@volcanicmaggies, What is the charge level for your battery, and did you charge it to 100% before starting those tests?
If you charge the battery to 100% before starting those tests, do you get a different result?
That seems to indicate that the system is not getting enough power to run at full load.
I’m on the Framework 60w charger. I’ve seen the battery drop while doing some gaming under Linux while plugged in.
The 90w I mentioned near the top of the thread was a typo as I was thinking about testing with a 90w, which RandomUser indicates allows an 85w max load.
@Monster_user Okay, I just changed the limit to 100, and here’s the results. Also interesting to note that my computer is currently on low battery, so it isn’t fully charged right now. When it is I’ll also try running it again.
(this is with turbo step and boost enabled)
i7: 92nd percentile
GPU: 29th percentile
SSD: 68th percentile
Memory: 38th percentile (with a note about XMP?)
@RandomUser The UserBenchmark (sorry lol) test that I carried out and mentioned to Monster_user above was carried out with the changes suggested. 3-5W is from Open Hardware. I don’t have any idea how to remove the battery and I don’t want to muck things up more than they are already…
Yes, I updated drivers for Framework’s BIOS bundle, but I have also made sure the actual graphics drivers from Intel are up to date.
@RandomUser Yes, it is running Windows 10 downloaded from Windows, the most recent version. And yes, it was 3-5W during the execution.
Here is a screen record of the values happening when the frame rates drop: fw laptop lag - YouTube
I’ll get a screen grab of the 0.2 when I can get it quickly (but it is literally in the Task Manager, CPU speed)
@RandomUser When I ran the game again (and again this is with turbo step and speed enabled) it had the same issue as the youtube video had, but I confirmed it did not go down to 0.2GHz. However, it seems like I can’t play the game right now, and I think that’s because of turbo step enabled. I am going to turn it off and replay the game and see if it goes down to 0.2. However, perhaps that’s enough: “it clearly can’t run some games and the frame rates drop but don’t stall while turbo step is enabled, but it crashes the CPU if turbo step is not enabled”
Okay from looking at that I can confirm at least that that’s the exact behavior I’m seeing, it’s just much harder for me to reproduce and doesn’t happen until several hours under load.
To be clear, this isn’t what’s causing the power throttling. Thermal throttling causes the CPU to downclock, yes, but it doesn’t change the power limit. You can test this yourself by running P95 and observing those fields in HWiNFO. You’ll see them change to “Yes”, but you won’t see your power limits drop. And if it was thermal throttling, the CPU should remain pinned at TjMAX because that limit lifts instantly when the temperature drops.
There must be something else causing the power limit decrease, probably something to do with power delivery. A battery issue could be possible, but seems unlikely to me because I haven’t seen my battery decrease in a sustained load scenario. Power adapter problems also seem unlikely because I’ve seen this happen on both the 60 W Framework charger and a 65 W USB PD adapter, both of which work fine under higher burst loads. Something to do with VRMs then? Something within the CPU itself? I don’t know honestly.
Also @volcanicmaggies there might be one more thing worth trying. I think I realized why opening Throttlestop fixed the issue for me; I had the power limits manually overridden in there. I think @RandomUser’s idea of just using a program like that to clamp the PL1 power limit at 28 W should at least alleviate the symptoms if not solve the underlying problem. You won’t lose thermal protections from doing this so it really shouldn’t be unsafe. I wouldn’t even be that opposed to just running it like that until the problem gets resolved.
Yes my bad, I should have been more clear. What I meant to say is that core temperatures are not what’s causing the PL1 to decrease here.
“Best performance (plugged in).” Based on the video, this should be what @volcanicmaggies is running too because the other two plugged in modes have lower power limits of 28 W PL1/30 W PL2 and 15 W PL1/25 W PL2, at least with the default configuration.
