Laptop Power Throttle

nMeCri · September 29, 2020

Last week a friend of mine gave me her Lenovo Laptop for cleaning. So I got this Lenovo V2000 Laptop from 2014 with following specifications:

- Lenovo Lancer 5A5 Motherboard (Bios Ver. 9BCN29WW from 20th October 2014) [Northbridge: Intel Haswell-ULT IMC, Southbridge: Intel Lynx Point-LP]

- Intel i7-4510U (2.0 to 3.1 Ghz, 15W TDP)

- Nvidia GeForce 840M, 4GB Graphics

- 1 TB WD HDD 5400RPM

- Samsung DDR3 1600 8GB Ram

- Windows 10 Home, Version 2004

which are quite ok for Zoom meeting and working purposes. So I opened the Laptop, cleaned all the dust, re-paste the CPU and GPU with Arctic MX-4 and changed the thermal pads on the VRAM.

After all the cleaning I ran some benchmark (Cinebench R20 and XTU Stresstest) to test the machine, but I noticed the Laptop is working strange.

The CPU temperature under load never go above 70 °C, and power usage stuck at max. 25 Watts, frequency keeps at 2.5-2.6 Ghz, never reached the maximum turbo boost frequency of 3.1 Ghz.

So I downloaded Intel XTU and found out I can not raise the Turbo Boost Power Max above 25 Watts, the adjust bar maxed out at 25 Watts.

So the CPU is always Power Throttling.

I tried to look into the BIOS (InsydeH20 Rev 3.7) but I could find nothing which could relate to CPU performance, there's also no "ADVANCED" Tab.

In ThrottleStop I could not change the maximum power settings also.

Is there any method to solve this problem that could apply a higher maximum power to the CPU?

Some friends told me I could use a 90w power adapter (65W now) or upgrade the HDD to a SSD which demand less power, but I don't think these are relevant to CPU settings.

WkdPaul · September 29, 2020

* Thread moved to the Troubleshooting section *

unclewebb · September 29, 2020

1 hour ago, nMeCri said:

I noticed the Laptop is working strange.

Your laptop seems to be working correctly. The 4510U is a low power CPU with a 15W TDP rating. Power limit throttling is more common than thermal throttling and is completely normal.

The maximum 3.10 GHz turbo speed is only available when 1 core is active. When 2 cores are active, the maximum drops down to 2.80 GHz.

Did you try checking the ThrottleStop FIVR - Disable and Lock Turbo Power Limits option? Did you try increasing the Long and Short turbo power limits in the TPL window? Many 4th Gen low power U series CPUs are hard locked to 15W. If you can run at 25W, you are doing better than most.