i7 8750h - Power Limit Throttling - Low TDP Even though cooling is capable

[ale fuentes]

3 hours ago, kaz04 said:

I'm still looking at the FX504 top end variant (FX504GM-EN017T) because of the following reasons:

1. It comes with a 150W power adapter, unlike 130W i5 models. So, I'm assuming the power limit throttling would be non-existent there, correct me if I'm wrong.

2. It gets a better display than FX505. The top end FX504 model get a 120Hz panel with 94% NTSC and 130% sRGB color gamut where as the FX505 top end variant gets 144Hz panel with 74% NTSC and 100% sRGB color gamut. 

3. It is priced at 112.000 INR (1564 USD) but costs 85,000 INR (1187 USD) online where as the FX505 GTX1060 variant is priced at 130,000 INR (1815 USD) and there is no discount currently.

 

The FX505 i7 8750H and GTX 1060 variant surely has the advantage of better cooling (read more heat pipes), nano edge display, RGB keyboard, comes with 2x RAM and 2x SSD than the FX504 i7 8750 and GTX 1060 variant with 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. But, the display on the FX504 is surely more color accurate and the 45,000 INR (628 USD) price difference is what makes the FX504 a better buy for me.

I'm not a hardcore gamer and I need a laptop for some photo and video editing as well. Please provide inputs if I'm making a wise decision.

 

Update: I'm ready to settle with a 1050ti laptop provided it has a good display and comes in the same price range.

 

as far as I've read photo/video editing is kind of a struggle for the cooling of this laptop and that is the source of the throttling problem, so if you are planing on heavy duty processor-depending task maybe the heat from the i7 8750H will be too much. on the other hand that difference in price and quality of screen is a major point in favor of the FX504. I would analyze it like this: does 1187USD afford other machine with these specs (probably not, I asume you have looked for a lot, haha) so I would then think in the amount of editing I would put into the pc, could I say is heavy or light editing? 

In my experience, in light gaming and everyday use this pc goes well, cant tell about editing as I dont work with that, but honestly I've hear some bad and good reviews there. Some people has got cinebench scores of over 1200 after undervolting so no reason to believe you wouldn't get the same performance after doing that adjustment (undervolting seems to have no danger associated). some people have even taken the laptop to asus for repasting and I remember a guy who asked for a motherboard replacement, maybe that also changed the BIOS, I dont know (his story is in this same thread). 

Hope to be of help, good luck!!

[felceaz]

6 hours ago, kaz04 said:

I'm still looking at the FX504 top end variant (FX504GM-EN017T) because of the following reasons:

1. It comes with a 150W power adapter, unlike 130W i5 models. So, I'm assuming the power limit throttling would be non-existent there, correct me if I'm wrong.

2. It gets a better display than FX505. The top end FX504 model get a 120Hz panel with 94% NTSC and 130% sRGB color gamut where as the FX505 top end variant gets 144Hz panel with 74% NTSC and 100% sRGB color gamut. 

3. It is priced at 112.000 INR (1564 USD) but costs 85,000 INR (1187 USD) online where as the FX505 GTX1060 variant is priced at 130,000 INR (1815 USD) and there is no discount currently.

 

The FX505 i7 8750H and GTX 1060 variant surely has the advantage of better cooling (read more heat pipes), nano edge display, RGB keyboard, comes with 2x RAM and 2x SSD than the FX504 i7 8750 and GTX 1060 variant with 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. But, the display on the FX504 is surely more color accurate and the 45,000 INR (628 USD) price difference is what makes the FX504 a better buy for me.

I'm not a hardcore gamer and I need a laptop for some photo and video editing as well. Please provide inputs if I'm making a wise decision.

 

Update: I'm ready to settle with a 1050ti laptop provided it has a good display and comes in the same price range.

 

My ASUS is the FX504GM-ES74, i see there are lots of variants across different countries. From my experience i can give you some advices:

 

This laptop won't perform at its best out of the box so if you don't feel like going through a bunch of forums and reading all you can to make it work as good as possible maybe this is not the computer for you. 

 

This is like a racing car, it has a 0 to 60mph in 5 seconds but that's just a number, that will only happens in certain conditions, so don't believe numbers like this processor should do 3.9MHz all the time.

 

Also to keep with the racing analogy, racing cars need constant tuneup, if you are the mechanic, this would be great.

