No more overclocking on Nvidia mobile GPUs

Slider. I just noticed this. My actual voltage under load is 1.112 V.

Link to my latest Fire Strike run: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/4089880

 

Anandtech is a garbage forum, it's overrun by AMD fanboys who circle jerk each other with the mods approval. Any dissenting opinion usually elicits warnings from their moderators until they close the thread. Don't even waste your time over there.

 

I read, but don't post as I've noticed that as well. I love to read, but don't fall for the traps over there. Unlike all the wonderful people on here who are indeed wonderful and don't seem to play fanboy/girl, and just try to help out the best they can and sometimes over the 'call of duty'. I've learned a lot from here and continue to learn a lot, thanks to Mr. Fox, and all the others. (Sorry I don't fully remember all your names, but I do remember what I learned.) Sometimes I need more re-reinforcement on current knowledge and I ask, even if I may have asked before, users on here continue to aid. For that I am truly appreciative. I've learned more about laptops, specifically gaming laptops in the past 2 years than I have learned about computers in general all my life. While I know that a desktop is easier to upgrade and maintain, I am far from a laptop. NOTHING, not even LAN boxs can beat the convenience of pulling out a laptop from the bag and being setup in like 5 mins and ready to game. Not to mention the space you save, at least I do. I just traded my gaming desktop for another laptop due to space constraints. No complaints from me. Everyone, desktop and laptop users should just be all one happy family. I am not as deep into overclocking like others, but I am proud to call you my family and to say that no matter who you are, desktop users, laptop users, we are all still ENTHUSIAST. Enthusiasts who love to push the envelope of today's technology and then share our findings with the community. So THANK YOU!

Now that all the goody, gooby gook is out of the way, lol. j/k.

I don't really want to mess with vBIOS as I am paranoid of screwing things up and my computers ARE my life. Schoolwork, Actual Work, entertainment, yeah. I'm sure I'm not the only one here. I like to push things, but I will do software overclocks. So I don't brick my gpu or make my laptop unusable with a vBIOS flash that might have 'been a little too high'. Which is why I am so upset about Nvidia's lovely clockblock and hope they do reverse course. So we DO NEED to keep up on our push on Nvidia, don't lose steam and keep on pushing on! Everyone keep up the awesome work and keep doing what you can!

 

I'm a bit like that too. I'm 0-1 on messing with BIOS updates. Also, I'm not interested in running OC when not gaming, nor establishing a paypal account to buy a vBIOS.

 

BTW, where is a clean copy of the 346.87 driver at? I am interested for a couple of reasons:
1) Quinn from the Nvidia forum only has recent posts related to OC of mobile cards, but has membership since 2009 (questioning if it was a hint dropped, especially since he recommended ntunes for the OC, an nvidia program)
2) I want to verify his statement that everything works when the nvlddmkm.sys is used with the 347.xx drivers (346 was not an official release, meaning that they may have used the same nvlddmkm.sys file with only the change to OC block, making the trial and error of changes easier compared with 344.xx that did not have certain other functions enabled)
3) Nice to have for me to play with and modify after my studies/testing is over.

Just some thoughts.

 

You could download it straight from Nvidia by choosing the old/beta drivers option at the GeForce driver download page.

EDIT: No, it isn't there. It should be on LaptopVideo2Go, though. See link below.

 

Yeah, I can understand people's caution. BTW I read that 880M owners using the modded vBIOS couldn't run on battery or else the graphics driver would crash because the mod forces constant boost clocks and unplugging would downvolt but not downclock the card. Dunno the validity of this, but that's what I read from places.

Try this?

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/31279-v34687-windows-8-64bit-asus-mobile/

 

Just checked, I don't think that works. 346.87 was an unofficial ASUS driver, never released by Nvidia.

 

346.87 Notebook driver for Win7/8/8.1 x64 from Asus : (389.39 MB)

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/DriversForWin8.1/VGA/VGA_nVidia_Win81_64_VER918134687.zip

That's where it originally came from.

EDIT: Hmmm, file not found. I'll reupload it.

 

Yep , edited my post. What was that driver for, anyway?

 

It was the one that accidentally leaked mobile G-Sync for some notebooks.

 

Time for AMD to kick ass.

 

Nice. I suppose it doesn't work on Optimus notebooks?

