AW M15x Throttling Issue Investigation - Stock clocks and overclocked.

yeah, a donation is a really must for anyone who uses the program. Its just awesome .

 

I haven't really spent any time trying to master TS yet, but i definitely intend to do so soon. I would be happy to donate if you can include a link in the next build

Thanks,

 

Thanks guys. Restoring the Donate button is on the things to do list.

 

The m15x throttle issue was fixed with BIOS A08.

The A08 BIOS is designed to offer M15x and M17x-R2 users enhanced stability.

As has been pointed out on this thread, the A08 BIOS for both M15x and M17x-R2 assign the processor’s Turbo Ratio limits to Intel’s default values, thereby allowing Turbo Mode to dynamically adjust core frequencies in real time. For M15x users this should immediately resolve any performance issues they may be experiencing.

The M17x-R2 has a greater threshold for both thermals and power draw than the M15x, and this has kept M17x-R2 from exhibiting throttling issues to the same extent as the M15x. However, we have discovered certain scenarios which lead to similar errors that can be attributed to the prior Turbo Ratio limits. To ensure the highest possible levels of system stability, the A08 BIOS is meant to fix these potential errors. Some users may experience a minor decrease in CPU scores, but that should be limited to benchmarking software and extreme CPU-intensive applications such as real-time rendering. Even then, it should be negligible. Users should not notice a performance decrease in casual use or even intense gaming.

Thanks, Alienware Quality

 

Alienware Quality,
I would like the BIOS to be altered to take advantage of a larger psu.

 

me seconded... if thats even a word.

also minor decrease in performance? really, 30% is minor? how about a "minor" discount for my next laptop then?
the people with extreme cpu's really just got slapped in the face with this "fix"

and if you think it's not noticable in real-world apps... how about video encoding? i've noticed a HUGE difference thankyou.
honestly for the extreme cpu users, why not let us tweak the bios settings... thats the real reason why it's "extreme" having the only option to choose between auto and... auto is depressing. we need a 3rd party tool (thank goodness for people like kevin) for us to even modify it.

 

1+

i understand why dell may not want to do this fix.

But the alienware brand holds a certain level of "performance" that it has to keep up with the competition. and with newer competition laptops now one step ahead (with nividia 460m/470m) i do not think the laptop will function best using the new nvidia GPUs while being capped at 150w.

With more power the newer GPUs would easily be powered, the platform would even extend its production life.
-saving costs of newer platform (no need to re-develop, re-engineer)
-more competitive product, (staying with competition
-More powerfull product (specially of OCers),
-more stable product(no throttling) ,
-keep its alienware customers happy, (one of the biggest problems with the brand is that they lose alot of customers after a bad experience, this would give a boost to loyalty, as fans would understand that the brand is for gamers by gamers)

 

another razer user ey madoon?
stealing their slogan like that... tsk tsk tsk!

agree 110% btw.

 

i didnt understand what you were talking about. i dont have any razer product. so i just opened the razer website to find that slogan.

yes, i know no one will believe i didnt know that it was their slogan! lol.

 

the A08 bios works like a charm, finally the mouse is useable ... glad I got my 5850 from dell while the getting was good

 

All I have to say is blah... This is from Wow, ICC, Lady Deathwisper..

Bios A08 of course

 

Did you actually experience a FPS Drop?
As far as I can tell, your GPU isn't really working that hard, so it might just be that it decided to clock down to save power.

I've seen this with WOW Testing a ton of times. The GPU is running at around 40% in an instance, and it clocks up and down without FPS is affected simply because it doesn't need all that power when operating at 40% capacity.

 

Oh yes I am quite familar with this and it is 100% throttling. I was the first to beta test the latest bios back in july. One main test I would use for testing was WoW. There indeed was an FPS drop when this happened. As soon as I saw it I checked my GPUZ and bam saw that graph. It then happened later on a mini boss (Stinky). I assume WoW is a good test as it stresses the CPU when there are a lot of real players near. This raid happened to be a 25 man raid so I am thinking that had something to do with it.

At any rate this totally feels bandaided. What happens next year when some cool new games come out? What if they do this or worse? We gota deal with this all over again just to get more juice to this lappie?

This sux.

