GT80 with 4720HQ refusing to boost under any load

My GT80 was running great for a while, but something appears to have gone wrong in the last month or so, judging by my history of Firestrike results. I've dropped 2500 on the Physics score, while combined dropped 1000. Graphics score has stayed stable.

I'm set to High Performance, and Dragon Gaming Center is set to Sport mode. Without any real load on the CPU (<1% usage on any core) it will run at 3.6GHz and the reported TDP is ~47W ( I swear this reading used to be a lot lower). As soon as anything runs, the speed tanks down to 2.6GHz. Games that used to run at 3.3-3.6 GHz now immediately drop the CPU down to 2.6GHz. My CPU temps are low, like 60C-65C. I know that this CPU will throttle if it hits it's power limit, but its acting like it's already almost there when idle and has nothing left for any games.

I've done a clean install with the recovery partition, but that didn't fix anything. This is causing almost every game to become a stuttering mess. I'm at a complete loss what to check next. Any ideas?

 

What power setting are you on? What does XTU say about what is causing the throttle?

 

Something is wrong. Your TDP reading can't be near 47W if you are on little to no load. Check on Intel XTU, monitor usage and temps. Do you have any antivirus running? Avast was causing me issues, with sometimes spikes to 100% usage with nothing happening, making everything slow.

 

I have it set to High Performance setting, XTU says it's a power throttle. I can get it to throttle right away with a single thread in Prime95, which I know it never used to do. When I first got it I ran the same scenario to make sure that the cpu boosted appropriately.

I killed nearly every process I can without crashing windows, including antivirus. CPU load is reading at 1-3%, TDP is still 44-47W. I'm starting to worry that I've got some weird hardware problem. When I get home I'm going to pull all the drives and try installing a fresh copy of Win8 on a clean drive, maybe it's a problem with something in my image.

 

Ugh, no go. A complete wipe on a new drive left me with a CPU that idles at 37W-40W with 1% usage (never any spikes) at 900MHz.

Simple game launchers for stuff like Total War cause it to shoot to 47W and XTU says it's hit the power throttle, to say nothing of actually playing any games. Try the exact same thing on my old Alienware 18 and it's at 20W, it's actually running games better than my GT80, and it only has a 4700MQ and 770m's. This is frustrating, and I'm having difficulty explaining to MSI support why there is something wrong with this behavior. I don't get it, I had a solid month and a half where this machine worked. It's like the bios thinks it's doing more work than it actually is.

Thanks anyway for giving me some ideas to check out

 

Have you done any cooling mod for the CPU itself?

 

Sorry to hear that. That definitely sounds weird and it is possible to be a hardware problem. What voltage appears on your intel xtu??

You can show msi with a video or picture with low utilization and high power use. My GT80 idles about 6-8w or so.

 

You might want to reflash the bios/EC.

 

No mods. I tried reflashing the bios and EC, no change.

I got my RMA with MSI and am shipping it off this week. Sad to be without it for a month or so, but I've got my desktop so I'm not missing much except portability I suppose. I'll miss sneaking a few rounds in of World of Tanks at work though

 

Keep us in touch, and make sure MSI understands the issue lies within the TDP reported, and that it is not normal. Hopefully you will have your machine fully working and back soon

How odd though... At least my CPU is configured to be always at 100% state, so I never drop below 3.5ghz and my usage does increase as TDP accordingly. at 0.8Ghz, 2% utilization, your TDP should be in the single digits.

 

Indeed, it could be the reporting of TDP has gone odd, not seen that before.

 

Might be some kind of utilities that is making the CPU to clock up, perhaps try safe mode and see what clock speed it's running at.

 

What puzzles me is that it reads low % utilization, as well as low clockspeed, yet very high TDP.

Could a short, of some sort, cause the readings to be far higher than they are?

 

Still does it in safe mode, doubt it's a utilities as it does it when even on an install of Win8.1 Pro that's not the MSI image with all the tuning utilities, nor any drivers loaded.
Odd thing is, when looking at FireStrike scores, there is of course the majority that are around where I used to be, but there is a small group that's getting the same physics/combined scores I am now. I wonder if there are more people out there with the same problem. If that's the case I bet it's the bios. I can see people not even knowing they had a problem if they didn't dig too deep into it.
I tried to be really clear why it's not working correctly, but I can see someone taking a quick look and saying it boots up/runs games, checks out and returning it. Hopefully that doesn't happen, its expensive to ship back(with insurance)!

 

Just to compare, here's what I was getting for Fire Strike back in Feb:

And here's now:


When the CPU can't feed both of the GPUs fast enough, it's stutters A LOT. FPS might read 50FPS, but it looks more like 20.