AW M15x Throttling Issue Investigation - Stock clocks and overclocked.

You know what, I completely overlooked this issue when I ordered my system.

Should I be hesitant to keep my order due to the throttling? Are you guys using throttlestop and other apps to control this issue?

 

240 doesn't cause throttling, hopefully no issues with 5870. and only a few with the 260, actually see throttling in games.

 

also you have the 620m less power usage so hopefully no throttling

 

Well, two points, mainly, I am trying to sell the M15x since I have the M17x, and the drivers were specifically known to work well with Star Trek Online (geeks ahoy).

 

Ok well no sweat then... just advise whoever your selling it to to use rivatuner and force 3d clocks...Nvidia control panel doesn't really turn off powermizer anyways... as my system still throttles with the MAX PERFORMANCE option selected instead of Adaptive...RivaTuner is the only full-proof fix to date.

 

Thanks guys.

I will just have to see for myself and put the M15x through my gauntlet

 

omg please help me .. I updated to A05 bios and it seems it made the throttling worse.. I cant even play wow with out it happening over and over right away. This is crazy .. I have tried throttlestop and it does nothing at all. :< PLEASE HELP> Thanks.

 

UPDATE: This is fact! Prior to this I could recreate the throttling with some effort. As soon as I flashed A05.. I could recreate by just playing wow and flying around.
I then Flashed back to A03.. It fixed it, is this not proof it can be fixed in the bios? HEH this sux... wow .. they just simply do not care.

 

Just out of curiosity,

You flashed to the a05 and throttling is now worse, unplayable even?

If my machine was throttling all the time, I'd send it back because I would consider it faulty.

They would have to replace it. It's not about them caring or not, if it's not working then you can get your money back.

I get the impression people aren't sending their machines back over this so I assume it can't be as big a deal as people are making out. Otherwise you should all be sending your machines back I guess, right?

 

Well they have had me troubleshoot and they say it is working as it should. This is really silly at this point.. its clear there is a prob. I have A05 and A03.. I have flashed them over and over. If I got a03 the throttling happens but its more difficult to recreate. If I flash A05, and simply play WoW it happens with little effort.
Clearly Something changed, and this isnt for the good.

 

Just out of curiosity (since I did order an M15x), can these issues be solved by just disabling powermizer?

 

I will try, I havent tried that as I would like my GFX card to be throttled for sure while on batt. I just want it to do what it should and stay maxed while gaming etc.



Aside from that, I need some help here. I tried using throttlestop etc etc.. and even that isnt working with a05. I never needed to fix this before.

A05 made this happen to me alot more in real world situations.
One other person mentioned the same thing.

So please all of you retest as it seems more sensitive.

Any suggestions as far as fixing this. I tried what is listed in this thread and it still throttles each and everytime in furmark.

Thanks in advance.

 

I have a M15X with the GTX260M graphic card. My issue is a related to performance - with the AC adapter plugged in the graphic card is throttled to only 25%, but when I pull the plug it increases to 100%. This happens in every power plan and I even created one and made all the settings the same, but it still happens. I have been using Furmark and GPU-Z.

I did some more research using Passmark and it also confirmed that the graphic card is throttling when the AC power is plugged in so it is not an application/benchmarking issue. As this does not seem to be a common problem my first thoughts is that it is something I have done with a power management option in Windows. My "custom" power profile has exactly the same entries for battery and AC so I don't think the problem is there.

NOTE - It is strange that when this throttling is happening the GPU clocks are not changing - it is just the GPU is holding at a 25% performance level.

To clarifiy - I can plug and unplug the AC and the preformance will change on the fly, i.e I do not need to stop the application to see an instantanous 75% drop in frame rate.

 

should probably check if ( wow i say this way too often.. lol) Stealth mode is on. I say this because Stealth mode only works while plugged in, and throttles back your GPU/CPU ... when you unplug, it deactivates... so this seems like the most likely cause to me.

I find its way too easy to accidently turn on that damn Stealth mode, since its touch. Also, Alienware got it all wrong on this one. WE NEED THE GPU/CPU TO BE THROTTLED BACK ON BATTERY, NOT WHEN PLUGGED IN...How dumb is that?...bunch of idiots...

 

The throttling behavior (while plugged in and on a performance power profile) does not appear related to Powermizer, despite what the Dell guys would have you believe. It appears to be a BIOS driven mechanism for reducing power consumption back to "safe" levels. Specifically the more wattage you use, the quicker throttling will hit as you approach the rated maximum for the wall power adapter. Unfortunately, using a larger power adapter offers no improvement.

A faster (and loaded) CPU, brighter screen, running blue-ray drive, music, and powered USB devices will all consume power and result in earlier throttling. It appears to happen very quickly when the CPU and GPU are fully loaded, but can easily occur before that depending on the variables.

This thread is over 112 pages long and contains a plethora of useful information. I highly suggest you read it over, including the steps for applying Joker's fix before making a purchase.

I am annoyed by the throttling, and was hoping Dell would take the high road and fix it.

 

It could be slealth mode - it sounds simple enough and I like simple, (it didn't occur to me before as I do not use it, but I might have touched it accidentially).

 

you may want to download the stealth mode indicator makes it much more simple to know if stealth mode is on or not. it should be on the first couple of pages of the forum.


do you guys want to start a petition or something that will can send out to dell or engadget or something similar to bring this issues to light again.

