One week after NVIDIA disabled overclocking on their GeForce 900M mobility lineup, a representative of the company over at GeForce Forums has reported that NVIDIA will be bringing back the disable feature for their overclocking enthusiasts on the mobility front. The GeForce 900M series which is based on the Maxwell core architecture is quite powerful on the mobility front and has shown its muscles in the overclocking department with the desktop parts however users were not very keen to learn that NVIDIA has decided to disable that part on the mobile chips.
NVIDIA GeForce 900M Overclocking Makes a Return With Upcoming Driver Update
The NVIDIA GeForce 900 and GeForce 900M lineup is top-to-bottom Maxwell based. Maxwell being a very power efficient chips leaves a lot of TDP headroom for overclocking. We have seen 1.5 GHz core clocks on air cooled discrete cards and the same has been seen while overclocking mobility chips with clocks going north of 1150 MHz from its 1038 MHz standard clock speed. But last week, all of a sudden, NVIDIA decided to disable and get rid of overclocking from the GeForce 900M series and stated the following reason for doing so:
“Unfortunately GeForce notebooks were not designed to support overclocking. Overclocking is by no means a trivial feature, and depends on thoughtful design of thermal, electrical, and other considerations. By overclocking a notebook, a user risks serious damage to the system that could result in non-functional systems, reduced notebook life, or many other effects. There was a bug introduced into our drivers which enabled some systems to overclock. This was fixed in a recent update. Our intent was not to remove features from GeForce notebooks, but rather to safeguard systems from operating outside design limits.” via Geforce Forums
Calling the feature a bug is quite surprising since the user is meant to overclock his product by adjusting the clock speeds and everything that goes wrong next is part of the users fault which should void the warranty. But that still doesn't makes it a big since the user is responsible for he damage done to the product if overclocking goes wrong, not the feature itself. While NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0 technology does leverage the performance in some cases making use of the extra TDP headroom, some of the more old school users still go heavy on over-clocking even high-end notebooks. Hence the fiery bunch of users who were calling NVIDIA out for disabling this feature have now received a response back.
As you know, we are constantly tuning and optimizing the performance of your GeForce PC.We obsess over every possible optimization so that you can enjoy a perfectly stable machine that balances game, thermal, power, and acoustic performance.Still, many of you enjoy pushing the system even further with over-clocking.Our recent driver update disabled overclocking on some GTX notebooks. We heard from many of you that you would like this feature enabled again. So, we will again be enabling overclocking in our upcoming driver release next month for those affected notebooks. If you are eager to regain this capability right away, you can also revert back to 344.75. via GeForce Forums
With overclocking coming back, that might sent a sense of relieve to users after a week worth of overclocking disabled on their notebooks. The driver update is planned for next month in March and there are quite a lot of announcements coming from Green team during the next month too at their press event on March 5th and GTC 2015.
