Hi, so i’m trying to do some control using the nvidia-smi -pl xxx command and I was wondering what was the safe limit for throttling the -pl limit without causing any damage to the hardware.
I’m assuming that fast switching would cause some problems. Is there any documentation on this ?
Welcome @mzs1505 to the NVIDIA developer forums.
It is very unlikely that you will be able to cause harm to the Hardware by simply invoking those commands.
The power settings are limited by min/max values which you cannot override this way. Similarly the power curve is not immediate, but controlled internally by power smoothing functionality.
Add to that automatic temperature and power throttling and things should be fine.
Of course there are always unforeseen situations where combinations of user settings and controls can cause problems, so no guarantee. But in general the use of normal nvidia-smi settings has been tested.
I hope this helps!
Thanks. Yes, that answers my question. I was worried that changing the values frequently would somehow damage the hardware but it seems otherwise.
Apart from this you mentioned automatic temperature. After doing some research I’ve come to the conclusion that temperature control is not possible without throttling the power limits. Fans can somewhat do the job but they aren’t reliable. Is that true?