gpu core / memory clock all over the place while idle.

t99

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Jul 16, 2014
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Perhaps this is nothing, but I want to get to the bottom of it while I'm still within the return policy of this gpu. I can be doing nothing but watching the afterburner logs and the core / memory clock is so inconsistent it looks like a 2 year old drawing lines. The core clock goes anywhere from 300mhz to 1227, 300 is the lowest and 1306 is the default for the current profile. The memory clock is a little better moving only between 1750/300. I might not normally think anything of this, but looking at it looks completely ridiculous. Imagine the most inconsistent scribbled graph and this is it. It's so all over the place that it almost looks like a audio file zoomed in a whole lot.

Gaming performance and even checking the logs after is 100% perfect in every way. The clock / memory speeds stay put and I have had no issues with various games over the last 2 days. What confuses me is that I don't see what could be happening while the computer is idling that requires the core clock to bounce around so much. My old 270x would always be on either 300 / 450mhz when not gaming. I get it if I were doing something, but


Just a note in case this helps.. during this the cpu usage is at 1-3% and gpu usage is pretty much flat at 0 for the most part...
 
Solution
Which exact model and brand of the GPU is it?

Drivers from amd or nvidia up to date? Did you uninstall the driver before upgrading?

Are you using the up to date afterburner?
Try GPU-Z

t99

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Jul 16, 2014
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rx 480 and everything is up to date. games run fine and this is the only thing that seems kind of strange. some games do seem kind of weird though because the gpu usage % goes from 100 to 0% constantly.

Here is a photo of gpu z while doing nothing. The first section there was nothing going on, just had afterburner up in the background. Then you can see about halfway thru there was less activity, this is when I minimized afterburner and did absolutely nothing. Then towards the end I started moving the mouse in a slow square and action picked up a bit more. That core clock just seems so weird for doing either nothing at all or basically nothing. It's all over the place, but the usage % is almost consistently at 0.

maybe it's nothing, but it just feels weird to me. If I was in 2d mode my old card would never go above 450mhz on the core clock. It would always fluctuate between either 300 or 450 and nothing else at all. It was almost like it new it was in 2d mode and this one does not. Not really sure if any of that matters anyway though.

http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/16/12/10/c79.png
 
Did you update windows with it? windows is using the graphics card as well and therefore the clock will go up.

Did you uninstall the driver from the old card before upgrading?
You can try uninstalling the driver by DDU uninstaller and install the AMD drivers after it again
 

t99

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Jul 16, 2014
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I stopped worrying about it for a while. I did some searching again today and found tons of people with the same issue. Apparently its something amd is working on.