If merely a driver update can enable G-sync or disable overclocking, how powerful could mobile GPUs get if all driver locks were removed? I get a feeling the 980M, with sufficient cooling, could approach desktop performance. It already is more powerful than about 70% of current desktop offerings.

Nvidia...

 

Don't worry about it. It only worked on a few notebooks, the MSI GT72 and ASUS G751 with 900M, no Optimus, and most importantly a special eDP LG IPS panel. Plus it was half-baked and clearly not ready for prime time.

 

Speaking of Nvidia Boost, I noticed that at P8 (lowest performance state), the 860M runs at 135 MHz, at P5, 504 MHz and at P0 (full load and highest performance state), more than 1098 MHz. The maximum and minimum voltage and frequency offsets are different for each P-state. So it works a little like Intel's SpeedStep and Turbo Boost. Now I learnt something...

 

I don't know about that. This site seems to paint the opposite picture.

(now before I get accused of bias I'd like to point out I literally googled "Anandtech AMD fanboy" and this was the 3rd search result lol)

 

stahlhart is the same idiot who gave me an infraction when I called out Nvidia for imitating Ubisoft during the past year and threatened to ban me for a repeat offense (never heard of three strikes, I guess). AT mods are such hypocrites, worse than the very forum bottom-feeders they're supposed to patrol.

 

Let's not turn this into an AnandTech-bashing thread, guys. Stay on topic, please.

 

Just use the minimum voltage that you can get away with - there's no point in just raising the voltage without raising the clocks. As you probably know the only reason to increase the voltage is to make higher clocks stable. In your case you're keeping the clocks the same, but raising the voltage for some unknown reason - when it was stable previously at those same clocks and a lower voltage. 1.2V is a lot, I'd be hesitant to run it at that, also 1.15V is a lot too - it's possible that you're getting increased instability at those higher voltages because other components on the card that supply the power may be being overstressed & becoming instable. For me the golden rule of overclocking is to use the lowest 100% stable voltage for any given overclock - there's no point in using excess voltage.

 

one of the largest german tech sites just picked up on this:

http://www.chip.de/news/Nvidia-gege...r-kommt-mit-uebertaktungssperre_76550091.html

Notebookcheck finally got it as well:

http://www.notebookcheck.com/Nvidia-Serie-900M-und-kein-Overclocking.136565.0.html

 

Petition at 500 supporters now ladies and gents.

Now I need to know, I see a lot of bashing on ManuelG from the nVidia forum, who relayed the news, but did he have anything specifically to do with this decision?

Also, "The Register" also reported this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/16/nvidia_turns_back_clock_rage_ensues/

Problem I see here is that all these news sites just report Nvidia's stance and a few that state some users aren't happy. End of story. Nothing that helps our cause really.

 

Well, that's that .sys file from R346 driver. Feel free to try it if you want.
http://gavitex.com/share/ss8ipkpz4
Just put it in unzipped driver's folder and run setup.exe

 

ManuelG is taking a lot of flack. Unfortunately being where the rubber meets the road is part of his job, so he needs to be a big boy and start doing it. Effective communication should be part off his job description too but it doesn't look that way. He's obviously on a very tight leash and it seems Nvidia would have it that way until we give up caring... just like the 880m fiasco.

This time round the stakes are really high (for Nvidia too, they're just too short sighted and full of hubris to realize yet) . We gotta keep hammering them.

 

Trust me, I know. I was just going to go to my perceived max just to see if it could handle it. Only reason I got to 1.125 is upping the core until I see the scores level or dip. The modded bios doesn't allow Kombuster or furmark for testing. It is equally possible though that I replaced only the identifier of the card for that of a 780 desktop card and this is causing it to direct resources incorrectly to maxwell. I'm OCing for the bench at the moment, not the keep it there and see what happens... Check my OC on the 4790k on the batman lounge, 1.7 something at 4.5 but I run it for everyday use at 4.0 1V. Sorry if that came out snappy, just woke up. Plus I'm new to video card OC and driver mod, so I'll be a little quieter now. But yes, I do understand lowest sustainable voltage and up it for stability.

