GTX 670 won't idle properly

[imrazor]

I don't know if anyone here can help me, but my GTX 670 is running at full speed while doing nothing more than displaying the desktop. So clock speed at idle is 1019MHz and temps are running at 54C, but GPU load is 0% according to GPU-Z.

My config is very unusual. I'm running the GTX 670 in a virtual machine with PCIe passthrough. Until recently I was running with an evaluation version of Windows 8.1 for testing and to get the config right. It worked nearly perfectly, including idling and a much lower idle temp of 38C. So I recently installed a retail copy of Win 8.1 Pro in the VM (using exactly the same settings and driver version), but my card is not idling properly.

Just to be clear the card works perfectly for playing games - 45 fps in the Witcher 3 with Medium-High settings at 1080p. It just won't calm down after the game is over.

 

[imrazor]

No I have not tried it with 6.5. I got everything working nicely with 6.0U2 and didn't feel like upsetting the apple cart. It's been a while since I did my research, so I can't say with certainty that others were using the setting with 6.5. Mostly that setting is used to enable nested virtualization, so there isn't much out there about using for GPU passthrough with Geforce cards.

As an aside, the only reason I used 6.0 was that I had a free license for it. Can you downgrade your ESXi install at work (or is it a production server?) What model of Geforce are you using?

EDIT: Have you tried GPU passthru on your work machine with a Quadro or an AMD card just to confirm you have passthru configured properly?

 

[nzalog]

The server at work is not production, just a little test dell box on my desk that I use to tinker with ESXi. It did work on the same machine with an older AMD card. The "nvidia card is a quadro 600, but it's not new enough of a quadro to support passthrough natively. Downgrading it is an option but would kind of suck if they did something to break this in 6.5.

 

[imrazor]

Yes that would suck in a major way. If, however, you want a cheap, old Quadro that will support passthrough, you could try the one that came with my Dell. The Quadro FX 3800 seems to be about $20 - $40 on eBay, but it is a DX10 only part and only supports a correspondingly old version of OpenGL. I didn't have to use the hypervisor.cpuid.v0 parameter to get it work. Despite the lack of DX11 and modern OpenGL support, it did surprisingly well in Cinebench R15 (~51 fps after a modest overclock.) If you're not interested in modern games, or just want a GUI console for your ESXi box, it might fit the bill.

I'm really surprised the Quadro 600 didn't work. It's a newer part than my old FX 3800, unless NVidia simply disallowed any card under $600 MSRP.

 

[imrazor]

Was wondering if you got the GeForce working with ESXi 6.5. Any luck?

 

[nzalog]

No I didn't have any luck getting the quadro 600 working, ended up just going back to the AMD card on my work ESXi 6.5 server. When I get some time I'll just load 6.0 on the same machine just to see if it's an issue with 6.5 or something else.

At home I'm waiting for something called "Unlocker 2.0.9" to be released. It's a neat little utility that unlocks the ability to create MacOS VM's on many different vmware products. The person who created it is having some issues with ESXi 6.5 as well. Either way, once that comes out and I'll take upgrading to 6.5 a bit more seriously. What kind of sucks is I might have worked myself into a bit of a corner with my pretty unique build. Relying on too many hacks to get it to do everything I want out of it.

 

[imrazor]

I've heard of Unlocker, but have never used it. I had thought Unlocker was fully functional on any VMWare product. What's the issue with ESXi 6.5? And I thought you had mentioned you had 6.0 at home.

 

[nzalog]

Yeah I am on 6.0 at home. The unlocker 2.0.9 which is meant for 6.5 is not reliable yet so it's in release candidate. Once that's out and deemed reliable, I'll test upgrading my home 6.0 to 6.5.

At work though I've been on 6.5 for a while which is where I was having issues with the quadro card. I'm probably going to try 6.0 at work with the card just to isolate if the issue is esxi version or something else.