 

Hmm, I've done a few ICC25s with mine and didn't experience any throttles. But I'm using a 740QM CPU, and I can see you're running an XM series.

Are you using the 25 Multiplier TS thingy?

 

Was that with or without Rivatuner running?

 

no 25x multi... No riva edits ever on this install of windows.
Yes Fersknen this is prolly for sure a power related issue.

I hope people care about it as much as I do as down the line they could experience problems. This is just bandaided..
I will be doing more testing and adding a Kill a Watt meter.

This is getting old

 

deex, another forum member Grandie, was having throttling issues in WoW as well ( post here), does disabling powerplay and using AMD gpu clock tool to set the clocks work? or does it still throttle?

or is the WoW throttling only on your 260m (not sure which card you're using atm)

i agree with the bandaid statement. this is supposed to be a top end system capable of running high end parts, to be power limited this way is bleh.

 

he is using the 260m (look at the clocks).

I totally agree, this sucks

 

man this sucks. deex do you have a cpu log to go along with the gpu log.

 

ah my bad, guess i should sleep after working nightshift ey?:SLEEP:
so it seems deex has the 260m throttling in WoW while Grandie has found his 5850 throttling (also in WoW)

hoping that disabling powerplay and manually setting clocks fixes it for him, but yeah having to do this doesn't seem right at all for a system with this pricetag.

hehe, i wonder if WoW will be added to the same list with furmark and prime95 by dell devs . this is a real life app and it's throttling.

 

No, I will try and get one though. I wasnt expecting it to do that.. I must admit this isnt the first time it has done this in WoW.

At this point I think if the studio has been resolved by a psu then this prolly needs to be too. I need to get some kill a watt data and the cpu log.

Again yes this may only affect me at the moment but to all of you that this has been fixed and you feel the issue is over... I must stress that we are only basing things off of software / games that are available now, as are Dell's people. (plus financial concerns)

Anyways Ima try and make it happen again.

 

agree with you DeeX..after a08 bios release out..almost all m15x seem satisfies with it..

they still don't release that throttling still occur in upcoming games which more demanding and really intensive, such as Crysis 2..

this were dell's trick to make user blinding..why we can't have dell rep like m17x have..is it hard for dell to assign one rep to look into this problem..

 

Who's the rep?

 

an addon seems the throtling resource
mine here

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/member.php?u=314603

Known as Brian..i think you already knew it..

This was the only guys always helps and be a middle man for m11x and m17x user who have problem in NBR..

where are dell rep for m15x..i don't know..

 

Your rep for M15x is adriana. She's on NBR but you have to PM her. Brian tends to be more active but follows M11x/M17x. Keep in mind neither are paid by Dell to be on NBR, they do this out of courtesy and on their own time so be nice with them and it'll get you guys what you want.

P.S. Re: A08 and throttle fixes for the M15x, was I right or was I right?

 

I never stopped running Rivatuner or Throttlestop. Coupled with A08 BIOS, the fighting between Throttlestop and the CPU has entered a detente, and I use Riva to OC my 260M anyhow.

Doesn't justify Dell's shoddy handling of the issue, but it definitely helps (along with the trackpad fix).

 

yup, honestly it looks like the only real solution is to offer higher wattage power adapters and give bios support.

all this undervolting is going to have some serious issues with some configs.

 

Well if anyone experiences any throttling at all please post here. It will be much less frequent and prolly only on the 920m/940m configs.

This seems to be following the same path the studio xps went through;
Bandaided and then finally resolved by a higher rated PSU.

Thx

 

A higher rated PSU and bios that allows for such is the final and true solution for the M15x and even M17x-R2 to an extent. For now the R2 works without any gaming throttling but the system still does not have enough PSU power to push the GPU to 100% along with the CPU at 100%. With furmark + WPrime run concurrently, the dual 5870s load drops to about 75-80% when it should never go below 90%. The Clevo X8100 also has this problem and I'm almost certain the X7200 will as well.

 

Damn see.. that's crazy too.

