Arch Linux Nvidia modified MSI 3070 16GB issues

[MoyDee]

Ok I know this is an odd issue to deal with but maybe you guys can help me figure out what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Reddit haven't been able to help me with.

 

A bit of background here. I have an MSI 3070 that had been given to me because it had an issue. I figured out the vRAM was the issue. Sadly I don't have the funds to order the modules. Running in broke boy power. I can get the money but it's my card and I want it now. I might have to save up and order them I know but at this point it's the challenge. So I remove the vRAM and find that the pads are fine on the board but the pads on two modules are definitely bad. Because some of the pads are still with the balls left in the board. Great I found the issue. Checked the schematics that I found and they aren't ground or No Connection. Crud... Alright. Well looking at the model numbers they might be the same as the 2GB modules on the PS5. They are and I have plenty of those. My job is a microsoldering tech (at the time) so after a decade of soldering I've learned to save good components. Reballed and popped on, change the straps and boom working card. Well because it's been modified I have to run it in max performance mode under windows in the Nvidia control panel.  

 

That's all well and good. However; there's a problem. I'm transitioning after a year of testing to Linux. 

 

I'm running Arch because meh I like it and I'm running KDE Plasma in X11 because Wayland doesn't play nice with Nvidia settings so I don't have access to power mizer so I can't enable max performance.

 

Unfortunately when I run anything like steam or a game like phasmophobia I get a black screen with no mouse. I have no access to TTY. It's a complete mess. I'm still running windows 10 on my main drive but I would like to change that and never go back. You might ask why not use AMD. I like the card. I want to figure it out. Gemini got it more stable so I can use things like chromium and use the computer for hours, but as soon as it demand more from the card it crashes. Running a script to log Nvidia smi shows that just the card stops. Smi keeps logging and everything is within spec at least as far as I can tell.

 

Any help would be amazing!

Thank you for taking your time to read and or help.

 

[MoyDee]

I haven't really been on the forms here so I don't know how text files show up, but here is the NVIDIA smi output from slightly before the crash. I also uploaded a screenshot of the nvidia-settings program.  No idea if this information is useful to anyone, but I'm happy to grab anything that I can.

crash a few sencds.txt

[highduke]

Tried in Wayland? Same?

[MoyDee]

Sorry work has been hell. Wayland if it loads doesn't have the same Nvidia settings. The thing that makes it slightly stable is powermizer. So sadly no dice but thank you for that idea. I did find the answer. I'm going to put it in this thread once I get a moment to write it up. Gemini actually helped with this one. It's stupid obvious but takes asking the right questions which I wasn't. 

[MoyDee]

On 3/23/2025 at 12:34 AM, MoyDee said:

Ok I know this is an odd issue to deal with but maybe you guys can help me figure out what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Reddit haven't been able to help me with.

 

A bit of background here. I have an MSI 3070 that had been given to me because it had an issue. I figured out the vRAM was the issue. Sadly I don't have the funds to order the modules. Running in broke boy power. I can get the money but it's my card and I want it now. I might have to save up and order them I know but at this point it's the challenge. So I remove the vRAM and find that the pads are fine on the board but the pads on two modules are definitely bad. Because some of the pads are still with the balls left in the board. Great I found the issue. Checked the schematics that I found and they aren't ground or No Connection. Crud... Alright. Well looking at the model numbers they might be the same as the 2GB modules on the PS5. They are and I have plenty of those. My job is a microsoldering tech (at the time) so after a decade of soldering I've learned to save good components. Reballed and popped on, change the straps and boom working card. Well because it's been modified I have to run it in max performance mode under windows in the Nvidia control panel.  

 

That's all well and good. However; there's a problem. I'm transitioning after a year of testing to Linux. 

 

I'm running Arch because meh I like it and I'm running KDE Plasma in X11 because Wayland doesn't play nice with Nvidia settings so I don't have access to power mizer so I can't enable max performance.

 

Unfortunately when I run anything like steam or a game like phasmophobia I get a black screen with no mouse. I have no access to TTY. It's a complete mess. I'm still running windows 10 on my main drive but I would like to change that and never go back. You might ask why not use AMD. I like the card. I want to figure it out. Gemini got it more stable so I can use things like chromium and use the computer for hours, but as soon as it demand more from the card it crashes. Running a script to log Nvidia smi shows that just the card stops. Smi keeps logging and everything is within spec at least as far as I can tell.

 

Any help would be amazing!

Thank you for taking your time to read and or help.

 

 

 

 

                                    //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// MY SOLUTION\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

 

Alright if you are finding this thread and you have the same issues then welcome to the most simple answer one could have ever found.
Make sure that you have the proper drivers, grub as the boot-loader, and that everything is up to date. In Arch the command for the drivers is.
 

sudo pacman -S nvidia-dkms

As far as Grub being the boot-loader that one a bit a bit more complicated. If you hadn't selected it during the install then you need to find the solution for the one you are using. I'm just giving my experience and when I was troubleshooting I found that reinstalling arch and selecting Grub resolved my problem.

 

Then when installing steam make sure that you are installing the one that has the Nvidia Library. Just read everything very carefully when you are installing steam at the time of my install it was option 5.

 

Next we are going to modify grub by adding nvidia.NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0 and nvidia_drm.modeset=1  to the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

That will look like this in my default install. Yours might look different, but the important part is adding nvidia.NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0 and nvidia_drm.modeset=1  to the grub_cmdline_linux_default inside the " ".

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia.NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0"

lastly you need to make sure that you are using X11 and have linux-firmware and nvidia-settings installed

 

install both of these with

sudo pacman -S linux-firmware

and

sudo pacman -S nvidia-settings

 

 

Now you need to open Nvidia settings. Open a terminal and type

sudo nvidia-settings

 

This is why we need X11 bcause at the time of this post you can't change anything on the PowerMizer tab. You will want to change the Preferred mode to 

[Prefer Maximum Performance] and set the Graphics Clock Offset to [-75]. The offset will likely be different for you. This is a strange mod that I did and while not uncommon it is not the norm. So your solution will likely have different requirements. At this point you will reboot.

 

sudo reboot

 

Now we want to check that everything is working right. We will need to look at the power usage.

Open a terminal and type

nvidia-smi

You should get a screen that outputs a bunch of information like driver version and processes that are using the GPU. What we are interested in is the watts being used. For me it sits between 49-53W. The stock wattage was 21 for me.

At this point test a game that had stability issues and likely you will be off to the races. I have not had any issues playing games or streaming to youtube. 

 

This is obviously my solution. It may not work for you but if it helped then I am glad that I was able to find the answer for both of us. I'm writing this at 3AM before work so I'll come back and clean up the post to make it easier to read later. I wanted to get the answer in that I had so that if anyone else finds this they have the answer they might need. 

[xAcid9]

I think you can use LACT to disable lower power state for Nvidia GPU as well. It works in Wayland too.