[Unraid OS version 6.9.0-rc2 available]

On 1/17/2021 at 10:06 AM, Gnomuz said:

Well, it's been the normal behavior of the Nvidia drivers for a while. A "power limit" is enforced for the card by the vbios and drivers, and when the power drawn approaches this limit, the clocks are throttled.

If you want to see what the power limits are and to which extent you can adjust them, you just have a look at the output of 'nvidia-smi -q'

Mine looks like that on a P2000 (which is only powered by the PCIE slot, thus the 75W min & max) :

    Power Readings
        Power Management                  : Supported
        Power Draw                        : 65.82 W
        Power Limit                       : 75.00 W
        Default Power Limit               : 75.00 W
        Enforced Power Limit              : 75.00 W
        Min Power Limit                   : 75.00 W
        Max Power Limit                   : 75.00 W

On this one, no adjustment is possible, as Min and Max Power Limits are the same. And it's almost constantly throttled due to the power cap when folding.

 

Same output for a RTX 3060 Ti on another rig:

 

[...]
Clocks Throttle Reasons
        Idle                              : Not Active
        Applications Clocks Setting       : Not Active
        SW Power Cap                      : Active
        HW Slowdown                       : Not Active
            HW Thermal Slowdown           : Not Active
            HW Power Brake Slowdown       : Not Active
        Sync Boost                        : Not Active
        SW Thermal Slowdown               : Not Active
        Display Clock Setting             : Not Active
 [...]
    Power Readings
        Power Management                  : Supported
        Power Draw                        : 194.23 W
        Power Limit                       : 200.00 W
        Default Power Limit               : 200.00 W
        Enforced Power Limit              : 200.00 W
        Min Power Limit                   : 100.00 W
        Max Power Limit                   : 220.00 W
[...]

For this one, you can see it is throttled because 194W are drawn out of a 200W limit. But this power limit can be adjusted between 100W and 220W through the command 'nvidia-smi -pl XXX', where XXX is the desired limit in watts.

That's the way it works, and it makes overclocking/undevolting more complicated. The way to go for efficient folding is to lower the default power limit, while overclocking the GPU (-> same perf with less power) . But it's impossible afaik on an Unraid server, as you need an X-server to launch the required 'nvidia-settings' overclocking utility ...

 

To summarize, nothing worrying in what you see, and not much to do. The only thing you can try under Unraid is raise the power limit to the max and see if you get better results for your folding. From my personal experience, minimal impact on performance, and a bit more power drawn 😞

Thank you for your clarification. I have been looking around as well for overclock commands, but haven't been successful and your post confirms my doubts.

I was wondering if you've been able to find something else?

The nvidia-smi adjust clock settings only seem to apply to tesla gpus

I hope settings like these will be added in the future.