Thanks! I think it'll help when I revert my CPU in the morning and recheck if it stays in p0 again. A common pattern here seems to be you all have fast CPUs, which I gather should be able to feed the GPUs much more quickly than mine can, and so possibly induce a throttle earlier.

I'm curious as to why I wouldn't see similar behaviour running multibeam tasks here on my 980 SC @ stock. VRAM memory clock is sitting pegged at 3505MHz memory clock, power state P0.

would it be:
- Some difference in the way the applications load the GPU affecting turbo-boost or power saving ?
- similarly, that I run 2 instances at a time, raising total load ?
- that I run with process priority elevated above the standard below-normal ?
- the 980 just doing things differently ?
- some driver difference ? (347.62), or
- Something else ?

Minutia like these could all be important as we try to cope with the new generation's changes (for development and users), It'll be interesting as a clearer picture develops.

Is there any point in increasing the memory speed if the memory controller load is not peaked? Going with lower speeds will increas stability and reduce power consumption.

From my brief tests so far yes for (sheer) throughput, though the tradeoff is electricity cost. From a pure efficiency standpoint you could probably argue it's turbo boost doing its job and making you more efficient, rather than increasing throughput. [ After all, efficiency is one of the strengths/goals of this architecture ]

I shall probably cut over to zb myself when I have the time to modify 9 rigs...probably over Christmas vacation in a couple of weeks.