ASUS STRIX GTX 980 Ti DirectCU III - FLASHING - LOW TEMP THROTTLE ISSUE

Apr 18, 2018
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this is my card STRIX-GTX980TI-DC3-6GD5-GAMING

Im having some issues with throttling when temps are low I have power and temp limit to the max 110% / 95C and overclocked my card 200 core and 200 memory with no volts adjusted and its all very stable and the temps are good!

often at 60 to 65 C my cards starting to throttle to stock speeds and before I even had it was downclocking to 800 mhz and stayed there a while when the temps was getting even below 60C. I have custom fan settings and its better then the just auto fan. my fans will spin pretty high when its starting to get higher temps. This frustrates me and idk how this goes. sometimes when it throttles I see in gpu-z also that it says at Perf Reason that my card is idle when I actually have my game running...

Now I am getting really curious that I want to maybe flash my card and I dont know if this will fix my problem but I want to flash it to the STRIX OC card "STRIX-GTX980TI-DC3OC-6GD5-GAMING"

As it is totaly the same card can I flash it to that one? I have here 2 websites from techpowerup where I can get the vbios

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/b3...irectcu-iii-oc
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/b3...i-directcu-iii

Also I my current vbios is not the first release but the 84.00.4B.00.04
I bought this card used ... or is it better to flash it back to previous vbios?

I dont know what to do here

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/...ze=6144&since=

Those are the drivers that I can download

PS: As the temps are good, I did change thermal compound paste from this gpu, maybe I put to little ammount of paste and not the entire chip is making good contact that some cores on the card is getting hotter like as an cpu? If that is the case maybe I need to put more to see if that helps but i dont know if this can be the case.

Thanks for your reply guys :)
 
60-65C is good for an air cooled card with 250w TDP and is not the reason for throttling.
There is a number of limits:
Power
Temp
Voltage
No load
Any of those can tell the GPU to throttle. to identify which one you are hitting, use MSI Afterburner (or other similar programs) and configure it to display those limits.
Also GPU utilization might be helpful info for troublshooting.
Beyond that, it could be PSU issue for example.

I do not recommend to flash other BIOS unless you 100% sure what you are doing and why, as well as being prepared to brick the card.
BTW, if i remember correctly, there are tools to modify the BIOS for 980Ti as well as plenty already modified BIOSes that have altered clocks/limits/voltages etc.
 

Thanks for your fast reply !!!

I do need to say that when this throttle occur it happens ofcourse while gaming and I did see in gpu-z that the perfcap reason was saying IDLE in some situations. that happens when the gpu load is under 50% ( i saw it yesterday and it was between 40 and 50 gpu load ) so then this throttle happens but why? I am gaming so its so weird
 
it means that either CPU can not prepare more frames or there is a FPS cap.
it is logical that the GPU will drop clocks if it's not fully utilized.
basically you can use higher resolution monitor or/and higher game settings. those will increase the GPU usage.
Depending on the game, you might want a better CPU to keep the GPU bussy.
 


I really havent thought about this yet, the RUST game that I play I do play on potato settings to get highest fps!!!

but I will do what you say to make it harder for the gpu to get that sweet spot so it will not downclock itself

I will let you know if this is the solution to get the fix 😀
 


I did some changes and this downclock is pretty random and weird I made a screenshot

http://i63.tinypic.com/fus58j.png