 

If you want this laptop for photo editing or other tasks i would recommend you to get in contact with some colleagues that can show you how their computers are performing, i'm posting a capture of my screen while exporting one hundred pictures with Adobe Lightroom, it only took two minutes and you can see the processor hitting 50+W at that moment, the maximum wattage was 61W, sometimes it throttled to 45W.

 

So this is something where a benchmark can't really help me, this is real world data.

 

[kaz04]

5 hours ago, ale fuentes said:

as far as I've read photo/video editing is kind of a struggle for the cooling of this laptop and that is the source of the throttling problem, so if you are planing on heavy duty processor-depending task maybe the heat from the i7 8750H will be too much. on the other hand that difference in price and quality of screen is a major point in favor of the FX504. I would analyze it like this: does 1187USD afford other machine with these specs (probably not, I asume you have looked for a lot, haha) so I would then think in the amount of editing I would put into the pc, could I say is heavy or light editing? 

In my experience, in light gaming and everyday use this pc goes well, cant tell about editing as I dont work with that, but honestly I've hear some bad and good reviews there. Some people has got cinebench scores of over 1200 after undervolting so no reason to believe you wouldn't get the same performance after doing that adjustment (undervolting seems to have no danger associated). some people have even taken the laptop to asus for repasting and I remember a guy who asked for a motherboard replacement, maybe that also changed the BIOS, I dont know (his story is in this same thread). 

Hope to be of help, good luck!!

Yeah, I have been through each and every post on this thread before coming to the conclusion of purchasing one. Undervolting is the 1st thing I'm gonna do.

 

And I'm not a professional photographer/videographer so my editing is once in a month. Upgrading from XPS 15 L502X, I'm surely gonna feel better lol. Thanks a lot for your inputs  

[kaz04]

2 hours ago, felceaz said:

My ASUS is the FX504GM-ES74, i see there are lots of variants across different countries. From my experience i can give you some advices:

 

This laptop won't perform at its best out of the box so if you don't feel like going through a bunch of forums and reading all you can to make it work as good as possible maybe this is not the computer for you. 

 

This is like a racing car, it has a 0 to 60mph in 5 seconds but that's just a number, that will only happens in certain conditions, so don't believe numbers like this processor should do 3.9MHz all the time.

 

Also to keep with the racing analogy, racing cars need constant tuneup, if you are the mechanic, this would be great.

 

If you want this laptop for photo editing or other tasks i would recommend you to get in contact with some colleagues that can show you how their computers are performing, i'm posting a capture of my screen while exporting one hundred pictures with Adobe Lightroom, it only took two minutes and you can see the processor hitting 50+W at that moment, the maximum wattage was 61W, sometimes it throttled to 45W.

 

So this is something where a benchmark can't really help me, this is real world data.

 

7

Wow, that's the kind of feedback I was looking for. Now it has made my life much easier. And, I don't mind tuning until it doesn't adversely affect the hardware. Right now the GTX 1060 is out of stock from all online stores, I hope Asus hasn't discontinued it.

[ale fuentes]

20 hours ago, felceaz said:

My ASUS is the FX504GM-ES74, i see there are lots of variants across different countries. From my experience i can give you some advices:

 

This laptop won't perform at its best out of the box so if you don't feel like going through a bunch of forums and reading all you can to make it work as good as possible maybe this is not the computer for you. 

 

This is like a racing car, it has a 0 to 60mph in 5 seconds but that's just a number, that will only happens in certain conditions, so don't believe numbers like this processor should do 3.9MHz all the time.

 

Also to keep with the racing analogy, racing cars need constant tuneup, if you are the mechanic, this would be great.

 

If you want this laptop for photo editing or other tasks i would recommend you to get in contact with some colleagues that can show you how their computers are performing, i'm posting a capture of my screen while exporting one hundred pictures with Adobe Lightroom, it only took two minutes and you can see the processor hitting 50+W at that moment, the maximum wattage was 61W, sometimes it throttled to 45W.

 

So this is something where a benchmark can't really help me, this is real world data.

 

that seems like a great performance, could you share with us what did you do to your laptop? undervolting? overclocking? I assume that it's not out-of-the-box performance you are showing us here.

thanks in advance

[felceaz]

3 hours ago, ale fuentes said:

that seems like a great performance, could you share with us what did you do to your laptop? undervolting? overclocking? I assume that it's not out-of-the-box performance you are showing us here.

thanks in advance

Here i share my Throttlestop settings, you can see all the undervolting settings on the FIVR on it's top right corner, i could reach values of -320mV and little less but i found that with -250mV i got better times on TS Bench.

