GPU Clock Throttle
GPU clock throttle reduces performance when power or thermal limits are reached.
GPU clock throttle reduces performance when power or thermal limits are reached.
What this failure is
GPU Clock Throttle is a Hardware failure seen during ML training runs. GPU clock throttle reduces performance when power or thermal limits are reached. Common tags: Clock, Throttle, Power, Thermal.
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Why it happens (the mechanism)
Power limit reached. Thermal limit reached. Voltage limit reached. HW slowdown (hardware protection). Taken together, these mechanisms explain why the failure is reproducible, why it tends to surface on specific workloads or scales, and why generic mitigation attempts often fall short without addressing the underlying cause.
What you'll observe
- Training performance is lower than expected
- GPU clock speeds drop during training
- Power consumption is at limit
Common symptoms and what they mean
| Symptom | Why it happens |
|---|---|
| nvidia-smi shows clocks dropped | Power limit reached |
| nvidia-smi -q shows current clocks lower than max | Thermal limit reached |
| Power consumption at configured limit | Voltage limit reached |
Which systems are affected
- Power-constrained GPU deployments
- Long-running training jobs
- GPUs in hot environments
How to confirm this is the problem
Use this checklist to test the hypothesis against a small reproduction. No single line proves the root cause, so preserve the preceding events and compare one variable at a time.
- ✓Reproduce the failure from a clean checkpoint/seed: the symptom must appear without warm-up state from a previous run.
- ✓Verified signal present: nvidia-smi shows clocks dropped
- ✓Verified signal present: nvidia-smi -q shows current clocks lower than max
- ✓Verified signal present: Power consumption at configured limit
- ✓A targeted fix from the "How to fix it" section eliminates or substantially reduces the symptom within one validation pass.
The fix and the prevention pattern
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Root cause
- Power limit reached
- Thermal limit reached
- Voltage limit reached
- HW slowdown (hardware protection)
The fix and how to prevent it
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