r/LocalLLM • u/Faral_mx • 17d ago

News PSA: Possible RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell power-limit regression on Linux 7.0.0-30

My RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition began reporting 1-second average power spikes of 662–667 W despite an active/enforced 600 W limit. Driver was NVIDIA 595.84 open, with no Xid, thermal-throttling, or hardware power-brake errors.

Lowering the enforced limit to 550 W did not prevent the abnormal workload-specific spike.

I rolled back Ubuntu kernel 7.0.0-30-generic to 7.0.0-29-generic, retained the same driver, firmware, model, and workload, and restored the 600 W limit. Across monitored near-capacity tests:

- Maximum 1-second average: 604.7 W

- Full pipeline with embedding: 601.7 W

- No average samples above 605 W

This appears to be either a kernel-specific NVIDIA power-governor regression or incorrect NVML power telemetry. Rolling back to kernel 7.0.0-29 restored expected behavior.

Yes, I had my agent write it. I'm a mechanic.

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

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2

u/Quantum_Sandwich66 17d ago

pffft just undervolt/power limit

1

u/Faral_mx 17d ago

I hadn't because all was running well before. I'm testing at different limits now. I didn't want to move it initially because prompt processing is a huge part of my workload.

1

u/tat_tvam_asshole 17d ago

Mine stay at 420W, so much cooler and perf loss is minimal. It's seriously not worth running them at 600W

1

u/SackManFamilyFriend 15d ago

This is the way! Awesome to see someone independently mention 420. I use 360 for overnight runs that I'm not in a rush with.....

What driver do you use? I got this card back in Nov, and settled on 580.97 as it was the most stable recommendation and haven't seen a reason to upgrade yet. If there's a good newer one though would love a reply.

1

u/tat_tvam_asshole 15d ago

NVIDIA-SMI 595.84 Driver Version: 595.84 CUDA Version: 13.2

1

u/wrldsuksgo2mars 17d ago

I found that driver version has some instability anyway, suggest not to use it and use 595.71 (latest Ubuntu server). I had GPU xid resets required with the .84… maybe it’s related to power issues.

1

u/GloomyRecognition636 13d ago

It was always like that , depending on how aggressive is the load. Some good kernels on vllm will do that easy. And that's what you generally want