Developer tames DGX Spark overheating with custom clock-locking daemon for Ollama
A developer running large language models via Ollama on an Nvidia DGX Spark reported sustained GPU temperatures of 82–84°C, uncomfortably close to the hardware's software slowdown threshold. The DGX Spark's GB10 chip exposes no user-accessible power limits or fan controls through nvidia-smi, with all thermal management handled by firmware. To address this, the developer built a lightweight daemon that polls GPU temperature every 30 seconds and adjusts the GPU clock ceiling up or down in 150 MHz steps using nvidia-smi's lock-gpu-clocks command. The solution brought sustained temperatures down by roughly 11°C, from 83°C to around 72°C, while maintaining approximately 94% GPU utilization across the same workload. The tradeoff is a 5–15% reduction in median inference throughput, which the developer considers acceptable for continuous 24/7 operation.
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