P2000 noise and curious fix

[howardis]

Hi All,  Sorry if this is in the wrong spot, please let me know if it is.

 

Have been a very long time unraid user and finally took the plunge and added a P2000 after getting a wicked deal on a used one.  Everything is working great but there is some fan noise.  While playing with nvidia-smi I noticed that when idle the fan is at 66-67%.  I was looking at different switches and noticed that if I ran nvidia-smi -l and let it cycle, by the 3rd refresh the fan is down to 48% and the noise is gone.  Since the server sits next to my desk, I've gotten in the habit of opening a terminal window and just letting it run minimized.  Works good but I'm thinking I'm really not fixing anything.  Any ideas on: why the command slows the fan?  or Any other way to permanently slow the fan?  or Any way to fix the fan (as I don't want to return the board).

 

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

when idle

Sun Jan 31 13:17:18 2021       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 455.45.01    Driver Version: 455.45.01    CUDA Version: 11.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  Quadro P2000        Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| 67%   36C    P0    18W /  75W |      0MiB /  5059MiB |      0%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

 

 

while running nvidia-smi -l 

Sun Jan 31 13:16:49 2021       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 455.45.01    Driver Version: 455.45.01    CUDA Version: 11.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  Quadro P2000        Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| 47%   35C    P8     4W /  75W |      0MiB /  5059MiB |      0%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

[severalboxes]

That's interesting. I got so tired of hearing the high pitch whine that I tossed a water block on it.

 

I remember looking around forums for a way to slow it down, but never found anything.

 

The P state looks like it changed. P0 is high performance, P8 would be some throttled down state.

[howardis]

Well my 'fix' seems to consistently work.  Thanks for info around power state.  I wonder what causes the power state to lower only when looping the nvidia-smi command (and return to p0 when it stops).  I would prefer to have to silence it by depending on my desktop continuously asking it to provide status.  The P2000 is going to get annoyed with the dumb requests.  🙂

 

Just stopped the loop and it went to P0.  When I started it again it was P0 for 2 iterations, then P5, then P8 where it settles.  Mostly curiosity, I then started up a 4k-->1080p transcode.  Temperature rose to 45C, utilization 3%, went to P0 but fan topped out at 50% rather than an idle 67%.  Still silent at 50%.  If anyone has ideas....

 

 

[howardis]

Not sure if bumping is frowned on, but anyone have any ideas?

Alternatively is there a way to automate running the nvidia-smi -l command from the unraid server?  Whenever I shutdown the desktop it gets noisy again.

[J05u]

Anything you found about this?

I have same issue

[howardis]

I did fix it but it has been a while.  If my status thing above is working then maybe this will work for you.  I loaded plugin user scripts.  Created a new script with the following to set persistence on each reboot.  Seems to have worked.

 

#!/bin/bash

nvidia-smi -pm 1

echo persistence set

 

[howardis]

@JO5u I guess you can try the nvidia-smi -pm 1 command to see if it works for you before setting up the script