Hi there, so I recently bought the EVGA 980 TI ACX 2.0, card works fine, no issues ingame whatsoever.
(Cross posting this with the Nvidia Forums)

However the issues seem to start when the card goes idle, which it simply doesn't, as shown in image below.

This is the card running idle, to which the temperature will eventually hover around 62C and this is absolutely not normal.

Now, I have since figured what's wrong with it, however the fix doesn't make much sense to me (especially since I'm quite a novice in all this).
So obviously the card is running at full clock speed even when idle sometimes even higher than 1101, around 1304, which is the main issue here.
After looking through everything and double checking things like making sure Power Management is on adaptive and no hardware acceleration was the issue, I found what caused it after some searching on google.
Upon changing some settings in the Multi Display Power Saver my idle clock speed and idle temperatures are fine, sometimes it still shoots up with this setting but it mostly keeps idle low.


 The settings in question.
 
 Idle clock & temperature after



The weird part about this however; is that I'm not even running an SLI setup nor am I using more than one monitor, which was a known issue and this was the fix to.
However, even with one card it seems to somehow cause the card to run at 100%.

Now I tried tinkering in the Nvidia Control panel by setting the Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration to single display performance mode and keeping everything in Nvidia Inspector on default, yet this also yielded the same result: 100% clockspeed and a high idle temperature.

Naturally this is not even a real fix.
So now I'm just left with a bunch of questions.
Is my card faulty? Is it the drivers? Or do I have some setting set wrong?
Is this fix actually a safe thing to do?

Apologies, I've been so busy with the drivers and what not I completely forgot.
Hope this suffices.
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770 3.4GHz
CPU Cooler: Scythe Kotetsu
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ 6GB
Motherboard: Asus H87M-Plus
RAM: 8GB Kingston Hyper X Blu 1600MHz 
Monitor: Dell UltraSharp U2312HM - 23"
 
 
 
EDIT:

Alright I seem to have found the actual issue here by disabling processes one by one in Task Manager.
It seems Razer Synapse is causing the clock speed to go crazy. Is there any way to fix this?

Sajin
Glad you figured it out. Disable the software or try to update it are the only solutions.

Everything is already updated, guess I'll have to wait for new drivers on either Razer or Nvidia.
I take it there's no way to make the GPU drivers ignore Razer Synapse or something?

Do you have power management on adaptive or max performance?

Ok was just curious as that setting is what was causing my high idle clock.

I'm having a similar issue.  I recently received a GTX 980 ti ACX 2.0+ (stock clocked), and I've noticed a few things.

• I'm also seeing what appear to be higher than normal idle temps.  Initially, the fan curve was not set to be silent at temps <60, and the fans would spin at 30% (~1000 rpm) with temps around 47 degrees.  By setting a "silent" curve (no fan until temp hits 60) I saw the idle temp climb to 61 degrees, and the fans came on, so it idles at 63 degrees with 15% fan (~500 rpm).  While it's no real hassle to adjust the fan curves, I was a bit surprised to see it come out of the box running a more typical fan curve than the silent mode that is advertised.  Also, at idle the card does appear to downclock to about 810 MHz.
• After initially installing the card I tried out CoD: Advanced Warfare and Batman: Arkham City, and was concerned with my frame rates.  Originally I had a GTX 980 SC before getting the 980 ti ACX 2.0 as a Step Up purchase, so I used that as my comparison.  I was getting around 30 fps on Batman when I should easily have seen above 60 (on the 980 I saw 60 fps), and on CoD I was seeing 90 fps (I think the game may be capped there since that's the highest the frames ever go).  Then while playing CoD I adjusted super sampling in game to 2X (I'm running 2560 x 1440 resolution) and frame rate dropped to about the teens.  After disabling super sampling I was still getting low frame rates, so I rebooted my PC and the issues went away: I started seeing around 120 fps on Batman, and 90 fps on CoD.  However, when running these a day later my experience was not so smooth.  My Batman frame rates went down to about 60 fps, and my CoD frame rates aren't consistently smooth.  While 60 fps is fine for Batman, I should be seeing higher than this since my 980 could produce similar results.  After witnessing this I added GPU Usage to my EVGA PrecisionX onscreen display, and noticed that in both games the GPU usage hovered around 50% or less.  Even when the frame rates were low, the GPU clock would boost to around 1200 MHz, and the VRAM would fill to about 2GB to 4GB.

So basically, my idle temps seem higher than they should be, and my frame rates and GPU usage levels don't appear to be where they should be.  Is this normal behavior, or should the card be considered defective?  Or, could this simply be a driver issue?  I am running Geforce Experience, and the latest driver (353.30); in fact, I uninstalled the driver and reinstalled it as a clean install, and I still see the same behavior.  I will keep monitoring this to see if it's consistent, but I wanted to get some feedback before jumping the gun and assuming it's a bad card.  I even tried turning off Razer Synapse but the issues continued.  It's weird someone mentioned Synapse, since I had issues with it all weekend, where it tried to update but would freeze and not finish the update.  Here are my system specs:
 
GPU: EVGA GeForce 980 Ti ACX 2.0+
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K 3.5GHz
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master V8 GTS
RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum, 16GB, 1866MHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H
Pwr Supply: EVGA 1000P2 (using single 6+8 pin cable for GPU)
Case: Dell XPS 730x
Monitor: Acer XB270HU, 2560x1440, 27" (GSYNC turned on)

If you go into the Nvidia Control Panel (right-clicking on empty desktop space then select Nvidia Control Panel), you then select "Manage 3D Settings", and one of the options should be "Power Management Mode".  I can't remember if it was this forum or another, but someone suggested changing the setting from Adaptive to Prefer Maximum Performance, and I saw no difference.  I may try that again to see if it behaves any differently, because I am really confused as to why I can't get more than 60 fps out of Batman Arkham City when I got over 100 fps at one point.  I did try out Crysis 2: first without the high-res textures and tessellation, and then with.  After installing the texture packs  actually saw higher frame rates, and in both cases the GPU usage was fairly high, generally between 80% and 95%.  I also watched some of my CoD gameplay videos (ShadowPlay is pretty cool), and noticed that I GPU usage in those games when I was running my 980 SC (reference cooler) was around 50-60%, which is what I get now in CoD, and framerates were around 91 fps.  That tells me that this particular game caps its framerate, unless there's a setting somewhere that would prevent this.  Anyway, I'm still confused by the low GPU usage in Batman and CoD, as well as the high idle temps. As far as the idle temps, I will take a closer look at my case fans and the ambient temperature, just in case...

knip