Help with new 980m

Hey all,

From my last job I got a Dell Precision m6700 and decided to upgrade the aging K3000m quadro that was in there. I went ahead and added a 980mxm Clevo board, however I noticed that the device now likes to throttle the GPU quite a bit.

I have tried Throttlestop which helps a bit here and there however as soon as the CPU is under any sort of load the 980m gets throttled again (which if I am not mistaken is an issue with clevo in general).

Really starting to be at a loss here with the exception of maybe trying a modded vbios but I have yet to be able to find one to give a try. Any ideas outside of vbios to try and get this thing to stop throttling? Or if it is that I need a modded vbios where I could get a download?

 

@Aaron44126

 

I dunno. Haven't experienced this with the M5000M.

In the sensors tab, GPU-Z has a "PerfCap reason" listed. What is it showing there when the card is throttling? What actual clock speed and temperature are you getting (should also show on the same screen)?

 

For the clock speed it likes to hover around 135mhz - 270mhz under any sort of load(the GPU load is also sitting at 100%). As for the PerfCap reason: Pwr is whats listed I never actually noticed that little bit before..

Going to guess that may have something to do with my 130w power brick not being enough?

 

980m is typically a 115w card IIRC

 

Huh, I didn't think it would be that much. I can give it a try with getting a larger power brick and see if that helps out at all.

Thank you!

 

I have a 980m(alienware) in an m6700 and I've not had problems, I do have a 240W PSU though that seems like it's the issue for you. Mine runs at 135mhz sometimes too but I think it's just maybe reduced bc of optimus working with the hd4000, never had any issues in games. Mines always plugged in. Maybe try firestrike to get an idea if the card is performing within spec too.

 

Err, yeah. M6700 needs a 240W brick to run unthrottled.

 

Thanks for the help all!

I put in an order on amazon for a 240w brick (currently on the 130w that it came with heh). I will post an update once the brick gets here.

 

You had a 130W power brick? Bruv what kind of power did you think the 980M was putting out?

I'm glad you got this sorted though.

By the way, what CPU do you have in your m6700? I'm curious how you never had throttling under load with a 75W K3000M + the CPU + everything else on a 130w PSU.

 

lol I got that brick with the laptop for free so I just didn't think much of it. When I left that company I kinda just snagged the largest brick I could find in our box of bricks.

As for the CPU I have an i7 3740QM. I was thinking of upgrading that as well to a i7-3940XM but not sure if the price to performance is worth it at this time.

 

All M6700s shipped from Dell came with 240W bricks so this isn't something I usually think about. You might be able to get away with 180W in some cases but any less than that and you are very likely to hit throttling.

Anyway, nice grab; M6700 is still a very capable machine. The one I'm running, I've had for over seven years, and with the GPU upgraded (and all-flash storage) I don't really feel any pressure to upgrade to a new PC. You can see some links in my signature for other upgrades (fan control options & AX Wi-Fi card).

 

I will for sure take a look, I planned on this being my main machine for at work while waiting for servers on maintenance night.

Looking at benchmarks with that M5000M you got though; I regret not just throwing the extra cash for it at the time. For the drivers did you have to flash the card at all to get the Geforce ones to work right?

 

Were you able to get 2.4Gbps on your AX card? I have 1.2 right now

 

I'm just using the Quadro drivers. They are updated regularly and work fine for gaming (no GeForce Experience stuff included though). You could probably trick the GeForce drivers into loading but I don't care about that.

I think 980M and M5000M should have performance almost the same... It is the same GPU chip and same clock speed.

Windows "reports" a 2.4Gbps connection to the router but I'm getting only about 25% of that in real world performance.

 

Right now I get about 1.2Gbps and have used up to 500Mbps for Plex Streaming.

What driver version are you on?

 

Currently on 21.50.1.1. I did my performance measurements back in July-ish so I was on an earlier version of the driver, whatever was current back then, and I believe the speed was topping out at around 550 Mbps. The most bandwidth-heavy thing that I do is a weekly system image backup to a network drive, and that does push hundreds of GB but it runs while I am sleeping so I haven't been keeping track of the speed. (I can tell that it finishes consistently faster than it did with my old AC card...)

I've been looking forward to gigabit fiber Internet but AT&T is teasing me. They ran a line to my property some 16 months ago but it is not activated. Though houses as close as 300 feet away (adjacent street) have service.

 

Yeah 130w isn't original it's the 240W I,made sure that's what I was getting when I got my m6700. The K4000m it came with was rated at 100W so def needed the 240 for that. I have a 3940xm and the 980m so thats 65W+115+ so at least 180W needed I would think. 970m would be 20W less but ofc 20-30% less performance, but way more cool temps at stock. Don't even bother with oc other than the miniscule msi stuff and you have to be in the club to get your hands on an unlocked vbios it seems lol, nah.

I'll have to checkout that upgraded wifi card though, I just have the intel Centrino 6300N ultimate I got for $4 shipped works fine but if I can get better speeds that would be awesome.