E6400 overheating throttling

I had to have 2 replacement heat sink + fan assemblies plus a replacement motherboard before my throttling issues went away. But before then unclewebb's throttle stop program worked a treat!

 

That's what I was afraid of. I'm not sure whether it's worth the trouble of going through that hassle, I might as well just rely on ThrottleStop for when I play games.

 

Hey there,

I have a Precision M2400 with a Core 2 Duo T9600 (essentially the same as Latitude E6400 but has NVidia FX370M graphics on board). I have used my system docked with the Advanced E-Port with 2 monitors for the last 7-8 months. In the last 2 months I have been frequently getting the 100% CPU condition (showing on the Desktop CPU/Memory Gadget) where everything grinds to a halt and becomes unusable. On closer inspection within the Windows 7 Resource Monitor the "CPU Usage" is actually near 0% with the CPU "Maximum Frequency" at around 7%! From what I have read I suspect this is the throttling problem.

I am using the latest A21 Bios and latest Dell NVidia drivers. This only happens when docked and leaving the lid open makes no difference. It even occurs when doing the simplest of tasks (Windows Live Messenger, Firefox with a couple of tabs, Thunderbird, No on-access AV scanner) although watching video on the web (such as youtube) or flash based content seems to trigger it most often. During this condition the system fans fire-up and everything feels quite hot. If I'm lucky force closing Firefox cures the problem without having to undock, failing that undocking resolves the problem after 30 seconds or so. As the problem is going away the CPU "Maximum Frequency" rises back to 50%-80% as normal.

Dell are coming tomorrow to replace the mainboard which includes graphics card. They said replacing the processor and its cooling system isn't necessary. Here's hoping that it is just the graphics card and its insufficient heat dissapation and it fixes my problem.

I wonder if anyone has any comments or experienced this with the M2400 before?

Cheers,

 

I suspect that just taking the fan out and cleaning the lint from the heatsink will do the trick.

Use something like hwmonitor to see what temperature your machine reaches when it starts going slow. with the current bios it shouldn't throttle until its about 80-90 deg C.

 

Hi one4spl,

I have installed hwmonitor and when this condition occurs the CPU cores are at 46C and the GPU core at 78C which doesn't strike me as being overly hot. Does this make sense do you think?

 

Sounds like you guys should be doing some monitoring with ThrottleStop. Dell uses CPU clock modulation on a wide variety of their laptops which instantly kills performance.

ThrottleStop 2.53
http://www.mediafire.com/?mh1wn2njmg4

The throttling is typically power related and not heat related. Run a log file and post it here or upload it somewhere so I can have a look at it.

To monitor your Nvidia GPU temperatures too just add GPU=1 to the ThrottleStop.ini configuration file.

 

Thanks unclewebb! During the slowdown condition ThrottleStop reported a CMod% of 12.5% on both cores. I set it back to 100% using the Clock Modulation setting, hit save and the problem immediately went away! The Windows 7 Desktop gadget CPU monitor immediately went from 100% back to 3%.

So my question is: is it worth Dell replacing the mainboard on Monday? Is this throttling just by design and it will just keep happening even with the replacement mainboard? I wonder if anyone at the Dell EMEA Workstation support would actually have a clue what I would be talking about if I tried to explain this to them?

 

I've had a motherboard replacement (because of other issues), and I also have the throttling problem when I play games.

My recommendation is: use unclewebb's excellent software and be done with it. The replacement will have the same problem, and there's always a risk something else stops working as well.

You can of course then use this problem when you order a new laptop, to ask Dell for a "special discount".

 

Hi unclewebb,

Attached is a log extract. I triggered the performance issue by watching a few flash videos in firefox and it started to throttle at 06/13/10 15:22:38. I set ThrottleShop CPU Modulation to 100% at 06/13/10 15:26:35 at which point everything returned to normal. Do you have any further comments which might help with Dell Tech?

Many thanks!

 

I'd have to say that throttling initially starts in that log at:

15:20:39 10.50

A T9600 has a default multiplier of 10.50 but when lightly loaded, it should be able to use Intel Dynamic Acceleration (IDA) and be averaging a multiplier in the 10.50 to 11.00 range. The CPU is barely loaded at this time but it has already been locked at 10.50 on both cores. After that it keeps dropping in steps down to 9.5, 8.0 and then 6.0. That's how throttling typically starts. First multiplier throttling is used to slow the CPU down and then it carries on with clock modulation throttling until your laptop is completely unusable.

They can replace the board on Monday and CPU, etc. but none of that is going to fix a bad design. You pretty much have to go along with this waste of your time so that maybe someday Dell will offer you a different model that doesn't run like a slug when you try to use it. You're not getting the performance you paid for so keep pushing them to do something about it.

My old Dell D830 doesn't throttle like that even when running Furmark + Prime95 at the same time so it doesn't make sense that newer, much more expensive laptops run slower than the ones Dell was building 3 years ago.

Edit: To reduce throttling you have to lock clock modulation at 100.0% and you also have to lock the multiplier at its highest value. This doesn't eliminate throttling, it just reduces it so its not as big a problem. It usually makes your computer a lot more usable. A properly designed bios and suitably sized power adapter is the only real fix.