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3080s 'stuck' at 320w — was this ever figured out?

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SirCanealot

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Discussion starter · #1 ·
Hey everyone,
I have a Palit Gaming Pro 3080 which should have a 320w / 350w power limit (109%). It's also under an AIO and maxes out around 48c. I have all the RAM and VRM under heatsinks and a small fan and I believe they're running fine. (Edit: If my card was throttling in any way, it'd run up to the higher power limit initially, then throttle when the card gets warm. I also realise my PCB isn't amazing, and I'm not trying to put 500w through it, lol.)

However, even though I max out the power limit, the card doesn't seem to budge past 320w. Setting the power limit to 350w might use a little more than 100%, but not by much.

I've tried reinstalling the drivers, as well as using several utilities (even tried adjusting the power limit via command line) and the card still won't budge past 320w. I also tried flashing the bios from the Asus Tuf OC and while the card then reported as having a 340w / 375w power limit in something like GPUZ, the clocks/voltage used didn't change and the card still reported itself as using 320w.

I've seen many people discuss this, but I haven't anyone really suggest fixes or if there's a problem with some cards. Anyone have any ideas? I'm actually thinking of approaching Palit support and see if I can get anything out of them on this as I'm super confused!

Thanks a lot!
 
#2 ·
SirCanealot said:
Hey everyone,
I have a Palit Gaming Pro 3080 which should have a 320w / 350w power limit (109%). It's also under an AIO and maxes out around 48c. I have all the RAM and VRM under heatsinks and a small fan and I believe they're running fine. (Edit: If my card was throttling in any way, it'd run up to the higher power limit initially, then throttle when the card gets warm. I also realise my PCB isn't amazing, and I'm not trying to put 500w through it, lol.)

However, even though I max out the power limit, the card doesn't seem to budge past 320w. Setting the power limit to 350w might use a little more than 100%, but not by much.

I've tried reinstalling the drivers, as well as using several utilities (even tried adjusting the power limit via command line) and the card still won't budge past 320w. I also tried flashing the bios from the Asus Tuf OC and while the card then reported as having a 340w / 375w power limit in something like GPUZ, the clocks/voltage used didn't change and the card still reported itself as using 320w.

I've seen many people discuss this, but I haven't anyone really suggest fixes or if there's a problem with some cards. Anyone have any ideas? I'm actually thinking of approaching Palit support and see if I can get anything out of them on this as I'm super confused!

Thanks a lot!
Click to expand...
Please do a port royal run (3dmark) and have GPU-Z open and before running PR, set ALL of the wattage values shown in GPU-Z to "max" by clicking the mouse over them. Do the same for TDP% as well (set it to max). Then, install hwinfo64, run it with sensors only, and have TDP% and TDP Normalized % visible under the "maximum" column. Take a screenshot of both and we'll see what's going on.
 
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Discussion starter · #3 ·
Thanks for the reply!

Edit: May have missed maxing out some things. Apologies, hope I didn't miss anything important :)

I thought I'd do a run on 100% and a run on 109%.

Port Royal scored 10757 on 100%, and 10748 on 109%. It seems like setting it to 109% allows a few power spikes, but doesn't actually seem to raise the general power limit of the board at all. Any ideas at all?

This is the run on 100%:
2472351


This is the run on 109%:
2472352
 
#4 ·
SirCanealot said:
Thanks for the reply!

Edit: May have missed maxing out some things. Apologies, hope I didn't miss anything important :)

I thought I'd do a run on 100% and a run on 109%.

Port Royal scored 10757 on 100%, and 10748 on 109%. It seems like setting it to 109% allows a few power spikes, but doesn't actually seem to raise the general power limit of the board at all. Any ideas at all?

This is the run on 100%:
View attachment 2472351

This is the run on 109%:
View attachment 2472352
Click to expand...

Thanks. Looks like yet another BIOS bug.
Setting your TDP to 109% caused TDP Normalized to increase, but your TDP itself remained the same.
Looks like the power slider is broken or your vbios isn't increasing the correct limits, or your vbios is increasing the 8 pin rail power limits, but not increasing the PCIE Slot power limit.
I also noticed that GPU Chip Power didn't increase either (actually seemed to go down, but margin of error), but that could be a red herring and not related, as GPU Chip Power almost never reaches its own power limit anyway.

The TDP slider is supposed to increase all of the power limits (Power Plane Input Source (SRC), 8 pin #1, 8 pin #2, PCIE Slot, MVDDC, GPU Chip Power).
If you can open your vbios with the Ampere Bios Editor 0.04 (bmgjet posted it some pages back in the 3090 thread, you can search his posts for the link), then post a screenshot of the rails, maybe we can see. Although it's worth noting that I've seen certain rail power limits get completely ignored (exceeded) while other rail power limits throttle before you even reach that limit shown.
 
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Discussion starter · #5 ·
Interesting! As much as I'd love to fix the issue, I also posted this since I really wanted to understand what is going on here. Thanks so much for your informative replies! :D

I got ABE and opened it and this is what I have:
2472400


If it's a BIOS issue though, why doesn't flashing to another BIOS fix it? I also flashed the latest BIOS Palit provides for the card. Guess certain parts aren't flashed? :/

The card runs decently at 320w, but it'd just be 'fun' to have a little more, you know... Thanks again!
 
