NCP-AIO Troubleshooting and Optimization Practice Question
Network Topology
Refer to the exhibit. An engineer is troubleshooting inconsistent training performance across two GPUs in a single DGX node. Why is one GPU reporting a lower clock speed despite being in P0 state?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often assume the GPU is faulty and needs replacement. They fail to consider environmental factors like airflow or fan failure, which trigger thermal throttling even on healthy hardware.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The GPU is experiencing thermal throttling due to improper airflow or fan failure.
The P0 power state represents maximum performance, but the actual clock frequency is governed by the hardware's thermal and power monitoring sub-systems. When two identical GPUs show different clock speeds in the same state, it suggests external environmental factors or hardware degradation. This distinction is critical for AI operations to maintain balanced parallel training workloads and ensure distributed training does not bottleneck on the slowest card.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The GPU is misconfigured in the system BIOS.
Why it's wrong here
BIOS settings typically impact the entire PCIe bus or the collective system environment rather than individual GPU clock speeds. If the BIOS were the cause, all GPUs would likely exhibit identical power management characteristics rather than showing a discrepancy between two specific cards in the system.
- ✓
The GPU is experiencing thermal throttling due to improper airflow or fan failure.
Why this is correct
When a GPU reaches its thermal limit, the firmware automatically reduces the graphics clock to prevent physical damage. A discrepancy in clock speeds between two identical GPUs in the same P0 state indicates that one card is running hotter than the other due to cooling issues.
- ✗
The CUDA driver is applying a different profile to each GPU.
Why it's wrong here
Drivers apply global power policies to all GPUs of the same architecture. While individual GPU power limits can be tuned via nvidia-smi, the default driver behavior does not distinguish between identical cards in terms of clock frequency scaling unless manual overrides are explicitly applied by the user.
- ✗
The GPU is running an outdated firmware version.
Why it's wrong here
Outdated firmware can cause various bugs but rarely causes inconsistent clock performance between two identical GPUs in the same server. Performance variance is almost exclusively tied to hardware environmental factors like heat and power delivery rather than the firmware versioning present on the device itself.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official NVIDIA exam blueprint
This NCP-AIO practice question is part of Courseiva's free NVIDIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the NCP-AIO exam.