Arch Linux

Jammie

Member

Registered: 2021-06-22

Posts: 2

Nvidia GPU throttling at 57°C

Hello everyone,

recently I wanted to try some gaming on my ThinkPad T14 (it is equipped with a GeForce MX330, which is fine for moderate gaming). So I installed steam, proton and some games but noticed, that the frame rates where quite low.
I monitored the GPU clock and temps and found out, that the GPU throttles at 57°C to the minimal clock of 139 Mhz. This occurs whenever the GPU hit 57°C regardless of its task. I also installed the tool GreenWithEnvy. In GreenWithEnvy there is a section called 'temp', which displays the current temperature of the GPU. Furthermore it shows 3 temperature-limits called: critical (57°C), slowdown (97°C) and shutdown (102°C). That is why I suppose the throttling is caused by the first temperature limit which is already reached at 57°C and causes the GPU to slow-down to its minimal clock speed. Is there a way to adjust this limit? The GPU is basically unusable because it idles around 45°C-50°C so 57°C is reached within the first seconds of load. I will definitely try to undervolt my CPU to improve thermals.

Now to my setup:

-Kernel: 5.12.12-zen1-1-zen
-DE: Plasma 5.22.1
-CPU: Intel i7-10510U (8) @ 4.900GHz
-GPU: NVIDIA GeForce MX330

I use the PRIME render offload method (graphically demanding applications are run with the prime-run command). The proprietary NVIDIA drivers are installed (nvidia-dkms because of the zen-kernel). In addition to that I use the tool optimus-manager for configuration.

Thanks you for your help in advance!

log files:
Xorg.0.log
optimus-manager.daemon.log
optimus-manager.switch.log

➜  ~ nvidia-smi                                 
Tue Jun 22 14:38:27 2021       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 465.31       Driver Version: 465.31       CUDA Version: 11.3     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce ...  Off  | 00000000:2D:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   43C    P8    N/A /  N/A |      5MiB /  2002MiB |      0%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,577

Re: Nvidia GPU throttling at 57°C

The wiki seems to spell out your issue exactly: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo … ower_modes

Last edited by Ranguvar (2021-06-25 04:36:48)

Jammie

Member

Registered: 2021-06-22

Posts: 2

Re: Nvidia GPU throttling at 57°C

Thanks alot, I did not know, that there was an discrete article for my laptop. The wiki is just awesome!