Hi,
I have a strange issues.

When I select 120Hz for desktop refresh rate, my GTX580 will change power state to the highest (772Hz/1544Hz/2004Hz)
The only way to revert back to lowest power state is choose 110Hz refresh rate or less.

Drivers 263.09

This makes sense, I guess. Maybe 120Hz mode needs the extra juice. Any reason you have to be running in low power mode?

in 2D the GPU (for both ATI and Nvidia, at least 3 last generations of video cards) is always in low power mode, not even in the middle one.
When you play accelerated video it jumps to the middle state, but never to maximum

You have 3 power states, performance, medium and low
performance is all clocks on maximum, medium is about half for GPU and 1/3 or less for memory
and low power state is extermly low, 51Mhz for GPU and 135Mhz for memory (for the GTX580)

The reason it bothers me is becuase its broken and should be fixed, and the card just gets hotter for nothing

at the moment i have it on 110Hz refresh so the card is in low state, only 34% Celsius
when i use 120Hz refresh rate in high state the temps go up to 55-59% (Im talking about windows desktop not games)

its just unnecessary heat

Yeah, I see what you are saying. That could be annoying. On my GTX 470 I am only seeing two different modes though. On the desktop (doing nothing) its at 405MHz, then if I open a video or play a game it jumps to 625MHz. I am looking at this in GPU-Z. Is there some other program that is better for monitoring this stuff?

Thats strange, download NvidiaInspector 1.9.4.2.
It will show you all power states that you have, go to overclocking tab and it will show you all the power states.

Ok, when I use that program now it shows 51MHz on the desktop.

Thats how it supposed to be for 2D.

Did you checked in overclock settings that your video card have 3 power states too?

Seems my card, the GTX 470, has 4 power states. 1 low, 2 mid, and 1 high. The mids are pretty much the same expect for a difference in the memory clocks.

Sorry to be kind-of hijacking the thread, but I have a similar issue with 560ti and running a secondary display through the hdmi.
Frequencies of both core and memory jack-up to the max and temperature and fan RPM along with them. This is very annoying and I don't understand why you need full performance frequencies for running two displays. There was no such issue with AMD gpus, which essentially run in 2d mode in this situation.

Thats a driver bug, not yet fixed.
Same with 120hz displays, if you use 110Hz or lower the power states working as needed, 53hz in windows.
ify ou use 120hz it goes to highest state..

same with dual displays, try to fully uninstall all nvidia drivers, reboot, go to program files and delete nvidia folder
and then install latest beta driver and choose clean install, latest version is 275.50
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

Thanks, ViruzZ, but I'm going near 120hz, I have a connected DVI and HDMI diplays, strictly 60hz. Probably will wait for a certified release, but will definitely do clean install and delete the folder.