 

yes please since i am going to be a new owner of this rig i would want i working flawlessly without all these work arounds i will have to do myself. i payed enough for the machine

 

anyone wants to help me make a petition about the throttling issue that we can send to dell and engadget, so we can bring this issues back into the light again. since i'm not very good with wording.

 

lemme know where to go and ill be right on that band wagon

 

well i have the email for the chief editor of engadget already, maybe we can start it here and we can send the link out to dell and engadget, unless someone has a better idea. everyone seems to complain about it so lets get toghter and do something already.

 

Good luck with the petition guys. I brought the issue up with an Alienware engineer I met a few months back at their headquarters and he gave me the same line about powermizer. I didn't want to argue with him so I left it at that. I don't think Dell will ever address this issue. I think with the imminent 5870 revision, they're going to sweep this under the rug and pretend it never happened. You will need to rely on the fix I created along with unclewebb's throttlestop program to get 100% of the performance out of this system. I do not know if the 5870m throttles yet, the people that purchased it haven't really done any testing AFAIK.

 

I believe the guy with the M15x and 5870 has a post about it throttling.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2123/4511242767_702a4583d9_b.jpg

Does the huge drop in min fps count though?

 

its hard to tell from that image what is really happening it would be better if gpuz could record this but sadly he wasn't able to get it to work with the 5870m

 

Stupid question, as I just got my M15x, but how can I check for throttling? Are there steps I can take to replicate it?

 

on the first page is a link for the tool to use, furmark and prime. but those are synthetic test which will make it throttle for sure. the real problem is throttling during regular activities like gaming. but read over the first page, it should gave you a better idea what to look for.

 

Got it, thanks.

 

I just went back and forth between A05 and A03 and I discovered indeed A05 is more sensitive to the throttling, as you can see by the screenies. Now every game I have throttles at somepoint. WoW does it as soon as you enter the game and fly around, even far far away from players. It now is for sure annoying. My point of this is perhaps now because with A05 it can be reproduced very easy in a realworld, situation.. maybe they will fix it. If not in my opinion its almost a crime!
One can hope. : /


Refer to the file names to compare.

A03 Fur, A05 Fur, A05 WoW, A05 UT3

 

Yeah I'm hoping that the A05 bios and the soon to be released 5870 will cause the throttling to occur more often and Dell will finally fix it.

 

GOOD NEWS! A05 bios plus 5870 doesn't throttle at all! Full power all time!
However, because the frequency is fixed to 700/1000, I need to lower it manually everytime, anyway, it's much better than before!

 

So it throttles then?

 

I'd disregard this. Can't even tell if Prime is running, and Furmark wasn't done with the correct resolution, extreme burn, or 16xAA

 

the 620 doesn't throttle...and i'm going to find out if the 5870m throttles or not ( on a 620 system though) in a couple of days! ill report back as soon as i find out! stay tuned.

 

^

I'll know monday.

Like I said before, this is the first i7 system I have used that doesn't have any cpu throttling issues either on battery or AC.

Let's see, the Envy 15, W870, Studio XPS 16, Studio 15 are all the i7 systems I have tried over the last year.

All of them locked the CPU multiplier at the lowest setting when on batter or AC depending on the system.

Now, my system may throttle down when I put the 5870 in and stress the pants off it but that would be more indicative of not enough juice from the 150W power brick.

 

As this is really a long thread, I did not manage to read them all. I am just wondering that if the best way to fix the throttling problem so far is still the method on the first page?
Especially for the spec of 920 and 260m, since this combination makes the problem most prominent as far as I know.

And also could any 1 please explain what 5870 has to do with M15x? Does that mean we need to replace 260x with 5870 by ourselves?

Thank you very much.


My spec: i7 920, GTX260m, 4GB RAM, 320GB hard drive

 

Well, Dell doesn't offer the 5870 yet so right now the only way to add it is by buying one and putting it in yourself.

 

1. Yes
2. If you want the 5870m, you buy it from a 3rd party and do the replacement yourself.

 

there is no trottle issue for me, but all computers throttle to prevent 100% usage, throttling is the fail safe to prevent melitng etc etc.

 

Does the new version of BIOS A05 solve this problem?
Thank you

 

No

10char

 

Just wanted to say thanks to Joker for fixing the throttling problemo. Also for posting a link to the 1v bios to overclock my 260m!

Thanks

 

I got a little problem with the RivaTuner setting: I have adjusted overclocking to 566 (out of 575) of core clock, 1133 (out of 1150) of shader clock, and 450 (out of 455) of memory clock. But I do feel the performance is slower than before when I did not apply the change. Could anyone please tell me if i have done something wrong?
P.S I did not use the ThrottleStop
Thank you

 

use nvidia system tools and not riva tuner
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_system_tools_6.06.html
download it here it is a much better overclocking tool for the gtx 260m or 240m

 

Would that be a total different set-up?
and is the throttling problem only related to overclocking of GPU?

 

you actually are underclocking it by alittle bit with the clocks you are using. do you have throttling or you just want to oc?

 

Yeah, i do have throttling, and my computer's spec just is same as yours.
As I am pretty a novice, I do not understand the priciples behind the fixing measure, so I just try to do exactly what I told to do.

 

exactly what game are you seeing throttling? yeah the only real solution is the throttle stop + riva tuner at the moment.

 

Wow. The thing is I tried to only use Riva tuner without throttle stop, and it works fine, but I do think I experienced a slower performance than before.

 

do you have gpu-z to check you clocks?

 

not really