144Hz = Higher idle temps/clock speeds?

[Sezmia]

I have an EVGA 1060 6GB SC (ACX 2.0 Single)

I bought a 144Hz monitor the other day for games like Rocket League, League, CS:GO. E-Sports and the like, my card can do them easily at 1080p. It feels super good, and I can see why people invest in them. It's true that you get hooked on 144Hz, but I have a nice 60Hz monitor as a second to keep me grounded a bit.

I want to state that I understand that 144Hz requires more graphics power than 60Hz, even when in the OS. Into the issue, previously when using two 1080p monitors at 60Hz, my idle clocks were around 200Mhz on the Core, and 300-400MHz on the memory. I plugged in the 144Hz monitor, and played a few games not really thinking about it. But I went into MSI Afterburner, and noticed that my Core was sitting at 962MHz, and 4007MHz on the memory (idle). It makes no sense to me that a 140% increase in refresh rate would constitute a 381% increase in Core speed and a 901% increase in memory speeds. Since I have a single fan card, it runs hot already. I run the fan at 10% when idle all the time, and have a really heavy fan curve for when it goes above 40C and I still manage to hit 70C when gaming (even when previously capped to 62FPS in some games). Not to mention my case fans being terrible as well, but hopefully a case/fan upgrade will be coming soon. But that doesn't fix my issue. I personally don't want my clock speeds running that high while my computer's turned on, but idling. I know that there are some solutions to this through .bat files that allow you to manually change your refresh rate with a click of a button, and setting your refresh while in the desktop to lower than 144Hz (a lot of people recommended 120Hz, but I'm still hitting nearly the same clocks there as well, so I don't see the point as of yet) while playing your games in fullscreen which will allow the game to take advantage of 144Hz over 120Hz. But I want a legitimate fix to this. So, if there is one, please allow me to know what it is. I also know that this doesn't necessarily hurt the card as long as the temps are in check, but I'm still a little iffy on longevity with it running at essentially half it's effective core clock, and 100% it's memory clock 24/7. Thank you in advance for any replies on the topic.

 

[boju]

Cluey guy, pretty much answered all your suspicions yourself.

Running a gpu at maximum hz in any amount of time wont hurt it. But it does draw more power so your electricity bill will be the only thing that suffers.

 

[boju]

Wonder if dynamic hz range could be a feature in Windows to be include in power savings some day.

 

[Sezmia]

I actually fixed the issue somehow. Originally, I had my setup like this:

1080p144 24" main monitor, 1080p60 23" secondary monitor and third being 768p60 32" for when I wanted to watch movies or something of the sort. Main through DisplayPort, secondary through HDMI to DVI, and third through HDMI. I read somewhere online that what's causing this isn't really 144Hz itself, here's a post I found in Nvidia's forum to reflect that:
"Nvidia did comment on this issue a while back, and it appears to only affect those who have two monitors set at different refresh rates. This was supposedly done to reduce hardware errors and instability (a bios mod might work to override it, but do so at your own risk). Setting your monitor to 60Hz will make the card to return to idle clocks." I have no way of confirming that information, but I guess it would kind of make sense.

But surprisingly, my issue was fixed simply by unplugged the secondary and third monitors, then plugging the second back in, and I've remained at normal idle clocks/temps since. Like I said, there were people saying that you could simply switch to 120Hz, but I didn't see my clocks or temps go down after that, and I can confirm that my main monitor is running 144Hz while the second is running 60Hz. Pretty interesting.

Update: To be clear, the third monitor (768p60) was turned off the entire time, but somehow managed to mess with the idle clocks.

Update2: Core Clock: 139MHz | Memory Clock: 405MHz | That's what it's idling at now, and what I was used to seeing before the 144Hz switch.