Leenovo Y50-70 Laptop Not Utlizing Full CPU Potential

[Abhinav Sharma]

I own a lenovo y50-70 laptop, bought in 2014. i7-4710HQ, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, NVIDIA 860M. Recently I noticed that the laptop is not utilizing the full CPU potential. My work involves lots of CPU intensive calculations and numeric simulations on MATLAB. I use parallel processing functions of MATLAB which means all the 4 cores of my CPU engage for computation. Recently, CPU stopped going beyond 75 degrees and computations became relatively slower. If I restart the laptop and run same program on MATLAB within 15-20 seconds of booting, CPU works like a rocket and even reaches 97 degrees (earlier it used to reach this much, no matter when I run the program). If I run the same program again after some time, the CPU slows down again and doesn't exceed 75 degrees.

 

All drivers are up to date.

[DakotaWebber]

What are your clock speeds and utlisation doing?

 

 

[AnnoyedShelf]

23 minutes ago, Abhinav Sharma said:

I own a lenovo y50-70 laptop, bought in 2014. i7-4710HQ, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, NVIDIA 860M. Recently I noticed that the laptop is not utilizing the full CPU potential. My work involves lots of CPU intensive calculations and numeric simulations on MATLAB. I use parallel processing functions of MATLAB which means all the 4 cores of my CPU engage for computation. Recently, CPU stopped going beyond 75 degrees and computations became relatively slower. If I restart the laptop and run same program on MATLAB within 15-20 seconds of booting, CPU works like a rocket and even reaches 97 degrees (earlier it used to reach this much, no matter when I run the program). If I run the same program again after some time, the CPU slows down again and doesn't exceed 75 degrees.

 

All drivers are up to date.

Are you connected to power or are you running off the battery?

Have you checked Windows 10 power settings, as well as the old Power Options control panel and ensured that they are set to Better Performance/Balanced and not power saving?

[Abhinav Sharma]

9 hours ago, DakotaWebber said:

What are your clock speeds and utlisation doing?

 

 

Here are the screenshots of HW monitor under full load (Running a CPU intensive MATLAB program that is programmed to use parallel computing) in 2 different scenarios, (i) If my laptop is idle and then I run the program, (ii) If i restart the laptop and immediately run the program.

 

[Abhinav Sharma]

6 hours ago, AnnoyedShelf said:

Are you connected to power or are you running off the battery?

Have you checked Windows 10 power settings, as well as the old Power Options control panel and ensured that they are set to Better Performance/Balanced and not power saving?

Laptop is connected to power and I did check all the settings you mentioned. They are set to better performance.

[DakotaWebber]

Your clock speeds are lower, cpu drawing less power and utilisation is lower

I dont think it would be throttling even as the temps arent reaching high enough

 

-2.5ghz is the base frequency for your cpu, so it looks like its not turboing in the second screenshot so that looks like its either one of two things, temperature or power, maybe even of the battery itself 

 

As for utilisation, unsure, are you running out of RAM?

Try and set the affinity to high for the program and see if that does anything

 

 

[Abhinav Sharma]

On 6/5/2020 at 10:29 AM, DakotaWebber said:

Your clock speeds are lower, cpu drawing less power and utilisation is lower

I dont think it would be throttling even as the temps arent reaching high enough

 

-2.5ghz is the base frequency for your cpu, so it looks like its not turboing in the second screenshot so that looks like its either one of two things, temperature or power, maybe even of the battery itself 

 

As for utilisation, unsure, are you running out of RAM?

Try and set the affinity to high for the program and see if that does anything

 

 

Current RAM is 8GB. System uses around 95% of the RAM when I run numerical simulations on MATLAB (on parallel processing). The two screenshots were for the same program which I ran in two different instances (both the time laptop was plugged in).

 

Battery is weak now as it is 6 years old laptop. Gives around 30 minutes on full charge and normal usage.

 

Do you think that somehow system is preventing CPU from drawing more power?