E6400 overheating throttling

siliconix

does it involves higher temperatures of chipset/GPU .. I mean does fan kick in at higher temps. ? From my point of view I do not suffer from throttling as Chipset/GPU goes to 60C fan kicks in and in a seconds .. it's like 45C after minute 40C. I would like to be that way .. does this BIOS change it?

 

I don't monitor the temps, but before A15 I couldn't play a 25 minute tv show w/o fan kicking up a notch higher than now, so I'd imagine the temp is a tad higher before it kicks in.

 

I have installed A15 and I don't notice any difference when the fan kicks in. Still it starts at 45/46C chipset temperature (*) and goes to high speed at 50C. I have Intel Graphics.

(*) I am not sure it is the chipset temperature but I think so.

Örjan

 

I haven't been following this thread since recently, so let me describe my experience with the throttling problem with my E6500 with Nvidia 160M purchased last December. Now it's getting progressively worse until Firefox + Windows Media Center = throttling after 30mins to 1 hour.

Pretty much for the first 7 months or so were pretty much issue free, I think I was using one of the older bios, like A02 for most of the period. For the first 6 months I was also overseas and in much more colder weathers which might have or have not prevented this issue from coming up, and this was also using the dock most of the time.

After I've returned (to Singapore), around June or so, I still haven't gotten this problem. I could still game pretty much endlessly without facing the issue ever (without dock since I didn't have it with me at that time), but around late July or so I started facing this problem where after gaming for 1 or 2 hours, the computer would throttle and my cpu would reach 100%. Closing the game would calm it down a bit but the issue certainly didn't go away. I was probably using A12 around these times.

So after I got my dock back, around early/mid August or so, things got worse and throttling would begin like 10-20 mins into playing a game. I was using WinXP all the time before, and a week ago, I got a hold of a RTM copy of Win7 and installed it. Things pretty much remained the same, not much changes that I could discern. Throttling keeps happening and pretty much make gaming on this laptop unbearable. The place I just moved into is pretty hot and ventilation isn't the greatest either, which might contribute to the factors.

So just now I installed A14 bios E6500 (released 28 August) hoping it would help. Nope, nothing changed. Even worse is that I can't even shut down windows properly because when it throttles I can't even close programs. So I just do a force shutdown by holding the power button because I don't want to wait an hour (I guess) for it to sort itself.

Checking Everest which I just installed, my CPUs are around 45-48C, my GPU from 63 going up to 70C after 20 mins while using firefox + windows media center. Checking perfmon in Win7 gives my % of maximum freq at a constant 35.00, which could have caused by the previous throttling. So my CPU is also hanging around 70-75% average right now when just doing these two tasks.

Another thing that I noticed recently is that when I just restart windows normally while being throttled, the throttling pretty much continues making loading up windows after the restart taking much longer than usual, and then the throttle sometimes remain or goes away after startup. If I do a shutdown however and start it up again, the throttling seems to go away... until I trigger it again.


If any of these help in resolving the problems, I'd be glad to do more diagnostics. Either way, I'm going to pester Dell support first thing in the morning.

 

Your motherboard is broken.
I suggest you give a Dell call and get the motherboard + heatsink replaced (I think your laptop has 2 of them).

Many with the Nvidia solution got their throttling problem resolved like this.

 

Motherboard eh?

Now I remember that I just had the motherboard replaced slightly less than two months ago because my laptop wouldn't start up anymore...

Anyway, I'll take your suggestion and get dell on it. Thanks.

Edit: And adding to that, I just had the battery replaced two weeks ago because it suddenly started dying down a month ago and had like 10% maximum charge left.

 

The problem when you massively produce computer parts, it is bound to have manufacture problems, or even completely batch of bad motherboards. If 1 chip, or wire is not 100% you have problems. And a motherboard, has a lot of those, considering that you have USB controllers, firewire controllers, eSATA/SATA controllers, northbbridge processor, southbridge processor, BIOS, CMOS, PCI-E, and more; in addition, that you have a sound card AND graphic card with it's own set of problems, PLUS the wiring of everything. It's very difficult to know which motherboards are pitas and which are 100% perfect.

I also suggest the heatsink as well, as in reality you can't re-use thermal pads. The second it's removed, and by the time the motherboard is being switch, you have a lot of dust particles that comes down to it. Not to mention that the pad already has dried since the first install. The technicians don't carry new thermal paste or pads.

 

Dell has replaced my motherboard once and I'm pretty sure the tech had new thermal pads. Whether they place them properly is another question...

 

For my replacement last time, I certainly don't recall new thermal pads.

 

Sorry I'm a bit new to this thread. I updated the bios yesterday on the refurb'd E6400 I received (yesterday as well). It has got Intel graphics.

How do I reproduce this problem? The fan definitely kicks in as soon as I start a game like Counterstrike Source.