3060 Mobile Core Clock Throttling

Prodigy_Smit · February 14, 2023

I have a 2021 Zephyrus g14 with a 5900hs and a 3060 mobile. I noticed very weird GPU boost behavior where the GPU would boost up to 1.6-1.9 GHZ and then the clocks would start bouncing between 1.5 to 0.9ghz, averaging around 1.1ghz.

At first i thought this was the VRMs overheating so I repasted the laptop with K5 pro and NTH1. This fixed the thermals, the GPU now doesn’t get above 67c and the CPU averages 85c.

I tried DDU on the Nvidia drivers and reinstalled fresh ones, this slightly helped but it was only about a 100mhz increase in core clocks.
I did some more digging with HWinfo and it shows the GPU is power throttling. All the previous testing was done on turbo mode so I thought sure maybe the CPU was was eating up a lot of power and forcing the GPU to throttle. I capped the CPU to 35w and adjusted the fan curves a bit. Still the same behavior.

Now I think it might be windows doing some weird boost behavior control, any ideas before I try and reinstall windows completely?

Zando_ · February 14, 2023

According to here: https://www.ultrabookreview.com/46631-asus-zephyrus-g14-2021-review/ it's a hard 60W TDP limit for the GPU, up to 80W with Nvidia Dynamic Boost: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5087/~/how-to-enable-or-disable-dynamic-boost-in-the-nvidia-control-panel. It should be enabled by default, double check that it is. If it is then there isn't anything you can do, your GPU is just hitting the power limit as it should, there isn't a way to make it go any faster.

Prodigy_Smit · February 14, 2023

2 hours ago, Zando_ said:

According to here: https://www.ultrabookreview.com/46631-asus-zephyrus-g14-2021-review/ it's a hard 60W TDP limit for the GPU, up to 80W with Nvidia Dynamic Boost: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5087/~/how-to-enable-or-disable-dynamic-boost-in-the-nvidia-control-panel. It should be enabled by default, double check that it is. If it is then there isn't anything you can do, your GPU is just hitting the power limit as it should, there isn't a way to make it go any faster.

Usually that would make sense but it isn’t hitting the 60w TDP limit which i probably should have mentioned. It hovers around 45-50w ish.

I actually haven’t tried DDU on the igpu drivers. I’m going to give that a shot. Likely won’t do anything but its worth a shot.