880m Throttling with low temps and gpu load

Hello everyone, My name is Jordan and I am new to the forum although i have been following this site for years.

This is going to be a long post so apologies.

SYSTEM SPECS

M18x r2
Mobo Bios = Unlocked A10
3940xm @ 46/44/42/42 flex=25
880m GTX SLI (stock clocks and voltage) (upgrade from 680m SLI) Bought on eBay from upgrade monkey.
16 GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1866 1.5v
3 x 1TB Samsung EVO 840
Tripleheadtogo Digital SE
3 x ASUS 27" 1920x1080 monitors
CM STORM laptop cooler pad
660w AC power supply
Win 7 x64

880m Info
GPU GK104 Revision A2
954 Mhz Gpu (993 boost) 1250 Mhz Memory
Bios version 80.04.E9.00.02 (O2053-0002)
Device ID 10DE-1198
Vendor Dell (1028)
Driver version : nvlddmkm 9.18.13.3235 (forceWare 332.35)

My issue is Gpu throttling under 50-70% load and temps low at 60-70 c. on GPU and 45-55c on CPU
I could understand the gpus throttling if the were hitting 93c but they just seem to drop off the power band all of a sudden with no rhyme or reason.
GPU-Z list reason as PerfCap Reason = PWR.

What Ive tryed so far.

In no particular order.

I flashed the vbios to Unlocked Nvidia GTX 880m - 'OC edition' - rev00.zip by svl7
At first all seemed good, throttling issue solved and temps were even lower, however several issues have arisen.
First was instability, (Display driver has stopped working and recovered) and not recovering at times. (laptop plugged in) (WERInternalMetadata error)
second was that laptop will not boot to windows on battery power, will crash on windows start-up almost every time, if i do make it into windows the system will lock up, screen flashes black, white, orange etc before reset with no blue screen. (will boot to safe mode)
Tried my spare battery, PSU, modded display drivers by MR.Fox.
Tore down laptop and re-pasted GPU's twice, also paying very close attention to thermal pad placement and thickness for perfect fit (as I also did when cards were first installed)
Fresh windows install.
Mechanical HDD's with fresh install.
Running without triplehead2go.
And of course system dust free =)
All Fans confirmed working.
Stress tested the system and everything checks out, even the GPU's even tho they do throttle in some tests.
and ran system at stock clock rates on CPU and lowered memory clock as well.

So I'm back to stock vbios with the BS throttling issue even tho my temps are 60-70c under load! making games unplayable.
The video driver I'm back to running is the one supplied by upgrade monkey when I bought the cards.

I downloaded the newest version of NiBitor but it is unable to recognize my vbios so i cannot try to mod it, it says the "current BIOS device id is unknown" (last resort out of desperation)

Ive been fighting this issue day and night for a few weeks now, Im on dialysis and have frequent hospital visits and stays and I really need this thing to work.

I think my only option is a Vbios modded to work with my system as the one by svl7 is not working for some reason. (to low core voltage?) idk as i cant see the bios settings.

If you need and more info, or have suggestions please feel free to chime in.

Thank you for your time

Regards, J

 

Hey,

I have 880M SLI in M18xR1 upgraded from two HD6990M and on stock vbios I didn't had the power issues that you have but I've flashed slv7 unlocked vbios and everything works great too. Driver doesn't crash, gpus are stable and everything works good. In MSI Afterburner on unlocked bios there's also POWER LIMIT slider that you can adjust.

You can check the vbios settings in Kepler bios tweaker. Nibitor is outdated.

I've attached vBIOS that is currently flashed on my two 880M cards and it works stable.

Im sorry to hear that you have problems with the vbios as I suppose it may be caused by one of the gpus being faulty because I run same setup, only MoBo is a little different and it works.

Also if that doesn't work try to disable BD prochot in laptop bios, it may help.

You also use very outdated driver. I use this one -> http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...od-for-780m-880m-and-980m-mobile-gpus.767644/

My system is Windows 8.1 x64

Regards

 

Sell your 880M and get a 780M. Cheaper and faster with no issues

 

That was correct but two years ago. Try to find new 780M in reasonable price...

Also IMHO 8GB of VRAM will be needed in near future because of current-gen consoles and I won't replace that cards for a long time.

