New M6500 Discussion Thread

Throttling / fans -

is there a solution to this? My new M6500 seems to be way too aggressive about temperature control, though in general the cooling is not as good as might be desired.

It seems to throttle down the CPU's and run the fans in high speed mode when the CPU gets around 50 C , when it could probably safely run up to 70 C or so.

Anybody running one of those hacker apps to make it tolerate higher temps?

I'd even be happier if the fan would just stay on all the time instead of turning on and off.

 

do you use a laptop cooler? I sure wouldn't want to run my CPU at 70c...50-55 maybe....I'd let the DELL engineers handle this with BIOS updates and leave it alone....just my opinion. I have the intel desktop gadget btw running and can see the CPU throttle as it should i.e. 'on demand'. This laptop seems to cool very well compared to others I've had. FWIW

 

Which 'intel desktop gadget' are you using?

Tony

 

Intel CPUs are rated to run reliably up to 100C at full speed, 24/7. Turning the fans on full speed with the core temperature at only 50C is overkill and annoying.

It might be to your advantage to turn off turbo boost when just doing light duty work. This might help keep the core temperature down. Try ThrottleStop if you want to adjust turbo mode and your CPU speed on the fly.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/3/1794507/ThrottleStop.zip

 

I linked in this thread somewhere...it's for i7's...I'll see if I can find it...

 

Anyone have a color profile for the U2410 Monitor? Bokeh does....but he may not be available. Thanks

 

Basically yes. Under Linux I can switch both of my fans with i8kmon (off/slow/fast). This should also be possible with Windows tools. Unfortunately my BIOS (A00) still wants to control the fans, so that both fight for the fan control resulting in on/off switching every second.
Can someone with a newer BIOS please check if it is possible to switch off the BIOS fan control? Since Dell only provides Windows Executables to update the BIOS it is a real pain to update the BIOS if one uses any other operating system.

Edit:
fyi: The CPU will shut down at 107°C.

 

Giggedy-

Wow... I thought the M6500's didn't throttle... except in extreme conditions to save the CPU from heat damage. It is one of the reasons I ordered one.

Is it possible you are reading CPU-Z wrong or maybe that your vents are clogged?

SteveG

 

Throttling is not specific to the M6500. It's a function of the combination of settings from the BIOS speedstep settings and the power profile (assuming win7) for the Intel cpu and it's associated I/O components. I'm sure you could enable/disable the appropriate things to keep throttling from happening at all. Will say that the dynamic multiplier changes happen practically instantaneously. Had cpu-z open last night during various development builds observing this.

 

Spill-

I guess I don't understand throttling.

I was under the impression that the CPU had two speed data points... "low" and "high". Then, a line is drawn between them and the processor core speeds travel up and down that line depending upon the # of cores in use.

If I had a perfectly cooled system running a single core application on an i7-720qm, I should be able to get to the "high" number of 2.8... The more cores I use, the lower I move on that line. With all cores running, I am at the "low" speed of 1.6.

Then, I thought the algorithm also looked at core temps and power consumption. If it sees either going above a pre-determined estimate, it shifts that line down proportionally (aka - throttling). It now runs, lets say, from 1.3 to 2.5.

So, if I had one core only operating, but the system was getting too warm or using too much current, the "high" number would be brought down, and the most I could achieve would be 2.5 instead of the max of 2.8.

This is what I thought throttling was, not neccesarily what is... am I close?

SteveG