 

About TS Bench i don't know how it managed to emulate 16 threads but there is a value. When doing a 256M size test on 12 Threads my CPU throttles to 25W for some seconds then releases to something like 50W then goes throttles to 45W that is a behavior i also found when rendering 3D images, it throttles to 2.2MHz for some seconds or early stages of the rendering process then it releases and goes up to 60+W.

 

My computer uses stock paste

 

I'm also sharing some pdfs the tech guys sent me, they are in spanish but it has images and are very simple to use, i think the most important thing to do is to stop windows from updating drivers. 

Inicio Selectivo Windows 10.pdf

Evitar actualización de Drivers de Windows Update.pdf

[Garcia98]

JFYI if your CPU core and cache voltage offsets are different only the highest one will apply for the CPU package (except for AVX-512 instructions IIRC).

So it makes no difference to set the CPU core offset to -200, -300 or -500mV if the CPU cache offset is set at -125mV, it will use the -125mV offset.

[Dismort]

So guys I'm a total noob but I've got my FX 404 GE a few days ago (1050 Ti, i7) and I want to know what you think about these results I got with the Cinebench. I haven't tweaked anything, actually didn't even change the battery settings as you can see lol. This is the second time I run it and got worse results for some reason... Anyway I just wanna play Monster Hunter World and I'm waiting for the next sale so as long as I can play that I'll be happy lol. 

 

EDIT: OK so last time I didn't have anything else running and this time I did have Chrome open with a bunch of tabs so that might have affected the test. 

 

 

[felceaz]

10 hours ago, Garcia98 said:

JFYI if your CPU core and cache voltage offsets are different only the highest one will apply for the CPU package (except for AVX-512 instructions IIRC).

So it makes no difference to set the CPU core offset to -200, -300 or -500mV if the CPU cache offset is set at -125mV, it will use the -125mV offset.

Thank you for that information!

[KresnaPK]

On 12/11/2018 at 10:58 PM, Falkentyne said:

MSI?  Svet on MSI forums, or bios key combo (don't ask for this here.  Go find it yourself; hint: it was posted on Baidu over a year ago), or FPTW64+AMIBCP 5.02+RU (to disable bios lock in EFI to reflash modded APTIO capsule with fptw64).

Other laptops?  Good luck.

Alienware?  Not a chance.

Hi, i've successfully unlocked my ASUS FX504GE BIOS by following a guide for MSI GT73VR BIOS unlock carefully with that FPTW64+AMIBCP+RU tools, thanks for mentioning that stuff.

Now, i've modified the BIOS to unhide some of the hidden settings with AMIBCP & successfully flashed it with FPTW64 .  but the result is.. no luck.. the options still hidden. I even tried to modified the IMON Slope values directly in the optimal value to trick the CPU but.. no difference.

Here is my 312 BIOS dump in .rom format,

anyone here can investigate my bios dump & find what's controlling the power limit & know to unhide the settings properly in this laptop? 

unlocked.rom

[Falkentyne]

12 hours ago, KresnaPK said:

Hi, i've successfully unlocked my ASUS FX504GE BIOS by following a guide for MSI GT73VR BIOS unlock carefully with that FPTW64+AMIBCP+RU tools, thanks for mentioning that stuff.

Now, i've modified the BIOS to unhide some of the hidden settings with AMIBCP & successfully flashed it with FPTW64 .  but the result is.. no luck.. the options still hidden. I even tried to modified the IMON Slope values directly in the optimal value to trick the CPU but.. no difference.

Here is my 312 BIOS dump in .rom format,

anyone here can investigate my bios dump & find what's controlling the power limit & know to unhide the settings properly in this laptop? 

unlocked.rom

Is this the original bios or the unlocked one you did?  Because nothing was unlocked here.  
If you want to unlock a menu you have to set the menus/option AND the options leading up to it (previous menus) to User or Supervisor.

you can't just unlock the last value you want to have access to. 

Also make sure you are using amibcp 5.02.0023 and not 5.01. 5.01 is unstable on CFL bioses.

[KresnaPK]

7 hours ago, Falkentyne said:

Is this the original bios or the unlocked one you did?  Because nothing was unlocked here.  
If you want to unlock a menu you have to set the menus/option AND the options leading up to it (previous menus) to User or Supervisor.

you can't just unlock the last value you want to have access to. 