And one last thing. Thanks to svl7 vBIOS there are no more issues with throttling on 880M.

I think that if you can't get 780M for good price or just want more memory at the day of writing this post 880M is a good choice.

 

Actually, while I agree with the generally warmer consensus regarding the 780M, it is becoming readily apparent--with the BIOS tweak and the work others are doing--that the 880M is starting to solidify its performance as per specification, and the performance does show, even with advantages over the 780M in the odd case where the effort is invested, which means proper, quality repasting and use of thermal pads. It would seem the a considerable degree of the issue with the cards is related to the software, BIOS and stock setup side (even odd compatibility issues), with the rest of the hardware having solid potential that is only now being tapped, and paired with the 8GB vRAM, could be advantageous during this generation of consoles.

 

Hello everyone and thank you for your responses,

Matrix Leader6, yeah lol I wish that I had the money to buy some 780m's.

GodlikeRU, Ive already tried the modded 344.77 driver by Mr.fox.
I am talking with the vendor I bought the cards from and he got me the updated 344.77 drivers, they seem to be playing nice although the throttling issue is still present.
As for the Vbios I cant figure out exactly the reason why it doesn't work, Ive seen that others have been having a similar issue over at techinferno, and could have something to do with the cards not being a dell gpu even though its reported in GPU-z as one. IDK.... there is more to this than just that imo.

Since the time of the original post Ive tested the gpus separately and they dont "cliff throttle" by themselves, when they get too hot the core slows down but does not drop off a cliff.
So they are throttling as they were intended to and that's fine, I understand and appreciate that.
When in SLI they don't play well together, when playing games both GPU's are 50-60% load/60-70c temp and in GPU-z it it shows the cards at 993mhz then down to 135mhz then back up to 993mhz and back down to 135, like the cards are cycling between 2d and 3d mode or between power states.

It would be nice if svl7 and johnksss could do their magic on my bios =)

 

Hmmm. Try to force 3D clocks using nvinspector:

Code:

nvidiaInspector.exe -forcepstate:0,0
nvidiaInspector.exe -forcepstate:1,0

That will force both cards to run 3D clock no matter what.

Code:

nvidiaInspector.exe -forcepstate:0,16
nvidiaInspector.exe -forcepstate:1,16

That will revert to default.

Also I've noticed that one and only game that has a throttle bug is Warthunder and they are working on the issue. Temporary fix is to set Power Managment Mode in Nvidia 3D settings to - Maximum performance. They messed up something with SLI power management in game engine.

Ah and I almost forgot. I've saw guy that had M18xR1 with 880M upgraded to M18xR2 motherboard and then something messed up with throttling. On M18xR1 mobo it was working great. Maybe there are some issues with M18xR2 ?

 

Thanks for the pro tip GodlikeRU,

Unfortunately they still hard throttle, firestrike with 880m sli - http://www.3dmark.com/fs/4321656 and http://www.3dmark.com/fs/4321375
Results are just ridiculous, cant deplicate the runs, they are from 5000-8000 on firestrike depending on how much the gpus decide to throttle.

 

Ive decided for now to use my 680m's in SLI...... I am done putting them back in and I have them running at 933/2050 OC'd ------ (720/1344 stock) and I still have ALLOT more headroom for overclocking on these bad boys, hynix memory =) great silicon, I haven't added or subtracted voltage and temps are cool.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/4352823 - 8362 pts

This is the firestrike score without breaking a sweat on these cards, absolutely no throttling! NO BS with the 680's....I believe these were the best mobile gpus/vBios and drivers ever released by nvidia when you compare the issues the 780m/880m/980m have with these issues...yeah 780m works now but at first they didn't work right, 880m is just....:facepalm: and 980m not so much better. 980m was released to try to force people to forget about how much of a failure 880m was. Nvidia was at least looking into the problem and posting in forums, and as soon as 980m came along we got shafted....and no more posts from nvidia other than telling us about how much of a SIN it is to oc a mobile gpu so we will disable it speech.

WILL THE REAL NVIDIA PLEASE STAND UP?!?!?!?

I spent $1400 cad on these 880's and tbh i feel like taking a sledge hammer to them, send them to nvidia and be done with it.