It seems that a lot of GPU problems revolve around specific versions of drivers. Though NVidia has their own support structure, you can often learn from information reported by others who fold.
System:
Windows 7
i7 5930K
Asus X99-A
32 GB DDR4
Gigabyte Windforce OC 6GB W/ Arctic Accelero Xtreme IV Cooler
I have been having a problem with the overclock on my graphics card and it seems to be Folding specific. Generally it can run perfectly happily at 2100 Mhz. Sometimes it's a little lower, sometimes higher, sometimes it jitters around a bit. All this seems to depend on what F@H is doing. However, I have been finding lately that it drops to stock clocks ONLY while folding. I can pause it and run a game at 2100 Mhz perfectly fine. I tried pausing CPU folding and that has no affect. In order to get it back to proper clocks I have to restart the computer. The only pattern that I have found is that it seems more likely to occur when restarting folding after playing a game.
Does anybody have any ideas? I'm certainly not power or temperature limited.
I had the same issue with a gtx 970 on Windows 7 sporadically. I guess it is work unit dependent, some work units seem to not use the boost clock. And maybe it is driver related too? Which driver are you using?
Well this is interesting. I went to check what my driver numbers were and found that nVidia control panel was not running and I could not open it. I also found that the drivers were out of date via Geforce Experience. They won't have been out by much, but they are now the current 382.53 drivers. Of course installing the new drivers resolved the problem without a restart, but that doesn't mean that it is gone for good.
Sounds to me like the "Power State" of the card is getting "stuck" on P2 or P8.
Next time it happens:
note the freq (presumably you're using afterburner or GPUZ to check)
open Freecell and minimize it (don't do anything to the game other than open/min)
note the freq
If that raises the freq, then the problem is that your overclock is set to a specific Power State and F@H is using a different state.
There are apps to set state to constant P0, but I tend not to offer "how-to" advice on matters such as this and leave it up to you to find which would be best for you.
Edit: Usually OC is done per driver, so you may have "fixed" it...
Ok, that I shall do. I can tell you that this issue has survived at least one driver update before, but it was increasing in frequency over the past month. I will not speculate further.