Does increasing GPU power limit allow for higher performance? If so, how can I do that (Ubuntu 18.04)?

Hey guys, total newbie to the forums here. I’d love if you nice people could help answer a question I have.

I’m running Ubuntu 18.04 on a Dell Precision Tower 3620. I recently upgraded the graphics card to a RTX 2070 Super and got a 750W Corsair PSU to power it all.

However, the power limit is set to 215 W. This seems low given my 750W capable PSU. I’m currently taking a deep learning class and running the card up to 215 W training DNNs brings the card’s temperature up to 75 C. Am I right in thinking that there should be room to spare here? Wouldn’t setting a higher power limit allow for better card performance? Am I wasting my time?

Anyway, I tried following a previous thread on here by making nvidia-persistenced and nvidia-smi able to be run as sudo without a password, rebooting, and then running the following command, which unfortunately did not work. This was the command/output:

➜  ~ sudo nvidia-smi -pl 250     
Provided power limit 250.00 W is not a valid power limit which should be between 125.00 W and 215.00 W for GPU 00000000:01:00.0
Terminating early due to previous errors.

This is a total bummer! Is there really no way I can override this setting? Or would increasing the power limit not even matter much?

If increasing the power limit isn’t useful, then what else can I do to boost performance?

Oh yeah, I should mention my driver info and stuffs!

Here is nvidia-smi after doing DNN training for 5 minutes:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 430.50       Driver Version: 430.50       CUDA Version: 10.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce RTX 207...  Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 61%   73C    P2   190W / 215W |   6555MiB /  7973MiB |    100%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1011      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                           278MiB |
|    0      1570      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                         159MiB |
|    0      4589      G   ...quest-channel-token=6529682849136542766    51MiB |
|    0     28503      C   ...e/seth/.virtualenvs/default/bin/python3  6033MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

It says CUDA 10.1, but I actually have CUDA 10.0 on my system.

nvcc -V

nvcc: NVIDIA (R) Cuda compiler driver
Copyright (c) 2005-2018 NVIDIA Corporation
Built on Sat_Aug_25_21:08:01_CDT_2018
Cuda compilation tools, release 10.0, V10.0.130

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