nvidia-smi just gave me a text readout.  Didn't see way to edit anything.
[edit] check that... i did see the command nvidia-smi -i $GPU -lgc $VALUE ..  but just looking into it a little more before messing with anything


nvidia-settings brings me to a nice nVidia GUI that I can go through.  but none of the settings are editable. (greyed out).  at least they were until I stumbled upon this setting to modify the xorg.conf file to add in "coolbits 28".  Now the nvidia-settings can be changed a little.
I can modify the fan (which was one of my biggest things)

Now just trying to see if I can play with the clock/mem settings at all