#6 ·
SirCanealot said:
Interesting! As much as I'd love to fix the issue, I also posted this since I really wanted to understand what is going on here. Thanks so much for your informative replies! :D

I got ABE and opened it and this is what I have:
View attachment 2472400

If it's a BIOS issue though, why doesn't flashing to another BIOS fix it? I also flashed the latest BIOS Palit provides for the card. Guess certain parts aren't flashed? :/

The card runs decently at 320w, but it'd just be 'fun' to have a little more, you know... Thanks again!
Click to expand...
Did you also open the Palit vbios in the editor?

I don't know enough about the internal power limits, but it could be hitting the MVDDC limit. Which is confusing because you're reaching 90W on MVDDC but the vbios says the MVDDC limit is 67.5W...but you can see in your vbios the default and max MVDDC limits are EXACTLY the same.

I've seen weird stuff like this already. On 3090 FE, the 8 pin default power limit is 146W and max is 162W, but you can go up to 175W actually, which is the same as the "SRC" power limit!. Meanwhile, max Slot power limit is 86W, but it actually hard throttles at 79.9W!
 
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#8 ·
Looking at just MAX in GPUz alone is miss leading. It will pick up the spikes where the power limit works off averages for all the soft limited stuff.
 
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Discussion starter · #9 · (Edited)
Falkentyne said:
Did you also open the Palit vbios in the editor?
Click to expand...
I wasn't able to open the exact BIOS that I flashed from Palit as it's from a .exe file (tried opening it, but I can't find a BIOS file!).
I did compare to the Palit BIOS for my card from techpowerup, and it seems pretty random...?
2472505

The Techpowerup BIOS is on the left and seems a little older, and it seems to have lower power limits to my current BIOS... Apart from Max VRAM PL? :/

I might try and shop around a bit and see if I can find a BIOS that seems to have a higher power limit on everything and see if that does anything with the card. I've reached out to Palit's support, so will be interesting to see if anything comes from that.

I also tried Furmark and my card is still stuck at the same 320w limit with a few 330w peaks...

I've been using NVidia cards almost exclusively since the 580, and I don't think I've ever seen such weirdness with the power limit... :/

Edit: Thought I'd try flashing the below Gigabyte bios that has a 370w power limit with no adjustment (EG, 100% is 370w) and I'm still stuck at 320w. Thought I'd try fully uninstalling the drivers with DDU, but of course that had no affect. So weird!
2472515
 
Discussion starter · #10 ·
Sorry for the bump, but just in case this affects anyone else... As I mentioned I raised this with Palit support just to see if they happened to have any more information. I submitted to them a couple of GPUZ log files that basically showed the card sticking to the 320w limit, but they said as the higher powerlimit run had some higher power spikes then the raised limit was doing something.

That and they only support the 'standard' configuration of the card. So they wouldn't be able to comment on any use beyond 320w :/

I might email them back and state that I've run multiple benchmarks and generally keep an eye on stats while I play and the card doesn't not really go past 320w (apart from spikes), but otherwise a little disappointing.

But what else can you do. If anybody has any other suggestions that would be great. Otherwise maybe I'll try shunt modding once I have access to daddy (damn pandemic) again who can help me properly modify my G12 bracket for proper AIO mounting :p
 
#11 ·
SirCanealot said:
Sorry for the bump, but just in case this affects anyone else... As I mentioned I raised this with Palit support just to see if they happened to have any more information. I submitted to them a couple of GPUZ log files that basically showed the card sticking to the 320w limit, but they said as the higher powerlimit run had some higher power spikes then the raised limit was doing something.

That and they only support the 'standard' configuration of the card. So they wouldn't be able to comment on any use beyond 320w :/

I might email them back and state that I've run multiple benchmarks and generally keep an eye on stats while I play and the card doesn't not really go past 320w (apart from spikes), but otherwise a little disappointing.

But what else can you do. If anybody has any other suggestions that would be great. Otherwise maybe I'll try shunt modding once I have access to daddy (damn pandemic) again who can help me properly modify my G12 bracket for proper AIO mounting :p
Click to expand...
Don't bother.... I have discussed this in the RTX 3080 thread, it appears that the card is basically doing load balancing for power consumption which is why it stays at 320watt no matter you increase it to 350 watt. It sucks, but that is how it is and always will be. Palit specifically stated to me the following:


"The max 12V power from PCI-E is 66W.
150W*2 (8pin*2) + 66W (PCI-E) = 366W.
So actually there's not much room to tune up."

The more I explained to them but I do not see 340 or 350 watt, the more they tuned the same regarding the limits. So I left it there, sold my card, got a Gigabyte Eagle OC, and now a MSI Gaming X Trio.
 
Discussion starter · #12 ·
VPII said:
Don't bother.... I have discussed this in the RTX 3080 thread, it appears that the card is basically doing load balancing for power consumption which is why it stays at 320watt no matter you increase it to 350 watt. It sucks, but that is how it is and always will be.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the reply. All I can really do is let them know my disapointment and that this will probably put me off buying a Palit card again :/
It's a shame as I've never owned a Palit card before, but after dealing with, what, 7 generations of cards with a power limit slider, this is not how any other generation of cards work...
 
#13 ·
SirCanealot said:
Thanks for the reply. All I can really do is let them know my disapointment and that this will probably put me off buying a Palit card again :/
It's a shame as I've never owned a Palit card before, but after dealing with, what, 7 generations of cards with a power limit slider, this is not how any other generation of cards work...
Click to expand...
You make complete sense and I agree with you. It is a pitty as the build quality of their cards are actually really good.
 
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