Plugged in: Stuck at full clock speed?

Have an XPS 15 9560 w/ i7 processor.

When plugged in and looking at HWMonitor, it seems my clock is stuck consttantly at 2.8GHz, even when idle.

On battery when idle it will drop down to 800MHz. Plug it in, and it'll never drop from 2.8GHz. I don't necessarily need or want it to STAY at full power when plugged in, have I set something incorrectly?


I am also using Throttlestop, but I don't have any special "battery vs plugged-in power profiles"

 

Maybe post a capture of your throttlestop settings so we can comment on that. It may also be a windows power profile so you can check that too.

 

Clicking battery icon in system tray is on "Best performance", but changing this doesn't seem to have an impact.

Here are my ThrottleStop settings:

 

You might want to check you BIOS settings as well for Turbo, SpeedStepz Cstates etc. Perhaps also Dell Power Manager if installed.

Sent from my SM-N950F using Tapatalk

 

Clean windows install, so no Dell Power Manager but there is the intel thermal framework (but I imagine that wouldn't be doing anything to KEEP it at 100% clock speed?)

Speedstep is enabled in BIOS and in throttlestop.

As mentioned, it downclocks as expected when not performing tasks on battery power (and hits full speed when needed)

 

ThrottleStop shows that your CPU is spending 22.9% of the time in the C0 state. That means it is busy working on something so of course it is not going to idle down when it is plugged in. Why should it? Your 7700HQ has work to do so best to do that at full speed. It would get more work done faster if you did not check the Disable Turbo box.

If you want your CPU to slow down, open up the Task Manager and find out what is running in the background.

Here is what an idle laptop looks like.



My 4700MQ only needs to spend 0.4% of the time in the C0 state to process all of the various Windows background tasks. Your computer is up to something so find out what that is.

 

Here is what I get after a reboot... it happily ran around the 800-1200MHz range until I plugged in, and then it jumps up to full clock speed and doesn't move at all once there. I don't really understand the C-states

 

When a core has something to do, it will go into the C0 c state. When it has nothing to do, it will go into one of the low power c states like C3, C6 or C7. Look in the ThrottleStop C0% column that I posted. Almost all of the threads are spending less than 0.5% of the time in the C0 state. That means the CPU is idle. Now look at your screenshot in the C0% column. You have one thread at 18.3%. Your CPU is not idle. Click on the Task Manager Details tab and then click on the CPU column to arrange the running tasks from high CPU usage to low. A clean system can spend 99% of the time idle.



If you want your CPU to slow down, start by fixing this problem. You have too much crap running in the background on your computer.

Edit - And why is Disable Turbo checked? When you slow your CPU down, it will spend more time in the C0 state processing background tasks when it could be in the low power C7 state instead.

Edit #2 - Are you using the Windows Balanced power profile with the minimum processor state set to 5%. The High Performance profile will use max CPU speed, even when idle.

 

Here is a shot of the details. It moves around a bit of course, but was 95 +/- 3%

I've disabled Turbo (in BIOS too) because my understanding is that this helps keep thermals under control?

Yes I'm using the Balanced profile - only profile listed, and yes when plugged in it's on "Best Performance" for the battery slider. I guess that's actually it - having it on "Best" locks it in? Simple as that?

Thanks for all your help BTW

 

Sadly Microsoft decided to do away with power "profiles" now and lets you slide a slider from battery savings to best performance. Running it on best performance will do exactly that and keep your CPU running at a faster frequency.

 

Are the profiles actually gone in the last Windows release (I still haven't migrated)? I recall they disappeared with the former "feature update" but I could get them back by creating a new profile, then the others were also offered as the starting point.

 

So there are ways to get the power profiles back. I haven't used this guide but have heard it works:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/110372-restore-missing-default-power-plans-windows-10-a.html

 

I did a clean install of Windows 10 1803 on an early desktop Core i CPU yesterday and the power profiles were exactly the same as the good old days. Same thing with a 7th Gen Core i7 desktop computer I have. Perhaps the new fangled Windows power slider is only installed on laptops.

 

On my XPS 9550 laptop, I am on Windoze 10 Pro1803 and power profiles are unchanged

 

You find them in Win Mobility Center


And you can as well add in the Ultimate power plan (Scam) intended for Win Pro Workstation. Optimal Ytelse in Norwegian.

• Get Ultimate Performance On Any Windows 10 Edition

 

Power profiles still exist, they are just hidden under the right click menu on the battery icon.

If your system is using the High Performance profile, it will stay at the max clock speeds indefinitely. Doublecheck to see if you are not using the High Performance Profile, and if you aren't, try checking the Energy Saving profile and see if it lowers your clocks. If there is no Energy Saving power plan, add your own: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-manage-custom-power-plans-windows-10. The slider shouldn't matter for AC use, I just tried it and it won't clock to max.

 

Been searching for this on google for 5min and found your thread which describes EXACTLY my problem, i have the same laptop and CPU lol and im stuck at 2.8GHz

I loaded the latest bios 1.11.0, released on aug 15th a few days ago so think maybe related? what bios are you running?

 

I'm a bit confused as to why people are saying there's a difference between balanced power plan and high performance? If you manually customise each setting to behave a certain way for battery and AC mode, then shouldn't that same power plan act as a "high performance" on AC and "energy saving" on battery? Since you're selecting power saving values for when on battery and high performance ones for when on AC?