Help - GTX 680M serious throttling problem

Hello everyone,

A couple of weeks ago I sent my Clevo P150EM for a GPU upgrade (switched the 7970M to 680M), and I just received the notebook back today.

OK - it looks like they installed the new 680M graphics card, and then installed the Nvidia drivers. But they didn't remove the old drivers.

I manually uninstalled all the old AMD drivers including CCC. After that, the computer no longer recognized the GTX 680M (...which I thought was strange, as I only removed the AMD drivers). I went to the Clevo website, downloaded the most recent set of Nvidia drivers (302.77), and the 680M is recognized and running again.

I ran a variety of applications to test the new card (Furmark, along with a few games), but GPU-z and MSI Afterburner are both consistently telling me that the 680m is stuck at 135MHz core / 800MHz memory. It won't go up to normal speeds, it just stays permanently throttled at the minimal idle clocks.

Has anyone encountered this behavior? Any suggestions for how to fix the 680M throttling? Thank you!

 

There's a global setting in the NVIDIA control panel called "prefer maximum performance" or something like that.

Also the usual, make sure you're on ac power, windows power plan on balanced/high performance.

And download NVIDIA Inspector, it can be useful in monitoring and tweaking your GPU

 

I would advise you to do a fresh installation - then all sorted.

 

It just sounds to me like you have some remnant of AMD drivers messing you up. Id do a clean install or driver sweeper

 

Problem solved - I discovered that the notebook has to be connected to an outlet, otherwise the 680M will NOT function past idle clocks. The 680M works just fine (goes up to 720 MHz core / 900 MHz memory) when the notebook is plugged in. I didn't expect that, as all other notebooks I've owned let me use discrete graphics without any problem when away from an outlet. Simple solution, everything is working fine now - there's definitely a noticeable improvement when compared to the 7970M (... however, at least with the 7970M I wasn't forced to be next to an outlet).

 

Neither the GTX 680M or 7970M can run at full clocks while the notebook is unplugged. Batteries just can't provide the kind of power that these high-end systems require.

 

Kepler cards will throttle when running any stress test software like Furmark/Kombuster to prevent any possible damages to the card, both GTX660M and GTX680M do. However it doesn't throttle in games. Smart design.