980 TI Power Throttling Below Base Clock

May 23, 2018
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Hey, wondering if anyone has any ideas. I've got a 980 TI, and it's acting oddly. It used to work fine. I had it overclocked slightly and it was great. Kept it cool, typically running full load at about 60C. One day I was playing a game and noticed my frame rate was about 20 fps lower than typical. Didn't think much about it at the time. I looked into it today and the card isn't clocking as high as it's supposed to. It's hitting power throttling according to HWMonitor. Under furmark, clocks are dipping below 1000 MHz, while temps are about the same under load as before and power reported in HWMonitor is 102.5% (power target is 100% atm). I used to be getting around 1400 MHz continuously, and I haven't seen it boost past 1200 MHz today. Any attempts to overclock do nearly nothing, because the power limit pulls it back down to about 1000 MHz under load. It's also idling lower than I recall it used to, sitting at 135 MHz idle.

Anyone seen anything like this before? I suspecting a bad bios...maybe? It'd be real great to get my performance back. Anyone have any ideas?


Update: It's not the bios. I dumped it from the card and checked sha-256 against one sourced from online - they matched.
 
May 23, 2018
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Yep, no change. Thinking I'll throw it in another system later today and see if that changes anything.
 
May 23, 2018
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It's a Gigabyte card and the VRM does have a heatsink.
 
May 23, 2018
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I think I found some more info out. I used my Corsair AX860i's per PCIE current monitoring abilities to measure the current draw going to each of the PCIE power connectors for the GPU - they are not equal. One of the connectors is drawing about 2/3 to 3/4 of the current relative to the other one (it's not that accurate). So my prevailing theory is that the 8 phase VRM is split in half, each half gets their own PCIE power connector. And one of the VRM stages has failed. That would reduce power draw on that PCIE connector by a theoretical 1/4. Anyways, I'll probably pull the card apart soon to test/verify.

Anyone know if unbalanced GPU PCIE load is normal?
 

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