Unusually high board power draw on a RTX 4060 8GB

[Makito]

My ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 EVO OC Edition 8GB reports around 52W board power draw during idle. You can see from my screenshot that it's really at idle state: GPU and memory controller load are very low, as are the clocks, and the fans are stopped.

I'm running the latest Geforce drivers to date (566.14) with every setting at default. No overclocking. I have checked power management mode in 3D settings and it's on "Normal".

UEFI BIOS is up to date. Resizable BAR is enabled and working. ASPM settings are on default.

I'm a bit puzzled, how can it be possible? My former GPU, a GTX 1660, had a board power draw of 10W at idle, it had no fan stop and temps very higher. Besides, when I run a light Unity game, as Pillars of Eternity, for example, the board power draw only increases about 3/5W: it has no sense, it should go up considerably higher than that. And when playing something really demanding, like Alan Wake 2 on high settings the max power draw is around 115W, what it should be, no more.

It has to be some kind of driver bug, right?

 

[Macro Device]

Your system might be spiked with a mining virus or something like that. Try this GPU in a different PC or perform a fresh Windows installation on a different, proven to be OK, SSD. Or HDD, doesn't matter for this test but HDDs are painfully slow.

But first, I'd run DDU and reinstall the drivers to see if the issue goes away.

 

[Ruru]

What's your monitor setup? With 2x 4K monitors, my 3080 draws almost 100W in desktop.

 

[:D:D]

Some Nvidia cards have faulty / incorrect power readings. I think 4060 was one of them. GTX 1050 Ti is another which reads 34W idle through SW but has been shown in TPU reviews to be nearer 4W using external measurements of PCIe socket and 12V connectors. A give away is the TDP % reading being 0.0 and an even better give away is nvidia-smi cmd showing N/A for power reading.

 

[Lewzke]

are you running some ultimate performance power plan mode in Windows? maybe this is some PCIe power saving issue, for the maximum powersaving at idle you need power saving on the PCIe bus too. try "balanced" power mode

 

[Makito]

Some Nvidia cards have faulty / incorrect power readings. I think 4060 was one of them. GTX 1050 Ti is another which reads 34W idle through SW but has been shown in TPU reviews to be nearer 4W using external measurements of PCIe socket and 12V connectors. A give away is the TDP % reading being 0.0 and an even better give away is nvidia-smi cmd showing N/A for power reading.

Yeah, you're right. I have run "nvidia-smi" command, and that's what is shows

 

[:D:D]

An old post explains, not sure if they fixed up the driver to show N/A with nvidia-smi later on?

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/geforce-graphics-cards)/5/522968/4060-idle-power/

I think I posted this before but don't remember where

So really drawing ~10W while ~53W shown.

 

[GerKNG]

Some Nvidia cards have faulty / incorrect power readings. I think 4060 was one of them. GTX 1050 Ti is another which reads 34W idle through SW but has been shown in TPU reviews to be nearer 4W using external measurements of PCIe socket and 12V connectors. A give away is the TDP % reading being 0.0 and an even better give away is nvidia-smi cmd showing N/A for power reading.

this.
50W at idle with no active cooling will not have the GPU sit at 31°C.

it's a bug.

 

[3valatzy]

What's your monitor setup? With 2x 4K monitors, my 3080 draws almost 100W in desktop.

Time to upgrade with something decent. 100W doing basically nothing is ludicrous..

Meanwhile:

 

[eidairaman1]

Is it crashing?

 

[Frick]

Time to upgrade with something decent. 100W doing basically nothing is ludicrous..

To be fair computers rarely do "basically nothing" these days, and 2x4K monitors is a lot of pixels.

 

[John_Boh]

it's a know bug of the 4060, i made a similar post on overclock.net some time ago.
i noticed it on an Asus 4060 dual and a GB 4060 LP, same behaviour.
they didn't fix it yet for what i know


edit:
ps: the bugged sensor is "PWR_SRC Power Draw" that can't show nothing less then 47,5W for what i remember, but just use the GPU Chip Power Draw instead and assume that the rest of the board can't consume more than... i don't know... 15W in the worst case maybe on a 4060.

 

[StViolenceDay]

Most power-hungry nvidia GPUs has R005 shunt resistors and "semi-analog" IC that measures current amps passing throw those shunts. GPUs having such measurments reports their actual power usage with quite high precision of 1-2Watts.

But less power-hungry GPUs like x050 and 4060 sometimes lacks those shunts, and just estimate power usage by a very unprecise formula, based on GPU clock and voltage. Without any actual measuring of Amps or Watts. This case looks similar to the latter variant

 

[cinnamoney]

I have an asus 4060 and it doesn't read power usage after upgrading to the new nvidia app beta. When using the old geforce experience app it does report around 20 ish watts during idle and light desktop use. If you have more than one monitor it's likely that it triggers a specific power state that increases wattage use. One other thing I would look for is apps using the gpu, perhaps badly coded software or a miner.

 

[John_Boh]

I have an asus 4060 and it doesn't read power usage after upgrading to the new nvidia app beta. When using the old geforce experience app it does report around 20 ish watts during idle and light desktop use. If you have more than one monitor it's likely that it triggers a specific power state that increases wattage use. One other thing I would look for is apps using the gpu, perhaps badly coded software or a miner.

it's simply a bug.
try to use gpu-z and-or hwinfo64, you'll probably notice it too.