AMD Hawaii power-management fix on Linux

od6configThe new Hawaii-based GPUs from AMD (Radeon R9 2xx, FirePro W9100 and Firepro S9150) have a lot of improvements, one being a new OverDrive 6 (AMD’s version of NVIDIA GPU Boost). Problem is that it’s not supported yet in the Linux drivers and you will get too low performance – it probably will be solved in the next version. Luckily there is od6config, made by Jeremi M Gosney.

Do the below steps to get the GPU at normal speed.

  1. Download the zip or tar.gz from http://epixoip.github.io/od6config/ and unpack.
  2. Go to the directory where you unpacked the archive.
  3. run:
    make
  4. run:
    sudo make install
  5. check if it’s needed to fix the power management:
    od6config --get clocks,temp,fan
  6. if the values are too low, run:
    od6config --autofix --set power=10
  7. check if it worked:
    od6config --get clocks,temp,fan

Only OverDrive6 devices are set, devices using OverDrive5 will be ignored.

The PowerTune of 10 was what we found convenient for us, but you might find better values for your case. There are several more options, which are on the homepage of 0d6config. You need to run “od6config –autofix –set power=10” on each reboot.

Remember it’s third party software, so no guarantees to you and no “you killed my GPU” to us.

One thought on “AMD Hawaii power-management fix on Linux

  1. Jure Pečar

    This tool aslo requires running X server, right? I see it’s trying to connect to localhost port 6000 …

    Is there anything for hawaii (or newer) that would work without X? For example it is possible to set up fglrx in headless mode for opencl compute. It is silly that we have to set up X then to get the monitoring working …

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