[RESPONDED] CPU gets stuck at 0.2 GHz

@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 It shows up on linux too, ubuntu and void and pop have shown the 0.2

@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

@RandomUser Well, I mean it happens when I game on the other OSes, not that it happens randomly on others

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.

1 Like

@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

1 Like

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! :smiley:
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.

Hah, i wish! it will go up to PL2, but then is PL1’d to 28W, at a stable 85-95C.
Importantly, it doesn’t throttle down to 0.2/0.4 due to bdprochot or something else.
Temperature will occasionally spike higher, but i think this is a hwinfo error (at one point i got clocks of 5.4GHz… can’t imagine what the power draw for that would be)

Of note, this is a batch 4/5 model, so emi stickers wasn’t an issue. Also wasn’t related to the expansion cards, as it’d throttle down without cards, even while on battery power.

Been having this issue for about a month now. (got mine back at the end of January)
I’m running Manjaro Linux on kernel 5.16.14.

I’d like to echo the “reapplying thermal paste” approach mentioned above.

For me it’s been close to 2 weeks since I reapplied thermal paste (and cleaned dust while I was there) and I haven’t seen this issue anymore so far. So definitely worth giving it a try.

I repasted my unit. I still have massive throttling issues when playing games. The only solution is to disable power boost in the Windows 10 power plan.

When I use the power plan without power boost, I get 0 throttling. Never.

1 Like

Here you go: massive CPU throttling despite temperature being very reasonable (57 deg C).

I would also like to add to the chorus of thermal paste proponents: I was having this problem and after updating bios and ensuring I was on proper power management settings it persisted so I replaced the thermal paste with liquid metal and now it is running about 20 degrees cooler (was hitting 100C on all cores under load before) and seems to be perfectly stable (knock on wood). The application of the thermal paste seemed reasonable enough when I removed the cooler but it seems like it became insufficient for handling the i7’s thermals after several months.

Hello all, I reapplied thermal paste (twice, because the first time I think I messed up) but I’m still having throttling issues. I tried contacting support two weeks ago and over a week ago and no response still.

Hello volcanicmaggies,

We do not have a ticket in Support for you that is open. The last correspondence we had with you was back in February regarding your power adapter. Did you receive an auto confirmation that your ticket was received?

@TheTwistgibber I’ve replied to your PM with a screenshot of the email I sent in reply several days later

We unfortunately didn’t get it. I’ve tried responding to you via a different mail server to see if you get my response. Please let me know if you received it.

For those following along, this is likely a case of the heatsink and fan kit no longer being able to keep up and we’re going to try replacing the kit to see if temps can come down. Replacing thermal paste on a fan that isn’t keeping up with being pushed won’t help things unfortunately.

The Framework Laptop utilizes an onboard Intel Iris Xe graphics processor, which is absolutely great for lightweight to mid-tier gaming at low and medium graphics settings (even high on some less graphics-intensive games) but being as transparent as we can be, the Framework Laptop is not a hardcore gaming laptop. Games like Elden Ring will push the laptop hard and it’s important to note that there’s only one fan and a heatsink cooling the entire laptop. Thermals will be quite high and the fan will likely be pegged trying to expel as much heat from the machine as possible, and when it can’t keep up, the system will throttle itself. There’s no point in shying away from the fact that this is a VERY real possibility and that expectations of performance from the Framework Laptop while pushing the laptop hard with graphics-intensive games might be a bit out of sync with reality. Hopefully a replacement heatsink and fan kit will help, but graphics-intensive games will really push the limits of what the Framework Laptop is capable of.

1 Like

Regardless of the task, the system, any good system ought to be designed in such a way that it strikes the balance between heat generation and heat dissipation, AND remain functionally acceptable. “Thermal throttling” is an exception handling scenario where the system has been allowed to generate more heat than it can dissipate. Ideally, the system shouldn’t even need to be in this position, it’s a safety net.

That’s to say, the user experience should be “Not fast enough, so it’s stuttering”, rather than “It’s trying so hard to impress me for 5 seconds that it got so hot and so it’s severely stuttering”.