Problems with 970 G1 Gaming

[19_blackie_73]

Hey guys,

I've noticed recently, that my card (G1 Gaming 970 from Gigabyte) uses only 50-60% of its power limit while under full load (gaming & rendering). Is this sth to worry about? Also, why does oc'ing show no effect at all at render times/frame rates? According to AB the core clock rises, but i get nothing in return in terms of framerates and it also uses only 50-60% of the power limit. Extra Voltage doesn't help at all.

Anybody an idea?

I'm using the latest drivers, AB 4.2, and Win 10, for render tests I used blender and for gaming, I used the internal benchmark from gta V

Thanks in advance!

[DarkRuskov]

temps?

[19_blackie_73]

5 minutes ago, DarkRuskov said:

temps?

they are fine, about 30 degrees at idle (depending on how long the system's been running) and 60-70°C under load, doesn't get any hotter while applying an 100MHz OC, clock runs stock at solid 1367 MHz without any change over long gaming sessions

 

[DildorTheDecent]

It's using as much power as it needs to. If it used full power all the time then it would be incredibly inefficient. 

 

If you want to experiment with power usage then try overclocking. additional voltage usually equates to more power usage. 

[DarkRuskov]

and it doesn't full load on stock in your benchmarks?

[henkka_scorpio]

1 minute ago, DarkRuskov said:

and it doesn't full load on stock in your benchmarks?

If it uses 60% of power limit then how much is the GPU usage itself? And for GTA your CPU might be bottlenecking thus the GPU showing no difference when overclocking

[19_blackie_73]

4 minutes ago, DildorTheDecent said:

It's using as much power as it needs to. If it used full power all the time then it would be incredibly inefficient. 

 

If you want to experiment with power usage then try overclocking. additional voltage usually equates to more power usage. 

but it doesn't take it...

3 minutes ago, DarkRuskov said:

and it doesn't full load on stock in your benchmarks?

It does go to 100% usage, but it's actually not faster

[19_blackie_73]

12 minutes ago, henkka_scorpio said:

If it uses 60% of power limit then how much is the GPU usage itself? And for GTA your CPU might be bottlenecking thus the GPU showing no difference when overclocking

cpu isn't under full load, gpu usage is in every scenario at 100% or almost 100%

[henkka_scorpio]

TBH it could be a defective PSU if it cant deliver enough power, my power usage goes up to 105% or even 110% on extreme situations.

[LooneyJuice]

Honestly, it sounds fine. My G1 970 is overclocked and boosting to 1510mhz core and 8100mhz mem the only thing that even comes closest to using 100% power (out of it's 112% max) is The Witcher 3 and that hovers at around 85-90%. So your results sound fine. You can try benchmarking and comparing scores to regular G1 970s (something like Unigine Heaven at stock clock speeds you can expect a score in the ~1400 mark for Stock and ~1600 for max OC on Extreme preset at 1080p).

 

If your results are consistent with average G1 970 performance, then maybe the software you're using to render just doesn't really leverage the extra power, or you're running into a CPU bottleneck sooner. Additionally even a 10% bump in speed may help your framerate overall, but if you're not really looking for it, or you weren't hurting in the first place, it's not going to be a night and day scenario.

[19_blackie_73]

19 minutes ago, LooneyJuice said:

Honestly, it sounds fine. My G1 970 is overclocked and boosting to 1510mhz core and 8100mhz mem the only thing that even comes closest to using 100% power (out of it's 112% max) is The Witcher 3 and that hovers at around 85-90%. So your results sound fine. You can try benchmarking and comparing scores to regular G1 970s (something like Unigine Heaven at stock clock speeds you can expect a score in the ~1400 mark for Stock and ~1600 for max OC on Extreme preset at 1080p).

 

If your results are consistent with average G1 970 performance, then maybe the software you're using to render just doesn't really leverage the extra power, or you're running into a CPU bottleneck sooner. Additionally even a 10% bump in speed may help your framerate overall, but if you're not really looking for it, or you weren't hurting in the first place, it's not going to be a night and day scenario.

