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The original was posted on /r/nvidia by /u/Sexyvette07 on 2023-08-07 12:37:03+00:00.

So I recently picked up a 4080 and started tinkering with it to see how far I could push it. This is a power locked model that I cannot change the voltage or increase the power level above 100%. Long story short is it maxed out at 2970 mhz so I set it at 2925 mhz and called it a day. So far no crashes at this clock speed. Well, I got curious today how much extra power that overclock was using when I stumbled on the idle power draw being 42-43w. WTF? I’m a single monitor setup at 4k 120hz, and people with similar setups posted that they were getting 12-13w or less. Then I noticed the fans weren’t going passive and the core frequency was pegged at 2505. Right away I figured it was a power setting somewhere. Opened up the Nvidia control panel and started looking through the various settings when I found one that said Power Management Mode. This was set to Prefer Maximum Performance, so I switched it off, yet it still persisted at 42-43w.

Apparently when you hit apply, it doesnt actually apply it until you restart the computer! Loaded everything up again and idle power dropped to between 8-10w, the GPU fans were on passive and the GPU frequency dropped to around 200 mhz. Score!

So now onto my question. Is having the power plan within the Nvidia control panel set to normal going to affect the overall performance of the GPU? (except for the first half second it takes to ramp it up to 100%). I’m curious in what circumstances might someone need to have it set to Maximum Performance. It would also be nice for Nvidia to give a better tool tip telling you what happens if you enable or disable it. I don’t remember when I changed that setting, but it would have been nice to know exactly what it did instead of just saying “Maximum performance”. Stupid me probably thought “of course I want Maximum performance…”.