i7 6820HK thermal throttling

Hi everybody,

I have an Alienware 17 R3 (shipped during October of 2015), with a i7 6820HK and a 980M.
And for the past two months I encountered a lot of thermal throttling with the CPU.
The weird things being:

• I'm using the computer in a room with AC, so the temps of the environment did not change because of summer.
• The throttling starts when the CPU package temp reach only 75°C. I've been using a lot of different gaming laptop for the past years and 75°C doesn't hit as a high temperature.
• The thermal throttling mainly consist of a lowering of the CPU frequency to 0.79GHz (resulting in a lower power consumption and then temperature, of course) and seems to resume regular behavior when reaching 50 degrees.

Needless to say that any games I could be playing will suffer very low FPS during the two minutes this thermal throttling is happening.

I tried to see if some overclocking parameters could allow me to increase the temperature threshold without success, but to be honest, I never overclocked a CPU before, only the GPUs.

Does someone have any idea about this situation, is it the normal behavior, is it possible to alter it?

Thank you for reading!

 

Where did you see that it was actually thermal throttling? In Hwinfo or other monitoring software ? Mine throttles at 92 degrees C which is way over 75 degrees.

Maybe there is insufficient power supplied to the CPU, what PSU are you using ? 180W or 240W ?

 

From the official Intel software, XTU. It cans monitor the different throttlings (power, thermal) operating on the CPU.

EDIT : And the power supply is a 240W Flextronics.

 

I had a similar problem with my R3...or i should say I have. Its very intermittent - sometimes not appearing for months. In my case XTU reports it as thermal throttling, but if you open up Hwinfo, the performance limit reason is IA PROCHOT and GT PROCHOT (not thermal event, which is usually triggered above 92C). Dont know what the difference is!

The way I deal with is just disable BD PROCHOT in throttle stop. Hope that helps.

 

I'm trying this right away.

I just updated the BIOS after posting this thread, and played a little bit as I was monitoring.
The CPU after the BIOS update got high as 77°C before going down several times. But at some point it was at 69°C, and then the "Thermal Throttle" of Intel XTU started, the frequency dropped, as well as the temperature and the TDP. But the "Active Core Count" went from 1 to 2. Don't really know what it means though.

 

Same machine. SAME Problem. Bought this laptop just before Overwatch hit and have been plagued with thermal throttling issues. I suspect perhaps they forgot thermal paste of it is simply an engineering flaw.

I have to lower overwatch settings to medium at 1080p to reduce the chances of it happening. I have also used throttle stop to disable turbo boost to help keep the cpu temps lower.

 

Very strange. i never saw it throttle at those temps which are veryvreasonable by the way. is one core sticking out regarding temperatures?

 

Sometimes one core sticks out but I haven't been watching it too much of late. I know my reply is a bit late as well . I am considering liquid metal thermal paste as I have heard good things about it but I can't figure out why Alienware released a gaming laptop that requires a full tear down just to re paste. :

 

Everything changed when Dellienware started with BGA!!

 

I am a bit peeved that they no longer have the MXM chips. Will using liquid metal thermal paste void warranty?