[RESPONDED] CPU gets stuck at 0.2 GHz

@Dennis_Miller Fair enough, glad to hear that you found an option that works for you! Hope it continues to work well and that the new fan helps!

Update:
I ended up opening a support ticket and followed all of the steps to no avail. It was the final, last-ditch, recommendation that’s seemingly fixed everything.

A hard CMOS reset by taking the battery out for 15 mins (read, like 2 hours) then putting it back in. The subsequent boot was near instantaneous.

Upon starting back up, Discord (kill me) started up almost instantly and my Chrome (still kill me) tabs are actually responsive. I can hear my fans on, and my cope command: sudo watch cpupower monitor is reporting numbers far above 400 all across the board.

System Monitor is also reporting far lower percentages all across the board, which I find incredibly interesting. I guess something must have been screwed up from the get-go and everything was just as a fraction of either 400 MHz or some equally terrible number.

I just pray that the issue doesn’t decide to rear its ugly head again the moment I close my ticket.

I notice that @Dennis_Miller mentioned that they may have also reset the CMOS battery so I wonder if that’s some sort of commonality.

After seeing Yoshiko’s post, I think that the issue may be somehow resolved with a CMOS reset only. For those still struggling with this issue, give it a try. It is not necessary to wait 15 minutes. This is a myth widely believed on the internet. I won’t go into the tech reasons, but a momentary disconnect is all that is necessary to reset the CMOS circuit. All I did was push the CMOS batt down for a second, breaking the connection with the top contacts. I wasn’t sure that would work, but apparently, it did. Removing the batt for a sec would be better, more certain. I’m still wondering if there is a CMOS reset button or switch on the mobo.

Since the repair, the computer works WAY better than it ever had. My boots are also very fast now. I had upgraded to bios 3.10 and installed win 11 22H2 update. Still, the paste seemed excessive and there was a big crack in the paste down the middle of the processor, which may have caused problems. Thinner is better.

Removing the CMOS Battery fixing it makes sense, because it resets the BIOS to Factory settings and somehow resets the issue, It’s interesting that there’s more paste than needed though…

Update
A week later, still working fine. Resetting BIOS seemed to do the trick. Very fast now.

1 Like

I guess I am not affected :slight_smile:

You can run this with watch to see how CPUs behave.

grep 'MHz' /proc/cpuinfo
cpu MHz         : 533.456
cpu MHz         : 2100.000
cpu MHz         : 485.018
cpu MHz         : 684.178
cpu MHz         : 859.227
cpu MHz         : 1400.000
cpu MHz         : 2100.000
cpu MHz         : 2100.000
cpu MHz         : 465.049
cpu MHz         : 2100.000
cpu MHz         : 2100.000
cpu MHz         : 2100.000
cpu MHz         : 2100.000
cpu MHz         : 2100.000
cpu MHz         : 2100.000
cpu MHz         : 2100.000

I’ve been battling this for a while now… For some reason it seems to happen more with 3rd party power bricks than with the OEM one…

On Ubuntu 20.04 it was happening pretty constantly for me, after doing a clean install to 22.04 it seemed to not be happening as much, but lately it’s been so bad. I wish there was a solution to this…

image

I will say, trying ThrottleStop out it actually seems to help a lot, it still slows down occasionally while playing games, when the CPU gets too hot, but letting it sit for a few minutes returns it to normal…
I currently have BD PROCHOT and Speedstep turned off… Hope this helps somebody!

Has anyone found any solution? It’s happening allot it’s hard to play games. For others how fast are fan speeds when this happens? For me there’s no fan spin up.

Solution is: Contact support.

2 Likes

Solution is indeed going to likely be support and asking for new thermal paste.

I’ve had my CPU throttle to 200MHz with no thermal issues whatsoever, BIOS and CPU microcode up to date.
I unplugged the Displayport expansion card and the issue disappeared. It’s a first gen card with an updated 2nd gen firmware.

2 Likes

Welcome to the community @ldesgoui,

You will need to reach out to support for this as we’ll need to troubleshoot this further.

I’ve also run into this. When battery runs low it seems to switch into 0.2 GHz mode, but never switches back. Removing/replacing CMOS battery fixes it.

Framework 13: w/ 11thGen Intel

Here is my situation and solution:

Framework 13 w/11th gen Intel
Cooler Master Mainboard Case

Tried repaste, didn’t fix but made better.
Watched with MSI afterburner, looked at GPU Usage, temperature, and Wattage

-Noticed that the thermals were up to 70 C, dusted out and went down to 50 and problem went away.

Had same issue CPU locked at 0.2GHz seemingly randomly did happen after fairly extended use on a warm day I checked and there was a BIOS update and after running that it fixed it for me. Intel 11th Gen i5 running Win 11 Pro. -\_(--)_/-

I’ve just run into the same issue myself. Or rather, I’ve run into it a few times. Normally a reboot will fix it, or just simply waiting. This time however it persisted through reboots even after the system had cooled down to ambient temperature.

Unfortunately I don’t have my framework screwdriver handy, nor a thumbdrive or other boot device so trying to do a CMOS reset or checking for a BIOS update wasn’t an option (I’m on Linux and the latest seems to not be available via fwupd). Resetting the BIOS did not work.

However, I was able to resolve it by disabling quick/quiet boot and started getting normal performance again and the processor is at a more appropriate frequency, bouncing around between 1 -2 ghz.

I’ve battled overheating and severe CPU throttling (as severe as pinning the CPU to 200 MHz for a while) issues for the last month or so w/ my 13", 11th gen Intel Framework, running NixOS.

Laptop would get hot to the touch just by running anything that required a bit of CPU power. On an average day, video calls would consistently render the laptop extremely hot and slow - if not completely crippled by reducing the CPU clock speeds to 200 MHz.

I’ve spent some time reapplying the thermal paste and cleaning the fans and heatsink (incl. the intake and exhaust) rigorously. In my case clearing the heatsink and the air paths made the biggest difference.

It’s been about a month since I’ve made these changes. Despite daily video calls and light gaming, my laptop hasn’t overheated to the point it used to or had an extreme thermal throttling issue.

HTH

1 Like

Update: My laptop just got stuck at 200MHz again.

At this point I’m convinced that this is not just a cooling issue. I had my CPU throttled even at 44 C.

I think what happened was: I left the laptop on the couch, where the air intake wasn’t clear. It slowly overheated and went into sleep mode. When I turned my laptop on in the morning, as in - even with a cold laptop, CPU was throttled at 0.2 GHz. Rebooting or turning the laptop off and on didn’t make a difference.

I found that if it did thermal throttle, that once those conditions were no longer present, it needed a least 30 seconds running in the throttled state before it would consider going up to full speed.

Just rebooting it would not clear the issue, even though it was cooler