 

We're over the 500

Good good, I wouldn't recommend using Furmark or Kombuster though - they're unnaturally high loads which isn't good for the cards, and besides NVidia automatically throttle the cards when the Furmark executable is discovered - they've been doing that since Fermi. I've found that 3DMark11 (specifically the first graphics test) is a really good quick check to validate initial stability - longer term testing with games often shows you have to lower the Mhz by one or two notches (13-26Mhz) after that to be 100% stable.

 

What grinds my gears the most about all of this is how they have the cheek to deliberately hide this change in policy from us for months and months on end.

They claim it was a simple 'bug fix' but I have checked the official release documentation for 347.09 and there is no mention whatsoever of fixing an 'overclocking bug' in 900M series under the fixed issues section.

 

Yeah, good point Cakefish about the Release Notes, we didn't really ever believe them that it was a bug.

 

Well you have to remember, their record sales from last year came from two sources primarily, 1) all the chips they put into vehicles, 2) excellent maxwell sales. I haven't reviewed their 10-K yet nor the conference call which should be on seeking alpha ( the 10-k, as all official press releases (usually 8-Ks) and 10-Qs, etc. can be found for free on EDGAR search on the SEC website). Also, did anyone see a post on their official website as saying their stance on the lockdown. I see them point to the forum (more agent speaking), but wanting to know if they made the statement higher than that? I also want to know whether the 970 desktop returns were stated in their financials, etc.

BTW: This is stuff I do for fun in my downtime, watch the industry. As NVIDIA underwhelms me again and again (not market performance, but rather AMD waiting for them to catch up on certain tech, i.e. their shared memory (virtual shared memory or whatever Nvidia calls it), something AMD had ready 3-5 years ago, etc.). Not to say NVIDIA doesn't crush it in other ways and the memory thing was related to the HSA, but I don't see a meteoric opportunity with them like tesla 3-4 years ago, Netflix after they tried to split streaming and disk subscriptions entirely and had a huge price drop that they have rebuilt since, etc.

 

I use the gpu-z and HWInfo to verify max load using gpu-z stress test, followed by doing valley which stresses everything and crashes it if it isn't stable. It has made it to 71 degrees at 340mhz core, 80mhz vram, 1.125V. Still just tweaking for fun though and hesitant to do any serious vram without a working temp sensor integrated... If nothing else, I've found a decently stable 190, 190, stock volt which may be my gaming mode. But thank you for the advice. I plan on doing ultra "field testing" with a little Crysis 1&2, Civ:BE, and Skyrim. It's what I've got...

 

Sorry for the offtopic but what happened with the 880m?

 

It was overheating and throttling, even at stock clocks, meaning people were getting less performance than was advertised.

 

It was basically the ultimate rebranded crap card.. The silicon was pushed to the limit and hence just overheated.. Ask our resident 880M sufferer @Ethrem about it.. His cards were so crap (he went through 2 sets) that they couldn't hold boost clocks at all.. Forget about Ocing, they ran at 80C ++ at stock and didn't hold clocks..

 

I found Valley good for temperature testing, but not stability testing. I can run insane VRAM clocks on Heaven without crashing for example. Maybe it's different for Maxwell.

Crysis 1 and Skyrim generally won't push your GPU to 100% load. I've found out that other parts of the system are bottlenecks in those 2 games, so they're probably not great ones to test either. Crysis 2 would probably be ok for testing, Crysis 3 even better. And aren't Civilisation games also very heavily CPU dependant, again not great for GPU stability testing.

 

Those are also the games I play/own. I don't know how bioshock infinite would test it, but don't play it as much. Also, it probably was me improperly modding the driver, as I DDU'd, reflashed bios, went to stock driver 344.75 and can run valley without crashing at 1.15V. So it was definitely something else that kept me from that or 1.2V. Temps at 1.15V - Max 68 core temp. But thank you for the tips on which games. And yes, Civ is heavy cpu, but I love it and I play it most.

 

Temporary fix... soon -> T|I

 

All true. Civilisation can be GPU-heavy, though, especially if you jack up everything.

I've found that X-Plane 10 is a very good overall benchmark for CPU and GPU performance combined - textures and lighting eat up GPU power, while cars, objects and the actual flight physics are all CPU-intensive. For example, a 300 MHz increase in clock speeds of the CPU can increase the simulator frame rate by 5-8 FPS.

