E6400 overheating throttling

So to save me reading 50 pages of discussion, could anybody be kind enough to summarise what happened in the end with the overheating issue with E6400s and E6500s? I'm considering buying one but the overheating stories have made me very nervous. I know Dell issued a Bios upgrade back in December - did that resolve the issue?

thanks!

 

As far as I'm concerned the problem is fixed. One improvement in the recent BIOS updates was to introduce more fan speeds.

John

 

Yeah mine was fixed with a replacement main board and replacement heatsink/fan assembly.

 

My first E6400 came in very bad condition out of the box. After a short time Dell agreed to give me a brand new machine. This new machine not only does not overheat as it handles heat quite well.

 

hey everyone,

first post for me, and i'm a big computer noob, but i thought i'd try to help others if i could who encountered the same problem as me.

like most of the people posting here, i had no problems with my e6400 for about a year and then started experiencing major slowdowns after about 10-20 minutes of very light gaming activity (e.g. half life source). it was weird because i could go for hours doing certain activities (like typing) but could only go for minutes on others (like 3d gaming) before i could barely move my mouse.

my e6400 has a p8600, 2 gigs, win vista, quadro nvs 160m (driver 8.15.11.8621), bios a20

at first i thought i was infected with some spyware or that my 3d card had blown something, but i came to the conclusion after reading this thread and the one at dell forums that it was a combination of heat and processor throttling that was killing performance.

i eventually solved my problem. what worked for me was the following:

1) cleaning out the dust from my laptop fan (only need a small screwdriver and some compressed air) (see http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19247293/19512317.aspx?PageIndex=5 for pictures, credit to melmdk at dell forums)

2) using unclewebb's ThrottleStop (http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=348221&page=46).

i have to admit i didn't know what i was doing when i installed the program, but there are good directions included with the zip, and it's really intuitive. just turn it on, check the box for clock modulation (set at 100%) and start running your program (e.g. half life 2). there are also sensors in the newest version so you can tell if you are experiencing the throttling problem.

doing the above basically cooled down my machine and stopped the throttling problem. i hope dell comes up with an official solution soon, but thanks to all who posted. hope what worked for me works for others too. for those who are interested, this e6400 issue seems to have created quite a huge "ThrottleGate" controversy. google for info.

ps. i have been checking my comp's temp and stuff while using throttlestop, but if i am on the road to an exploding laptop or failed hardware, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated . thanks all.

 

Make sure you have the latest BIOS, and that not only the fan but heatsink is dust free. Your not supposed to have a throttling problem, not with the Nvidia solution.The laptop cooling system is so good that I am able to overclock my Nvidia Quadro NVS 160M at crazy speed without any additional cooling (see signature link to see how much I went far).

I suggest to get a heatsink replaced and motherboard replaced. I suggest the motherboard as I assume a heat bubbled formed in the thermal pads, and may have damaged a segment of the processors or sensor.

 

What is the current, most straight-forward way to determine if my CPU is currently being "limited by system firmware" / thermally throttled? I.E., the "Maximum Frequency" in the Task Manager Resource Monitor fluctuates for power savings - and I'm not clear if I'm being thermally throttled if this number will just be prevented from ever hitting 100%, or if 100% becomes "100% of 1.0 GHz" instead of "100% of 2.8 GHz" when throttled.

I have the "Event 37"s in my System Event Log from "Kernel-Processor-Power" reporting that "The speed of processor x in group x is being limited by system firmware...". However, it does not seem clear if / when the throttling is removed.

I tried RMClock, but RTCore64 fails to start due to failed verification on a digital signature. (Running Windows 7 x64.)

 

Run Win7 in test mode, or run throttlestop and dont enable it, it will show you what voltage is currently running. if the voltage does not rise when you start some programs or applications then it is most probably being throttled.

I ran a combination of RMClock & I8kfanGUI and dumped the results into csv's and then combined them and charted out graphs over time to clearly show the load of the cpus was nearly nothing, yet the cpu was being throttled in regular amounts in succession with no recovery, on very little heat.

 

In Resource Monitor in windows 7 you will see the blue line in the CPU graph step down. You can run something like 7zip's benchmark to give your CPU something to do to make it run at 100% of what the BIOS will allow at any given time.

When the machine is lightly loaded you will see the blue line go all over the place, this is speedstep doing its job.

The green line is how much (%) of the current clock cycles, at the current speed, are being used by running applications. Given that theres a baseline level or work that needs to get done to keep your machine working you will see the green line go up as the blue line goes down when you are being throttled.

Ive has no issues at all since installing A19 in my E6500. It will run *crazy* hot before it throttles, just like it should.

As others have said its also worth taking the fan off every few months and vacuuming out the dust. The bit of exposed sticky tape in there seems to collect dirt much more quickly than my ye old D610.

 

A link to signed version of RTCore64.sys is near the end of the first post in the Undervolting Guide.

Also, you can try this trick to see what is happening:

Note that one of the status lights flashes while you are in this mode, and the only exit is via a reboot.

John