@OxyMagnesium@RandomUser Thank you both for taking so much time to try and help troubleshoot this. I’ve set the battery limit to 28, and Elden Ring has run okay so far, so if the problem happens again, I’ll try and get a video. As for the 200 not showing up, it hasn’t shown up since I enabled Turbo Step and Turbo Boost. So it seems like when those aren’t enabled, the CPU (because it is restricted to 2.8 when they aren’t enabled) drops to 200MHz and can’t get back out, but because with them enabled it starts at a higher CPU, it never reaches the 200MHz.
When I click the battery icon, all it says is it is not running battery saver.
@RandomUser Okay, I changed it! It was operating under Razer’s power plan since I had Razer Cortex installed. Also, I did manage to get a frame rate freeze playing full screen, but haven’t had it happen while playing in windowed mode for twenty minutes or so.
@RandomUser@OxyMagnesium Here’s another video of Elden Ring where the computer drops to 0.2, right at the end. I made sure the power was set to 28W (which you can see at the beginning). It seems like if I go out of the game for a moment when it goes to 0.2, it returns back to normal, though, which you didn’t see. fw 0.2 GHz - YouTube
@RandomUser Alas they haven’t been very helpful apart from providing a new charger, still waiting to hear back to my replies (yesterday and several days ago)
@RandomUser Yeah, had it for a while, but I didn’t know I would be gaming as it was a recent thing I got into. Support has been great about repairing/sending out parts, but it’s a matter of communicating what the issue is and why it isn’t my fault that’s the hard part lol
I am also having this issue. I have a batch 3 with the i7 1185G7. i have not changed the bios since i got it so will be trying to update to the latest one when i get home tonight. But until then my cpu is just staying at 200MHz. it has an occasional blip up to 4.2GHz but it only happens for a 60th of a sec. i though maybe i had too many chrome tabs open (~100) but when i closed 85% of them i still had the issue. everything is slow to open. I am on full battery. it happens when not plugged in an plugged in. i have the 60W charger from framework. I also have the slider set to best performance in windows.
the temps are fine. when i use task manager it never goes above 5% utilization and when i use HWMonitor it goes to 100% but it still at 200MHz. When i try to watch 60fps youtube videos it drops 1/3 of the frames. when i tried to load up the stream manager for a twitch stream it took 3 minutes to get the stream to load in. it was at 480p and still lagging. the network connection is fine. when i try to scroll threw a pdf or open discord it lags. below is a screen shot of HWMonitor when trying to open twitch stream manager.
From what i’ve seen from forum posts i can’t tell if the new bios fixes the issue or not.
I think the earlier problem of onboard audio not being able to get a clean output is also a result of this. i had to drop the sound to 16-bit to stop getting a bad output. and when i use a chrome extension to boost the audio it gets garbled. I had the same problem with the chrome extension on my main rig and it went away when i upgraded the cpu.
Edit: I rebooted and went into the bios. I am on 3.02. I also changed performance mode on startup to turbo performance from battery performance. and when i launched chrome with all 100 tabs and the cpu went to its turbo and everything is smoother now. the twitch stream is not lagging and i can watch 60fps youtube again.
it feels normal. i mean that in the best way possible. If it starts happening again i will update the bios but with everything working now. The only hiccup is the audio when using the extension on battery, it works on wall power. i’ll update this if anything happens.
@SuperCookie Definitely update the BIOS!! Even if it’s working there’s several issues that are fixed with the BIOS update. Glad to hear it’s working good now though
I’m wondering whether this issue also affects the i5 processors or is specific to i7. I think, in some early Tiger Lake benchmarks i5 would outperform i7 which was seemingly caused by power management issues, like what seems to be happening here. Then over time, laptop vendors patched the BIOSes and people stopped discussing it that much.
So I’ve had this issue for a while… what fixed it was reapplying thermal paste!
Temps aren’t as good as they should be, but at least it no longer throttles down to 0.2/0.4 GHz!
Used Arctic MX-5, and am getting 88-97 C under intense loads, ie. Prime95 while running a video game. I used to get 100 C consistently, followed by thermal throttling.