I even get no performance boost in heaven or any other software.... that is the strange thing, I even see an performance decrease while oc'ed

[19_blackie_73]

1 hour ago, henkka_scorpio said:

TBH it could be a defective PSU if it cant deliver enough power, my power usage goes up to 105% or even 110% on extreme situations.

what for a 970 do you own?

[henkka_scorpio]

1 minute ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

what for a 970 do you own?

Msi gaming edition, I've overclocked it quite a bit.

[henkka_scorpio]

2 minutes ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

what for a 970 do you own?

But I'm talking about benchmarks where it goes so high, in games its usually below/around 80%

[LooneyJuice]

6 minutes ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

I even get no performance boost in heaven or any other software.... that is the strange thing, I even see an performance decrease while oc'ed

Are you actually monitoring your current clock speeds with any OSD or something in order to make sure it's not throttling? (thermals isn't always the issue, that's not what I'm getting at). In fact, there may be an angle to the PSU thing. The min requirement for the G1 970 is 550W, and yes, there's a good margin in those requirements, but you're on a 500W PSU, you're on 80+ Gold which is at best ~90% efficiency (so very crudely, you're maybe losing about 50 watts to heat at peak load) and you're using a more power hungry CPU. Not to mention various peripherals you may have on your system.

[19_blackie_73]

3 minutes ago, LooneyJuice said:

Are you actually monitoring your current clock speeds with any OSD or something in order to make sure it's not throttling? (thermals isn't always the issue, that's not what I'm getting at). In fact, there may be an angle to the PSU thing. The min requirement for the G1 970 is 550W, and yes, there's a good margin in those requirements, but you're on a 500W PSU, you're on 80+ Gold which is at best ~90% efficiency (so very crudely, you're maybe losing about 50 watts to heat at peak load) and you're using a more power hungry CPU. Not to mention various peripherals you may have on your system.

my system draws about 260W maxed out so there's much headroom  I guess. and my cpu uses 80W of them, only one hdd and 3 case fans + 1 cpu fan, one keyboard and one mouse, nothing else. Pretty basic setup. So why should these 50 W matter?

I monitored everything with afterburner (fan speeds, core clocks, memory clocks, temps, power usage,... ) and everythings stable even when rendering 2 full days long. everythings exact on the same level as when fresh restarted. Power usage fluctuates a bit because different scenes and so on while gaming, but that's it.

[19_blackie_73]

just noticing it: the gpu hits the voltage limit but only runs at 1.206 V....

[19_blackie_73]

4 minutes ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

just noticing it: the gpu hits the voltage limit but only runs at 1.206 V....

@LooneyJuice: I can increase the voltage with +87 mV to 1.256, but then the OV Limit kicks in too (don't know what this is)

[LooneyJuice]

4 minutes ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

my system draws about 260W maxed out so there's much headroom  I guess. and my cpu uses 80W of them, only one hdd and 3 case fans + 1 cpu fan, one keyboard and one mouse, nothing else. Pretty basic setup. So why should these 50 W matter?

I monitored everything with afterburner (fan speeds, core clocks, memory clocks, temps, power usage,... ) and everythings stable even when rendering 2 full days long. everythings exact on the same level as when fresh restarted. Power usage fluctuates a bit because different scenes and so on while gaming, but that's it.

 

1 minute ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

just noticing it: the gpu hits the voltage limit but only runs at 1.206 V....

I'm sorry, I know I'm being super pedantic, but by maxed out you mean max CPU and GPU power draw correct? Additionally the 80W TDP on your xeon is the posted TDP which can vary quite a bit depending on usage scenario, so are you calculating your power draw off posted TDP or actually monitoring it somehow? And also, could you give me some actual Heaven scores from your runs?