Also make sure you are using amibcp 5.02.0023 and not 5.01. 5.01 is unstable on CFL bioses.

this is the one with some options (IMON slope, IMON offset, IMON prefix) set to Supervisor access including the options leading up to it (previous menus).

modded2.rom 

 

im using AMIBCP 5.02.0023, flashed it, but still.. the menu won't show up in the BIOS. Im not flashing the wrong .rom , because i've dumped my BIOS again to check if im already running with the modified one.

[Falkentyne]

How did you dump your bios?  What was the exact command used?
this file size is suspiciously large.  

 

I tried to edit and save options for you but it said "Saving secure bios as unsigned".

I attached it here anyway.

 

I've never seen that before.

 

 

modded3.zip

[KresnaPK]

16 hours ago, Falkentyne said:

How did you dump your bios?  What was the exact command used?
this file size is suspiciously large.  

 

I tried to edit and save options for you but it said "Saving secure bios as unsigned".

I attached it here anyway.

 

I've never seen that before.

 

 

modded3.zip

the original BIOS (the one from ASUS's website) size is 13.314 KB, i dumped the BIOS using FPT12 with command :

.\FPTW64.exe -D unlocked.rom -BIOS

yes i got that "Saving secure bios as unsigned", message too when saving.

i've flashed your modified BIOS & still no extra menus in the BIOS. i already verified that the modded BIOS is already flashed successfully by dumping the bios & check it in AMIBCP & it has the modified accesses to supervisor.

[Falkentyne]

Yeah sorry that I can't help more.

My only experience in that type of bios modding is on MSI laptops.

Never done it on desktops or other laptops.  I do know some others have had success (e.g. eVGA laptops have worked).

[LateNightDick]

@KresnaPK Good progress mate. Please make it work, save this forum thread. You'll get there buddy, we believe in you.

[Pio Soesetio]

On 12/14/2018 at 10:07 PM, BackSpace144 said:

ASUS just responded to my RMA request saying that the 25W TDP limit is a hardware limit and is part of the laptop. Really disappointing, I honestly feel that manufacturers should notify consumers that their performance will be hindered due to internal problems with the laptop. 

I don't think so. Mine runs at 45 W TDP. Programs ilke XTU, HWmonitor, Aida64 for some limits it to 25 W TDP. Use ThrottleStop, cpu gets to 45W. basically don't open anything that monitors the cpu besides Throttlestop. As far as i know, only throttlestop that doesn't limit the TDP.

[Pio Soesetio]

On 11/26/2018 at 8:17 AM, felceaz said:

Here is a Cinebench Score, hit an all time high right now 1200+. 

Mi computer is the FX504GM-ES74, the Screen is a TN panel with very nice viewing angles not as good as those laptops with IPN but i chose this one because of its 94%NTSC for photo editing. 

 

About the touchpad mine is working good, sometimes the cursor does not move but i change the way my fingers touch it and works again, it only makes sounds when i click it as intended. 

Holy shit man

That score is just insane!

[BackSpace144]

On 12/24/2018 at 9:06 AM, Pio Soesetio said:

I don't think so. Mine runs at 45 W TDP. Programs ilke XTU, HWmonitor, Aida64 for some limits it to 25 W TDP. Use ThrottleStop, cpu gets to 45W. basically don't open anything that monitors the cpu besides Throttlestop. As far as i know, only throttlestop that doesn't limit the TDP.

Until you use the dedicated GPU, then it power throttles the CPU to 25W and GPU (though I don't know to what extent). Apparently ASUS says it does this to keep the battery from draining while gaming. I don't know how this is even possible with an i5 machine and a 135W power brick though. 

[petzkub]

15 hours ago, BackSpace144 said:

Until you use the dedicated GPU, then it power throttles the CPU to 25W and GPU (though I don't know to what extent). Apparently ASUS says it does this to keep the battery from draining while gaming. I don't know how this is even possible with an i5 machine and a 135W power brick though. 

I've been hitting that same 25W tdp when gaming couple of days that I have owned the device(fx504gm/i7/16gb/1060.) 

But now i got 10W more to spare for the cpu. I managed to do that with limiting the GPU to 1544ghz and CPU to 3,6Ghz.

No stuttering in the games and solid temp. Using balanced or overboost, not much difference.

If only Asus will hit us with a bios that removes that stupid in game 25W cap. SO we and everyone else who owns this device wouldt have to do all the fiddeling to make it work almost like it should out of the box. Clearly there is headroom in the temps...

[BackSpace144]

8 hours ago, petzkub said:

I've been hitting that same 25W tdp when gaming couple of days that I have owned the device(fx504gm/i7/16gb/1060.) 

