E6400 overheating throttling

Can you remind me, do you have the Intel or Nvidia solution?

 

Nvidia Graphics

 

Yea, so my unproven theory sound more and more possible.

 

1. The fact is, that the notebook gets throttled down when reaching 55C on Temp4/5 sensors as reported by speedfan. (No matter if there's nVidia or Intel gfx.)

2. Throttling is not *directly* related to GPU temperature at all.

3. According to whitepaper the max working ambient temperature is 35C.

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Also i noticed the chat with sales rep of Dell which has nice lie: This notebook is not designed for graphics... wow =) It's probably designed for an excel worksheet and as it perfectly suits your sexy underwear =) The reason why there are not so many complains is that it's almost impossible for average BFU to narrow it down to this issue.

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Everyone who wants to figure out if their notebook is overheating or not.

Get speedfan, get a room at 30C and make a graphic intensive stress test. Watch Temp4/Temp5 and if you won't get over 50C you are perfectly safe (at least till your fans got full of dust).

I tried again with brand new PC and got to 54C at ambient temp of 20C in 30minutes... Luckily I didn't get pass the 55C, but this is too close to the 55C to be safe enough.

 

Oh I agree 100%. But the Intel GPU is IN the northbridge. There is no "room" to cool off.

It doesn't sound correct because I never had it at 35C, even if I put my laptop on my A/C. This is probably system ambient temperature (estimate) or the average between the southbridge and northbridge. But... I don't know any better, so I won't comment further and keep that as a possibility in my head.

I don't know what Temp4 and 5 is.. but under Everest, you have the actual names so you know your not looking at the wrong temperatures, and the lowest my Northbridge can go by having the system used normally in Balance power mode is "54C" in a air conditioned room. And I don't have any throttles/slowdowns what's so ever, even when I play games (yes, I looked at the FPS. Yes, I do play games a lot on my desktop, so I see and feel any large drop in FPS)

The only temperature that matches your specification above would be, based on Everest, my RAM and Auxiliary (which is overall system ambient temperature).

 

When I had speedfan installed all I saw for sensors were "GPU" "Core1" and "Core2" and I am 90% sure I have had both core 1 and core 2 over 55C and didn't notice any throttling. I mean, I can look in the system log and it shows that the processor has been limited by system firmware for x seconds. (usually 9-10) but even when it does do that I don't notice it at all... Like I said, played COD4 for at least 20 mins with fans going full speed, and game ran fine the entire time. Also, I have had the GPU temp over 90C if that makes any difference.

 

For those, which don't have A/C
Here is how to make a really cheap one.. (about 30$) all you need is a battery and ice and a or some small computer fans:
http://lifehacker.com/5308833/build-a-diy-portable-air-conditioner

It works efficiently, as the warmness of the room melt (so no need to have an exhaust outside your room) the ice which in turn cool off your room... exactly how an A/C window unit works (but with ice)

 

It is the bios. I8kFanGUI shows the chipset at 56 C, the magic number for throttling.

RMClock does help in keeping the system usable until the throttling stops. This could be a viable solution though I still don't think it makes sense for a screensaver to bring a laptop of this class to its knees.

 

Sad really. More confirmation that the issue is related more to the Intel GMA and bios. And we are back at where we started, an acknowledgement of the issue by Dell and hopefully a bios update.

 

It took me some time but eventually I've narrowed the problems that I experienced with my E6400 to this overheating issue. The high temperatures at my end are caused by intensive use of Vmware virtual machines where I code SAS (statistics). When I compile code on a virtual machine and subsequently execute it then this can get my CPU working hard easily.

I will contact Dell about this problem, but reading the reactions here it appears that that's not going to do me a lot of good in the short run. To think that I invested good money in a E6400 and ended up with a computer that's in reality is less powerful as my good old D620 is really frustrating me.

Anyway, does anybody have a "best practice" to minimize the risk on this throttling? I mean, can we modify the treshold temperature values ourselves? If so how and what would be the recommended values? I mean, you guys must try to circumvent this problem in some way, right?

Thanks