Question Nvidia control panel changing performance levels

[MrPRAINGLE]

GPU: Gigabyte Gaming OC 3070 Ti

I am experiencing GPU temperature hiccups at idle, or in other terms, 4 to 8 degrees fluctuations every second or so. The fans are turned on, I repasted the GPU. The thermal pads are very very damaged but I doubt this is the issue. The temperature at idle sits between 50 and 60°C .

Edit : The issue is not solved, but the cause of the temperature hiccups is a weird shift in the Performance level in the Nvidia Control Panel, causing spikes in power draw. The problem was not with temperatures.

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

include your complete system specs

along with your overall system cooling setup(case, fan layout/models, ambient room temp, etc,..)

 

[MrPRAINGLE]

- Asus Prime B550-Plus AC-HES
- 5600X
- Arctic Freezer 34 eSports Duo
- G.Skill Ripjaws V 2x16GB 4000cl18-22-22-42 Hynix CJR running at 3600c18 (I don't know the secondary timings) as my PC refuses to POST and enters a boot loop when I enable XMP
- Seasonic PRIME GX-650
- Sabrent 1TB Pcie 4.0

I have an Antec NX300 with the front panel and tempered glass side panel removed, and two NF-A12x25 intaking air at the front so aiflow is technically a non-issue. The room temperature is 24°C, and I deshrouded my GPU with two NF-A9 and an NF-A12x25 (because I did not have a third NF-A9 on hand) as intake.

I just checked and my temps are now around 25°C at idle with the fans running at 600RPM, but with temperature spiking up to 35°C every 5 seconds or so, and sometimes the GPU temps stop moving and don't change at all. I'm very confused, as I see a lot of different kinds of changes : frequent and low hiccups, less frequent but higher hiccups, temperature spikes... Maybe something is running in the background ? Could the problem be because of this ?

 

[MrPRAINGLE]

I came across a reddit post (for a completely different reason) saying that the system crashes using a B550-i Strix and an RTX 4000 series GPU, but to fix that you have to enable "Prefer Maximum Performance" in the Nvidia control panel. That's what I did, and the GPU temperature stabilized instantly. I checked the power consumption, and, at IDLE, it was at 86 watts constant. At idle. I then disabled it, and using nvtop, I saw the power usage vary between 24 and 70 watts. The situation is very very strange but the random power draw was in fact the cause of the temperature spikes. Now, the question is, why the hell did my GPU experience power draw hiccups ?

I noticed, in my Nvidia control panel, that a very weird thing happened : during exactly 1 second, the performance level was level 1 (Core clock 210 - 2100 MHz and Memory clock 1620 MHz), then during exactly 2 seconds, the performance level was the highest on level 4 (Core clock 240 - 2130 MHz and Memory clock 19002 MHz). The lower power draw occurs at level 1 and the higher power draw occurs at level 4, I compared placing the control panel and nvtop side to side. Again, there is no in-between, it repeats the same cycle every time : 1s level 1, 2s level 4, 1s level 1, 2s level 4...

Any idea how this occurs ?