 

Additionally, the voltage is normal. GPU Boost throttles depending on thermals, power draw and voltage, and even in my case, on stock, after about 61-62 deg, t may throttle just a tiny bit from 1.225v to 1.205. That's perfectly normal. The best you can do even by maxing out the voltage offset btw is whatever your max voltage limit on the bios is which varies from case to case.

[19_blackie_73]

 

7 minutes ago, LooneyJuice said:

 

I'm sorry, I know I'm being super pedantic, but by maxed out you mean max CPU and GPU power draw correct? Additionally the 80W TDP on your xeon is the posted TDP which can vary quite a bit depending on usage scenario, so are you calculating your power draw off posted TDP or actually monitoring it somehow? And also, could you give me some actual Heaven scores from your runs?

 

Additionally, the voltage is normal. GPU Boost throttles depending on thermals, power draw and voltage, and even in my case, on stock, after about 61-62 deg, t may throttle just a tiny bit from 1.225v to 1.205. That's perfectly normal. The best you can do even by maxing out the voltage offset btw is whatever your max voltage limit on the bios is which varies from case to case.

I monitored the power draw with some thing to plug in between wall socket and plug from the psu

And i messed up: i used valley but that shouldn't change the whole thing. I got around 58 fps, oc'ed it went down to 55

[LooneyJuice]

1 minute ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

 

I monitored the power draw with some thing to plug in between wall socket and plug from the psu

And i messed up: i used valley but that shouldn't change the whole thing. I got around 58 fps

Sounds fine, on stock with the extreme preset @ 1080p I was at 59.3. The small difference is attributed to my slightly higher actual stock boost clock of 1392mhz, which is completely luck of the draw. So unless something else is the bottleneck somehow, I can't really see an issue with your GPU. What's the most graphically intense title/software you can test on? Synthetic benchmarks don't always do the trick.

[19_blackie_73]

6 minutes ago, LooneyJuice said:

Sounds fine, on stock with the extreme preset @ 1080p I was at 59.3. The small difference is attributed to my slightly higher actual stock boost clock of 1392mhz, which is completely luck of the draw. So unless something else is the bottleneck somehow, I can't really see an issue with your GPU. What's the most graphically intense title/software you can test on? Synthetic benchmarks don't always do the trick.

minecraft  just kiddin

gta v, but here I saw no difference at all whether oc'ed or not

actually, I get the 1392 as soon as i increase the voltage

[LooneyJuice]

2 minutes ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

minecraft  just kiddin

gta v, but here I saw no difference at all whether oc'ed or not

Dude, dat minecraft.

 

Also, the way you can really tell whether it's doing anything for you (unless, like i said, something else is the bottleneck) is by saving both stock clocks and overclock in 2 custom profiles in AB and then assigning them to hotkeys. Find a fairly consistent scene somewhere in the game, start at stock, hit your hotkey and cycle to the OC preset to see what it's doing for you. Also, what's your overclock at which you're testing all this out?

[19_blackie_73]

3 minutes ago, LooneyJuice said:

Dude, dat minecraft.

 

Also, the way you can really tell whether it's doing anything for you (unless, like i said, something else is the bottleneck) is by saving both stock clocks and overclock in 2 custom profiles in AB and then assigning them to hotkeys. Find a fairly consistent scene somewhere in the game, start at stock, hit your hotkey and cycle to the OC preset to see what it's doing for you. Also, what's your overclock at which you're testing all this out?

tested it with fairly conservative 100MHz OC on core, didn't mess with the memory because slightly higher memory clock resulted in crashing during valley. as a result i get 1492 MHz. I'll try that tomorrow or so but now i might have to go to bed.

Thanks for your help, I let you know if i find anything

[LooneyJuice]

2 minutes ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

tested it with fairly conservative 100MHz OC on core, didn't mess with the memory because slightly higher memory clock resulted in crashing during valley. as a result i get 1492 MHz. I'll try that tomorrow or so but now i might have to go to bed.

Thanks for your help, I let you know if i find anything

Oki doke, that's when you may want to try your max voltage if you're not already doing so.