Nvidia's high-refresh-rate "power bug" rears its head again

A couple months back, some reviewers noticed that pairing their Nvidia graphics cards with high-refresh-rate displays—those with maximum refresh rates greater than 60Hz—caused the idle clock speeds of those cards to surge at the Windows desktop. That clock speed surge resulted in excessive power consumption. Nvidia later issued a fix for that issue in version 361.43 of its drivers, and all was well—or so we thought. A TR reader emailed us recently and reported that he was experiencing the same issue with his triple-Asus-PG278Q setup. He noted that setting any one of those displays above a 60-Hz refresh rate at the desktop would cause this "power bug" to recur.

Since we have an Asus PG279Q and several other monitors in our labs, we figured we'd try and see what was up. Our testbed system is running the most current drivers from Nvidia, version 364.47 . First, ...