But now i got 10W more to spare for the cpu. I managed to do that with limiting the GPU to 1544ghz and CPU to 3,6Ghz.

No stuttering in the games and solid temp. Using balanced or overboost, not much difference.

If only Asus will hit us with a bios that removes that stupid in game 25W cap. SO we and everyone else who owns this device wouldt have to do all the fiddeling to make it work almost like it should out of the box. Clearly there is headroom in the temps...

I wish they would release a bios fixing these problems too. But damn, nice fix. Will try that later today and see if it works. Although I kind of doubt it. I saw when unpacking the bios for my particular model (i5/GTX 1050) to see where the limits are induced, that my bios is set to use a 90W adapter (even though it came with a 135W one). So it might be limiting the hardware based on the total system power draw of 90W.

[KresnaPK]

14 hours ago, petzkub said:

I've been hitting that same 25W tdp when gaming couple of days that I have owned the device(fx504gm/i7/16gb/1060.) 

But now i got 10W more to spare for the cpu. I managed to do that with limiting the GPU to 1544ghz and CPU to 3,6Ghz.

No stuttering in the games and solid temp. Using balanced or overboost, not much difference.

If only Asus will hit us with a bios that removes that stupid in game 25W cap. SO we and everyone else who owns this device wouldt have to do all the fiddeling to make it work almost like it should out of the box. Clearly there is headroom in the temps...

nice workaround, but you lose performance by underclocking your GPU, you could just undervolt the GPU & CPU, then limit the CPU to 3,6 GHz/ 3,5 GHz (-157.2 mV) with throttlestop.

I undervolted & overclocked my FX504GE(i7 & 1050ti) GPU on the same time to 1835 MHz @ 925mV & gaming is very smooth & CPU stable around 3,2 GHz to 3,6 GHz on all cores even if it's using 25W while gaming, i use it DAILY. took quite a while of trial & error to squeeze the most performance tho, so.. take your time.

im also lucky to be able to overclock my screen refresh rate to 100 Hz using CRU (my panel is AUO41ED), but i only use 80 Hz daily because the difference to 100 Hz not worth the color degradation.

 

i also hear people with FX504GE just got 315 BIOS update from windows update and experience heat issues. can anyone confirm? im curious what changes that version made

 

[petzkub]

I tried to keep the gpu as high frequency as possible and have the 35w for cpu. There is not much difference in having steady 1550ghz for gpu than try to push +1700ghz and occasionally 1800mhz. I noticed that it tends to fluxuate more when trying to push more than 1600mhz. and same time lose cpu from solid 3,6ghz to 3,0-3,1ghz, and some dips even 2,8ghz (25w).

I have better experience with lower gpu and 35w for cpu while playing cpu-intensive games like battlefield 1. And im still testing and finding the limits with cpu and gpu. But these are my first findigs, that you can have more than 25w for the cpu, but you have to lower the gpu frequency.

When playing something like Overwatch i can push the gpu as far as it goes and cpu holds the 3,6ghz but it does it with 25w. Because its not so cpu intensive. 

 

Im not sure should the gpu go much over 1600ghz, its rated for 1670ghz with 80w tdp.

 

But anyways, we should really push asus for them to release better bios for our laptops. The cooling is sufficient for handling steady 1600mhz for gpu and for the cpu 3,8ghz.

And i the 150w powersupply sufficient? Just about... 80w for gpu and 45-70W for cpu. It should be good with 45w constant draw. Not much more.

Maybe we could use more powerful power supply? like this on...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-Rog-Gaming-ADP-180MB-FA180PM111-ADP-180HB-ADP-180EB-ASUS/dp/B07H7ZWRXT

 

Edit: now i got it running 3,6ghz 35w for the cpu and 1650ghz/4100ghz gpu.

And i got from 303 to 305 bios update manually, from device manager-> system firmware-> search automatically for update.

Even asus support dont have the 305 bios for my device.

[JereJ]

Is it normal that the fx504gm (i5 version) gpu runs at 1000-1300mhz in games even when i put the maximum processor state to 98% the gpu still runs 1000-1300mhz although the package tdp is between 15-18. 

[JereJ]

Can anyone test it, i need to know if i have faulty unit because even when i am not using turbo boost the gpu still runs on low clock speeds. I also have a problem when i change maximum processor state to 99% it does not disable turbo boost, so i have to put it to 98%. Also throttlestop shows that my maximum non turbo ratio is 22 although it should be 23 (i have fx504gm with i5-8300h and gtx 1060)