E6400 overheating throttling

It could be the GPU power management kicking in, which makes the Aero experience a little choppy.
This is an issue which can be found on low to medium-low end GPU's from both ATi and Nvidia.

The fix (for Nvidia solution only), is that I made a small program called: NV GPU Pro.
This program allows you to tweak several driver settings from your graphic card. One of them is tweaking Nvidia powerMizer (the power management of the GPU). What you can do with my program, is set the Nvidia PowerMizer to only disable itself when you are plug-in. As soon as you go on battery, it's back on, so that you don't lose battery life.

How the program works:
- Doesn't hack or modify the drivers itself
- Doesn't need to run on the back
- No setup, 100% portable, just run set what you want, restart the computer to apply chances and your done! (you can delete the program).
- When you run, the software will scan your system so that all tweaks are appropriately set based on your configuration. The software is tested with a wide variety of Nvidia GPU's which ensures a great chance of success, and less chance of BSOD. As your son and I have the same system, expect high chances of success. Yes, you can reset the settings/ If you update or re-install the drivers you will need to re-apply your settings.

Note: This weekend a new version of Nv GPU Pro will out, which will support 256 series drivers from Nvidia.

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If the above does not help:

Did it had the motherboard and heatsink replaced? It could be wither the heatsink is miss placed or a motherboard problem. Of course, have the motherboard fixed first or both at the same time, as once you remove a heatsink, thermal paste needs to be re-applied... Dell doesn't do this, they just put it back, engraving the situation.

 

I don't think you appreciate/understand this problem. It is not "a little choppy". It's the system being downright unresponsive.

 

So that is hardware problem, unless you make balance or high performance profile act like Power Saver in the options.

 

When these laptops reduce the multiplier and start using clock modulation, the performance can decrease to 10% of the designed performance level. That takes "a little choppy" to a whole new level.

I talked to the guy who wrote the 59 page bible about his throttling Latitiude E6500. The new and improved bios didn't fix a thing for him either. Unfortunately, after signing an NDA, he's not allowed to publicly talk about his problems anymore.

GoodBytes: Can you run 10 minutes of the Prime95 Small FFTs + Furmark test and post a screen shot and ThrottleStop log file of that? Not a handful but many Latitude owners with the Nvidia GPU can not run that test at full speed without running into severe throttling. You can include GPU=1 in the ThrottleStop.ini file so your GPU temps will be logged too.

If your laptop without any tweaks can run at full speed that's great but I don't think your laptop represents the majority of Latitude E6400 owners that are using the Nvidia NVS 160M.

 

What is the log part you me to show in throttle stop?

You say that "CMod%" at 100% is sever throttling here, but it always shows 100% for everything.. I don't get it.
Also the UI is completely different from the latest version. You need to update your screen shots.

Also your CPU speed presented is wrong. It doesn't match the real clock rate. Everest demonstrate the real speed, which has been confirmed with other programs.

 

I didn't post or create that picture you linked to. A clock modulation reading of 100.0% shows that clock modulation is not being used to internally slow down your CPU. This is the numbering system that Intel uses so you will have to complain to them about that.

Don't be so quick to attack and jump to conclusions. At least post a picture of the problem that you are having. Many monitoring programs do not follow the Intel recommended method for determining the multiplier at idle. At full load, CPU-Z, Everest and ThrottleStop will likely be exactly the same. Total MHz are not even logged by ThrottleStop because this data is not needed to determine a throttling problem.

All you have to do is download ThrottleStop, click on the Log File and the More Data Options and then do some testing at full load so ThrottleStop can log what your CPU is up to. It is designed to very accurately record the CPU multiplier and CPU clock modulation settings. For best results, run it by itself or run it with CPU-Z when testing.

 

While we're discussing throttling and overheating, can someone explain to me why my laptop handled heat very well (80ºC max GPU temp while gaming heavily) and this year (with similar temperatures vs. last year) it reaches 103ºC?

Maybe I should really ask for a replacement...

 

My best guess is that the thermal paste has lost some of its properties and/or your fan needs to be cleaned.


on another note, what are the different problems of integrated graphics vs nvidia dedicated GPU?

mine is with the intel GPU, so possibly the nvidia card handles heat better?

 

Yes, the first thing to check is whether the cooling system (more the grille on the heat sink than the fan itself) needs cleaning.

Dell uses a thermal pad on the northbridge so the cooling system isn't as effective as it could be.

John

 

Here's an example of two monitoring programs reporting the same information. CPU-Z rounds the average multiplier off to the nearest 0.5 while ThrottleStop prefers to be more precise. The total MHz are different but that doesn't make either program right or wrong.

With CPU-Z, you need to right click on it so you can see what each core is up to individually. When Intel Dynamic Acceleration is being used, one core will be mostly asleep and will be using the default multiplier while the second core will be working hard and mostly using the IDA multiplier.

By default, CPU-Z only shows you Core #0 which can be misleading. If you right click on it though, CPU-Z can also show you what Core #1 is up to and in this example, it reports IDA correctly. So does ThrottleStop and HWiNFO32.



Now if we could just get some ThrottleStop Log data from an E6400 with an Nvidia GPU while running Prime95 + Furmark, then we could see if Dell actually fixed anything with their last bios or if it was mostly a PR campaign and very little was actually done to fix the known throttling issues the E6400 has when fully loaded.