780m throttling to 325mhz and not going back up - Far Cry 3

first - i do not have this issue with any other games from what i can remember

after about 10mins playing far cry 3 780m goes from 850mhz to 325mhz or so and stays there until i restart the game

i played fc3 on my old 560m never had an issue like this

 

If you are using 350.12 GeForce driver, stop and go back to this driver. For some reason, not sure why, 350.12 driver makes my 780M cards (single and SLI) run like diarrhea and throttle like that.

If not, what are the temps? If you're GPUs are getting too hot they can throttle that way. If it takes 10 minutes for it to happen, that may be how long it takes for them to overheat under load.

If you want to confirm it is not a problem with the game itself, run 3DMark 11 and see if it does the same thing.

 

If you ever get a clocking issue, it's time to break out MSI afterburner and intel XTU and log the chip behaviour over time so you actually have some idea of what is going on.

 

played X: Rebirth today and same thing, throttles down , temps fall to 50C and won't throttle back up

it's not specifically overheating because GPU ran at stable 90C for over an hour before it happened...

EDIT: nvm alt-tabbing for 5mins then returning seems to fix it...still not sure what the cause is though...some games like Arma3 i play with GPU maxed out the whole time for hours there is never throttling

 

Without the graphs I talked about it's all guess work i'm afraid, you need the data to be able to say what is going on.

 

Your GPU shouldn't be running at 90C.. Repaste it with some Gelid GC Extreme + new thermal pads for it... Honestly not a good idea for GPU to be running at such high temps..

 

Even with extreme overclock/overvolt, I'm not seeing 90°C on 780M or 980M. This is not only too hot, but thermal throttling is all but guaranteed to occur at that temperature... by design. Be glad for the throttling, because that may have prevented your GPUs from burning up. I agree with @TomJGX suggestion. Time to change thermal paste and if there is any question about pad placement or integrity, replace those also.

 

i did liquid metal paste on all 3...as directed...a coat on the heatsink and a coat on the chip

all the thermal pads are premium high efficiency ones, were quite expensive too

both of the GPU's idle at 50c and have a pretty identical temperature pattern, i have not experienced any problems yet since putting in 2nd card ill have to report back on temperatures, id assume temps would be lower because each GPU is working less than it would if I wasn't running SLI

 

How do the temps look if you force the fans to full blast and just leave them there? If temps are fine like that, the fans might not be kicking on when they should.

 

the GPUs run cooler around 75C , since neither is maxed out now in-game

i will play with the fan settings for CPU in bios see if i can get it down a couple degrees, right now it definitely hits 90C but stays below 95C which is acceptable for the short time im using it to play cpu-intensive games (arma3)

im quite looking forward to my next laptop which is going to be at least Skylake and hopefully cpu overheating will be a smaller issue

 

interestingly enough Empire Total War absolutely destroys even my 780m SLI setup with FPS falling as low as 30 at some points...looks amazing though

 

That's more CPU bound due to poor coding though I believe.

 

As far as I know Empire Total War is CPU intensive, not 100% due to bad coding. There are just many units with physics, formations and other stuff so game must be cpu intensive. But it's not that crap like Dying Light, ETW engine is much better.