Laptop Forums and Notebook Computer Discussion - View Single Post - AW M15x Throttling Issue Investigation

JohnBatDell · 12-15-2009, 04:16 PM

Hey all. I spoke with engineering last night and early this morning, and wanted to give you an update on what we have.

There's been some pretty extensive testing on this issue, and our engineering team has come to the conclusion that throttling shouldn't occur at all in any real world scenario. As a result, they aren't planning on doing any BIOS revisions in response to this, but are still investigating to see if they can discover what causes this behavior while using these testing programs. It is, however, the general consensus that changing this is too risky for the potential payoff… too much could go wrong when this really isn’t a behavior you’d see while gaming.

That being said, this system should scream when gaming, and if you have any performance issues, they probably have nothing to do with this, and you should contact tech support to troubleshoot.

I did ask about folding@home's implications on this, and was pleased to discover several people on our engineering team that use the program. They discovered that folding at home drove the cores to 90% and stopped, and only did this when the system was idle, and therefore shouldn't trigger throttling.

I know this isn't the answer many wanted to hear, but this is where we're at.

From my personal perspective, I'd like to say that if what I'm doing with my system drives my CPU cores and GPU to a sustained 100%, I'd expect performance issues there, and would probably be looking to upgrade my system. I don't see that happening with this system any time in the near future.

12-15-2009, 04:16 PM	#293 (permalink)
JohnBatDell Company Representative Join Date: Nov 2009 Posts: 39 Rep Power: 0	Re: AW M15x Throttling Issue Investigation - Stock clocks and overclocked. Hey all. I spoke with engineering last night and early this morning, and wanted to give you an update on what we have. There's been some pretty extensive testing on this issue, and our engineering team has come to the conclusion that throttling shouldn't occur at all in any real world scenario. As a result, they aren't planning on doing any BIOS revisions in response to this, but are still investigating to see if they can discover what causes this behavior while using these testing programs. It is, however, the general consensus that changing this is too risky for the potential payoff… too much could go wrong when this really isn’t a behavior you’d see while gaming. That being said, this system should scream when gaming, and if you have any performance issues, they probably have nothing to do with this, and you should contact tech support to troubleshoot. I did ask about folding@home's implications on this, and was pleased to discover several people on our engineering team that use the program. They discovered that folding at home drove the cores to 90% and stopped, and only did this when the system was idle, and therefore shouldn't trigger throttling. I know this isn't the answer many wanted to hear, but this is where we're at. From my personal perspective, I'd like to say that if what I'm doing with my system drives my CPU cores and GPU to a sustained 100%, I'd expect performance issues there, and would probably be looking to upgrade my system. I don't see that happening with this system any time in the near future.