking it so harshly.

 

I'm wondering if A.) Anyone has heard of this odd issue and has any recommendations I could try. B.) If anyone has had experience with Nvidia warranty and a water block. Did they refuse the warranty or were you able to get it replaced?

 

Happy to reply with logs or any other info, didn't wanna make this too long. Thanks for reading!

Kyle

[TheBean]

contact best buy or nvidia support directly. this is not normal and it could be a hardware issue. 

[Vangeli]

Huh, I wonder if this is related to the latest Windows updates causing frame rate issues in games mostly on “the latest and greatest high end cards,” which could possibly mean just cards that use over 200w.

 

https://www.windowscentral.com/nvidia-staff-says-gamers-should-uninstall-latest-windows-10-update-fix-issues

 

Maybe the updates incidentally applied a 200W cap, causing random frame drops when the card can’t push past it as expected, and most people complaining of frame drops may not be looking at or noticing a capped power draw.

 

Not sure how you could roll back the update with a fresh install of Windows though, and this could of course also not be the problem you’re experiencing. I don’t have a 3090 FE yet (not for a lack of trying) nor do I have much experience with the inner workings of it all so I can’t be of much more help.