I seem to experience a cycle. CPU randomly drops to 200 MHz - almost always under heavy load (not everytime I put it under heavy load, but it happens almost exclusively under heavy load). Restart doesn´t help, but what helps is pressing power button for 20s. In some cases this solves the issue, but in other the FW then refuses to power on - LED starts the blinking and then first is white, then all green except 4, 9 and 10 that are red and then 8x orange. Then I have to remove the cmos battery and do the reset, which resets the bios and it powers back on.
Please note that I am using the board in a tablet setup, not in a full laptop. Any ideas? Does the LEDs bring some more insight why that happens?
This is caused by thermal throttling (either because of bad thermal paste, bad airflow, or a faulty temperature sensor). The solution is to contact support.
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How do the thermal characteristics of your tablet form factor compare to the laptop?
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My board was generously donated by FW for the project so I am out of any warranty support (I doubt they cover donations with warranty). I would like to understand what exactly is going on, because it’s different than throttling I know.
As for the tablet cooling, I can’t compare because I never had opportunity to test the laptop and because my board has serious issue with core to core deltas (up to 22 degrees under full load) that I failed to fix with multiple thermal paste reapplications and even replacing the cooler (I suspect mounting pressure design). It can take some 35W until the 28W limit kicks in. In terms of airflow, my tablet should be superior as it takes some air also from top of the board and bottom is very generous in terms of holes.
I also wanted to experiment with water cooling but FW doesn’t allow to bypass the 28W limit (and ignores all requests for such thing) that kicks in pretty quickly, there is little to gain from such effort, eventhough I had dell (actually smaller than FW laptop) with the same 1165g7 CPU that I got to turbo past 40W indefinetly, so I know FW could do it if they wanted.
EDIT: Managed to solve the core to core delta issues by replacing the VRM cooling pads and now it can handle about 6-7s of 45.4W (the CPU can´t produce more, it´s running at its maximum 4.1 GHz all-core boost) and after the turbo drops, CPU runs at stock 28W at 80-84 degrees celsius (ambient temp 26 degrees). That was measured after cleaning the heatsing and a fresh application of Arctic MX6.