AMD 7840U How to thermal throttle?

Framework Laptop 13
1

Hey,
could someone tell me how I may be able to force my AMD into thermal throttling?
I’m wondering because I’ve been running benchmarks and stress tests, but it seems like I’m unable to trigger it.

2

It likely is thermal throttling, have you checked your CPU temperature and power?

3

To be specific, are you actually seeing temperatures above 95C? I’d only worry about there being “no thermal throttling” in that case.

1 Like
4

Actually no. I got to around 91C CPU Temp. According to HWInfo it wasn’t throttling.

5

Iirc, 90-95 is the range at which AMD CPUs typically throttle. If you stayed in that range for a while and didn’t throttle at all, I guess that could be a little weird.

Were the benchmarks/stress test you’ve been running stressing all cores, and were the clock speeds peaking for all cores?

6

I think the “Thermal Throttling” indicator is just wrong. It never flags that it’s thermal throttling, but you can see the clockspeeds drop after a while at load when the temperatures are rising.

1 Like
7

Why do you want to get it to thermal throttle?

8

Keep in mind there are two types of throttling with Ryzen processors.

Hard throttling happens at a specific temperature, not a temperature range. If it was hitting a thermal throttle point of 95c for example, it would downclock as needed in 1/1000 of a second intervals to stop going over 95c. This is likely the type of thermal throttling you’re thinking of.

AMD has the throttle point of 100c listed but it may be set to 95c by Framework.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-7840u

Soft throttling on the other hand happens at any temperature. If your 7840u is at 100% load at 4.4ghz and -50c, if the temperature changes to -30c then clocks will lower to say 4.35ghz. There is dynamic boosting called Performance Boost(PB) going on that will increase clockspeed with lower power draw and temperature. Vice versa if temperature and power draw increases.

Also you can have 100% CPU load in two different applications but far different temperatures in power draw due to how differently the applications utilize the CPU.

If you want to make your 7840u thermal throttle, you want to maximize heat density. Running something like Prime95 small FFT’s with a thread count around 2 to 6 should get you the highest temperatures.