Question MSI RTX 3080 dropping clock speeds when under load ?

[frenzy017]

Any idea why my GPU is doing this?

Running on:

Maximus Hero VIII Motherboard

i7 6700k

16GB TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL16 (2x8gb)

PSU: EVGA G2 750w

Card is a MSI Gaming Z Trio 10GB LHR

https://imgur.com/a/Whj5o3Z

View: https://imgur.com/a/Whj5o3Z


As you can see that's what the clock speeds are doing during 3DMark Timespy.

Clocks sit at around 1810mhz during idle, which in itself is weird, then during the tests, they drop all the way to 210mhz sometimes only coming back up between the tests.

I also have a log of GPU-Z during the timespy test just don't know how to show it here.

So far I've tried:

DDU Reinstalling drivers

Tried it on a friend's computer with the same results

Tried setting NVIDIA power settings to maximum performance

Cards out of warranty so just wondering if I'm SOL or there's something else I can try before giving up

 

[Eximo]

Water cooling? Those temps are almost too good, which would say the system isn't actually doing much overall.

You are also mixing a pretty old CPU with a quite new GPU. If the CPU can't deliver the jobs in a timely manner then the GPU can sit idle waiting on the CPU. Which would explain the down clocking, it is saving power.

What load is this?

 

[hotaru.hino]

I don't think it's the CPU doing this, as Time Spy is a mostly GPU workload.

If the card was tried on another computer and you made sure the drivers and whatnot were reinstalled and the same result happens, then my inclination is the video card is starting to fail.

However the warranty thing makes me curious. The card's release date according to Pangoly was July 2021 (frustratingly, most other places pegged it at September 2020, which was the launch date of the RTX 30 series and LHR cards were released later). MSI says they have a 3-year warranty on their cards based on date of purchase. (https://us-store.msi.com/GeForce-RTX-3080-Gaming-Z-Trio-10G-LHR). So unless you did something seriously wrong with the card, it should still be under warranty.

 

[frenzy017]

Water cooling? Those temps are almost too good, which would say the system isn't actually doing much overall.

You are also mixing a pretty old CPU with a quite new GPU. If the CPU can't deliver the jobs in a timely manner then the GPU can sit idle waiting on the CPU. Which would explain the down clocking, it is saving power.

What load is this?

No just stock cooler. GPUZ says the load is at %100 which doesn’t seem right.

And yea funnily enough I’m in the process of upgrading to intel 13th gen and just waiting for parts.

Here’s the ticker and something I probably should’ve mentioned. I got the card second hand hence not being able to send it out for warranty. Unfortunately it was most likely used for mining. Highly likely I’m gonna buy my next card brand new.

 

[Eximo]

Have you checked the vBIOS version? Might just need to be flashed back to stock if they messed with it.

 

[frenzy017]

So I flashed the bios after carefully looking at the specs of the card. Same result. So I’m thinking to myself what the hell, it’s just gonna be sitting there at this point so I flashed it with an asus strix x bios and to my surprise it works! No clock drops and getting high fps with cyberpunk 2077 and like you said only bottlenecked by my cpu which was hitting 98%

Would you guys know why it works now? I’m not complaining just curious

 

[hotaru.hino]

So I flashed the bios after carefully looking at the specs of the card. Same result. So I’m thinking to myself what the hell, it’s just gonna be sitting there at this point so I flashed it with an asus strix x bios and to my surprise it works! No clock drops and getting high fps with cyberpunk 2077 and like you said only bottlenecked by my cpu which was hitting 98%

Would you guys know why it works now? I’m not complaining just curious

If the person who owned it before you flashed it with some random vBIOS, then there's no telling what it was doing to prevent it from behaving normally. And if it was mining card with a custom vBIOS to get around the LHR thing, then it probably had some limiters on it as well as mining cards don't tend to run as hard as the video card can actually run, at least from what I can gather (doing so means the card can supposedly last longer).

 

[frenzy017]

So right now I have the drivers from my ASUS 2080 still installed. Everything works fine so far. Should I install MSI drivers or leave as it is since it’s got an asus strix bios flashed?