GPU power capping/limit

Benceking24 · June 17, 2023

Hello!

I just got a 3 year old media server and started to dust it out and reinstall the os on it. It has the following parts:
Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI + AMD 3955WX + 4*8GB 3200 DDR4 + Silverstione sst-st1200-pts (1200W) + Nvidia quadro RTX 5000 + Nvidia Sync II + latest OS and driver (Win 11 pro 22h2 + nvidia 535.98)
Everything went great until I started to benchmark the system. The GPU performs really poorly like it scores 1/5 it's normal score that others measured with the same GPU. After trying out everything I just noticed that in Furmark the GPU power is sitting at 20-24% att all time (my point was 380-400 and it should be at 2400 for the 1080p benchmark preset, also in notch builder my score was 3200 and should be around 21 000). I checked the nvidia-smi and the power limit is set to the maximum (230w) but it is usually at 45w when i check it under load.

I tried the following:
- Replacing the gpu's power cable from Y to two separate cables
- Changing the nvidia "Power management mode" to "prefere maximum performance", manually selecting physix processor to the RTX 5000, allowing the performance counters for all users

- Disabling D.O.C.P, disabling above 4G decoding, disabling re-size BAR support, disabling sr-iov support, manually selecting pcie gen3 x16 mode for that slot
- Disabling nvidia sync
Everything else is configured for best performance in windows (power profile...etc)

Could anyone suggest me anything where to continue so that I could get all the performance out of the quadro card? (I don't know if the card is deffective but after visual inspection I don't see any clue)

Benceking24 · June 17, 2023

2 minutes ago, micha_vulpes said:
run nvidia-smi -a and scroll down to clock event reasons and look to see if the power brake is flagged
    Clocks Event Reasons
        Idle                              : Active
        Applications Clocks Setting       : Not Active
        SW Power Cap                      : Not Active
        HW Slowdown                       : Not Active
            HW Thermal Slowdown           : Not Active
            HW Power Brake Slowdown       : Not Active
This sounds like a weird issue I had on a Gigabyte board that would always spit out HW PowerBrake Slowdown flags when any professional GPU was installed ( like my RTX A4000). The card would be essentially capped to 2d clocks, and only pull about 20 watts from the PCI slot and about 20 from the supplemental connectors.

It was firmly a bios bug on that gigabyte board, and a much cheaper MSI board worked fine with all the same components.

Bingo, it is marked as active... I try to roll back bios versions now if it helps. It is funny because this MoBo is an enterprise one probably not suitable for enterprise GPUs?