 

Yep, whatever game you choose to test stability then keep GPUz (or other GPU monitoring tool) open so you can make sure you're getting a consistent 100% GPU load - that's the best way to test GPU stability, no use in the GPU just ticking over.

 

So looks like there solution is to give us all the silent treatment until we all shut up about it. Well, I'll never forget and will continue to pester them about it.

I haven't decided yet whether I want to risk a hardware overclock via VBIOS. I certainly don't have the experience to mod my own VBIOS myself, so I'd have to pay a small donation to someone with more expertise to do it on my behalf. We'll see.

Really, it's all up to AMD to save the day. I'm counting on you reds, please don't let me down!

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

Ugh... What a nightmare those cards were. Both sets would hit 95C and throttle to like 405 until it dropped a degree then right back which caused massive stuttering if I ran them at full boost for 30 minutes to an hour with the modded vbios and IC Diamond or GC Extreme pastes and stock I'd watch them hit 87C and start dropping as low as 800s which again caused insane stuttering, they crashed constantly. I finally got Xotic to get Sager in contact with me and they upgraded me to 980M cards for a reasonable (well, I had already invested 5k in the machine so at that point it was reasonable but it wasn't free) charge.

I love my 980Ms but running 3K downsampled with a custom resolution will put them as high as 87C but they boost the whole time. I rarely saw boost with the 880M.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

Ooh nice one @j95 !!!... When I was mentioning that Prema, Mr Fox etc have a look at it, I forgot about our resident driver modder J95... Total fail!! Please share this with us ASAP @j95...

Also for me:

 

We need to start warning potential buyers in the 'What Notebook Should I Buy?' forum about this issue whenever they consider a notebook with an Nvidia GPU. Not just here but in other forums as well. Tell your friends and family. Tell other techies to tell their friends and family when they're shopping for notebooks. We need to give them as much bad publicity as possible and cut their sales as much as we can. I'm not saying we shouldn't be recommending them at all just...with caution. And a brief explanation about how Nvidia has been screwing over their customers lately.

 

Word. I've already begun doing that. Just this week I dissuaded a friend from getting a Lenovo Y50 w/860M and convinced him to get a cheaper Y40 w/R9 M275 instead. He only plays LoL so either is more than adequate but still, anything to put a dent in Nvidia's wallet is fine by me.

 

Of course if I was evil old Nvidia, I'd never come out and say that I'm blocking overclocking so I could just sell rebranded cards later down the line instead of having my customers overclock their existing cards and lose out on padding my profits.

I'd also make up some half-assed excuse and attempt to spin it like I'm protecting the innocent customer from this evil "bug" called overclocking that could potentially destroy their expensive purchase.

I'm glad to see some consumers here fighting back, starting a fire underneath their fat-cat greedy butts and raising hell. I hope our efforts will not be in vain.

 

Desktop have never been more tempting.
Thats all I have to say

 

I agree with Cloudfire until Nvidia get their act together and respect us as customers and for companies to listen to what gamers want in their laptops I have to say that my next purchase will be a custom build pc. Unless a new company releases a gaming laptop with watercooling.

 

I sent an email to Wesley at PC Gamer a while back and they finally picked up the story: http://www.pcgamer.com/latest-nvidia-gtx-900m-drivers-remove-overclocking-support/

 

So, checked out the copy and paste of the .sys, looks to open clocking back up and voltage, but no temp control. Haven't checked for full funtionality. When opened in notepad, the file said does not operate in dos, or in unicode seems to look completely written in Chinese (rather than indestinct gibberish). Still searching for a better solution.

 

G-sync - Desktop not mobile
DSR - Desktop not mobile
Overclocking with newer drivers - Desktop not mobile
GM200 GPUs for the same price as GTX 980M - Which you can keep silent and cool with watercooling
4K displays with actual hardware capable of driving at that resolution
Cheaper CPUs which you can afford to experiment with - Kill one? Buy another one. Still same price as one mobile CPU
Silent cooling if you want
DDR4
PCIe M2 SSDs
Fully unlocked BIOS overclocking with control of everything

I miss the desktop days.

 

And little resale value

 

Thats true. Value of desktops come crashing down. But atleast you are able to plug in what god damn GPU you want to use later in an upgrade.
Can`t say that about my Alienware 18...