Well I believe that this can be done...
We were able to get them to finally recognize this... It wasn't too long ago that no one at Dell even would acknowledge this problem.
Teh fact that they are is a step forward....
We also have another thing on our side, this has happened before with the Studio XPS. It was at first bandaided much like this, but was then fixed with the bios change and a higher PSU. Plus on top of that tons of us now have the Kill a Watt meters and can prove that at some points the power draw on the systems are excessive. So again I encourage people to keep their gpu-z & throttlestop logging. (prolly only 920m/940m users). Also anyone with a Kill a Watt meter, I encourage testing.

With all that said, if people are not persistent then nothing can happen.
I encourage testing, and hope people don't give up. ;p

 

So, I got my new baby, and unfortunately it still throttles with prime + furmark. The throttling isnt that bad (compared to the setup with the 260m, where it would never go up to default clocks).

Attaching a pic. For some reason the GPU load drops to zero (even when furmark is running). Maybe the CPU is throttled back so much, that it doesnt feed any data to compute to the GPU, therefore powerplay decides to clock down the GPU.


EDIT: seems to be right. When TS is running, the GFX card doesnt throttle. This could mean that the CPU gets throttled so much that it is not able to feed anything into the GPU for rendering.

 

so you got a replacment m15x with a ati 5850 card versus nvidia 260m in your old system and it is throttling as well. I use TS for all gaming and benching and have not noticed any throttling. I ran furmark for 13min on pretty damn intense setting and my temps were fine along with no drop in gpu load.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/6706242-post5.html

 

well, I was only curious to see how it handles. It seems to throttle even more when you turn TS to 25x accross the board. Then the GPU throttles even with TS enabled. This only happens with prime running in the background.

I cannot complain as I played Mafia and ran benchmarks and it didnt throttle at all. The problem with benchmarks (most of them) is that they test the components independently, so if they do a graphic test, the benchmarks tries to do as little CPU computation as possible not bottleneck the GPU bench.

It's a huge shame that there is no wiggleroom in the M15x (TS (normal clocks) with prime and furmark) result in about 153W on the Kill-a-Watt meter. Clearly this machine has been designed with a too small power rating.

 

I continue to wonder how on Earth this gets released in this state.

 

i agree on the power constraints under benching and testing i am hitting like 155-160 with notebook cooler and fans on high. If i disconnect the cooler totally then i drop to about 150-155. Gaming i am running like 130-150. Did you play with TDP/TDC settings in TS and bump those up to make sure enough power is going to cpu when you are throttling. i have it set at 90/75 on bench and 85/65 on regular usage since i do not need all that insane power at all times

 

spot on, extra stuff like AI is practically non-existent.. a lot of things are usually scripted in a benchmark whereas in the game it would be done in real-time calculation. Games which are more cpu intensive have shown even on the latest bios to be throttling (DeeX for example still finds throttling in WoW)

glad to hear you got your new system wattos, shame it's still not 100%
i've settled on the clevo 5870m. i figure even if dell never sort this issue out, at least the laptop can't manually throttle my gpu.

it's really pathetic to think we have to go to these extremes in order to get what we paid for. Sure it's better than what we started with, but it ain't 100% yet.

 

we can disable the GPU throttling by disabling power play and using amd clock tool.

 

OMG! I'm so tired of the throttling. Please... give me some help for stopping it.

 

need more info: need a cpu and gpu log.
also what bios are you running???
what games is causing throttling??/

 

Bios A08
CPU i7 840QM
GPU GTX 260M

When I watch video like YouTube, my laptop usually freezes. I don't play games.

 

have you updated to the latest flash yet? or tried a different driver??? so how do you know it throttling, it may be somethiing entirely different causing this issue.

 

are you having similar issue like this????

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m15x/525954-flash-video-streaming-question.html

 

I tried driver from Dell and from Nvidia website. I'm not sure it throttling. My laptop usually freezes. ( I just run Chrome)

 

first try updating your flash player, then if that don't work try disabling hardware acceleration when watching the video.

 

I don't understand what do you mean "your flash player"

 

I'm guessing flash player version.

 

adobe flash player:

Adobe - Install a different version of Adobe Flash Player

 

Download here: rich Internet applications | Adobe Flash Player. Version 10.1.

Edit: nevermind. Inap's got it.

 

Inap means adobe flash player, also while your at it, upload a gpu-z log.

Edit: Rev and Inap got it