How to Lock Nvidia GPU Clock and Power Limit Under Windows with Nvidia-smi

The Nvidia System Management Interface (nvidia-smi) is a command line utility, based on top of the Nvidia Management Library (NVML), intended to aid in the management and monitoring of Nvidia GPU devices. It has a number of useful commands for mostly monitoring the status of your Nvidia GPUs, but there are some commands that can be useful for miners as well. There are two commands that we’ll be discussing here now that can be useful to help you optimize your mining performance and while here the focus is for use under Windows, the nvidia-smi tool is also available for Linux and can be used there as well. We’ll be learning how to lock the operating frequency of an Nvidia GPU to a certain fixed value as well as how to control the power limit of that particular GPU as well and how these two commands can complement each other well in order to optimize the performance and energy efficiency of a mining rig based on Nvidia GPUs.

Fixing or locking the GPU frequency to a certain level or the power limit on an Nvidia GPU with the nvidia-smi tool on Windows requires you to start a “Command Prompt” window, but make sure you do so with Administrator privileges, otherwise you will not be able to change anything as you would not have the required permissions. The nvidia-smi tool should be included in the Path, so no need to run it from a specific location, though you might want to run it from a Batch (BAT) file in order to automate it with the start of a miner for instance. Since it requires Admin privileges you cannot set the Batch file to be executed as Admin by default, but if you make a Shortcut to the BAT file you can set the Shortcut in Windows to be ran as Administrator and that would do the job.

To set the GPU clock on Nvidia GPU using the nvidia-smi tool you need to use the -lgc parameter. So, for example to set the GPU clock to 1050 MHz you would need to run nvidia-smi -lgc 1050 as on the example screenshot above. Do note that this will be the GPU clock that your Nvidia graphic adapter(s) will be running at ONLY if they are allowed to by their power limiter at the moment, but more on that in a moment.

To set the GPU Power Limit on Nvidia GPU using the nvidia-smi tool you need to use the -pl parameter. So, for example to set the GPU Power Limit to 120W you would need to run nvidia-smi -pl 120 as on the example screenshot above. When set the Power Limit is fixed regardless of other options of the GPU.

In our example above we…