Latitude E6430 - CPU throttling hard

I've got a pretty old E6430 that I bought a few months ago used. Just for fun, I decided to play some classic games on it, including Fallout: New Vegas. But I found that the game was running pretty poorly. I know that the E6430 is not a powerhouse graphically, but it should still be able to run a 10 year old game fairly well.

In looking at stats from MSI Afterburner, I noticed that the CPU was stuck on all cores at 1.3GHz, and hardly ever budging from that speed. Temperatures didn't seem that crazy; I was seeing around 70C on all the cores. So I broke out Throttlestop, set the multiplier to 36 and presto...now all cores are running at 3.4 - 3.6GHz at 85C. The old game isn't running perfectly, but it's quite a bit smoother.

The question is ... why? Is there any particular reason my laptop's CPU should be running like slug? Temps seem OK, power option was set to 'Performance', so I'm stumped. I've got a solution, but I'd rather the thing just do what it's supposed to without any special intervention.

Specs: i7-3720QM, 16GB DDR3-1600, Crucial MX100 256GB SSD, Nvidia NVS 5200M 1GB

 

I've seen this happen on older gens but not 3rd gen. Maybe you're supposed to install some kind of driver from Dell in order to use the turbo. Well whatever the case may be, just stick with throttlestop

 

It might be worthwhile checking the settings in the BIOS. Also, what power rating is the PSU? The computer might be wanting a 90W PSU as there's a dGPU on board and, if you're using a 65W PSU then it automatically throttles the CPU.

John

 

So the problem here appears to be one of my power supplies. I've got a 90w unit that came with the E6430, but I've also got an old 220w Dell PSU that I use occasionally. For some reason, sometimes this old power supply is not detected properly by this laptop (and others) and the connected laptop performs at bare minimum power. That is, unless you force the issue with something like Throttlestop. The old PSU delivers the correct power, but it seems like a sensor or IC on the PSU is on the fritz and doesn't tell the laptop how much power it can deliver.

 

The computer gets the PSU power rating using the centre pin of the DC plug. Is that broken on the problem PSU? Now you have figured out the cause, it might be easiest to buy a second hand Dell PSU with the required rating from ebay. A 10 year old Dell PSU with the correct plug will work just as well as one made yesterday but the newer PSUs tend to be thinner and lighter.

John