Intel Speed Step Seems to be massively reducing my laptops performance.

[David82]

tldr; Cpu was throttled to 1.6 ghz when it should have been 2.6. Disabled speed step and problem went away BUT now Im worried that the extra heat will mess the machine up - looking for different approaches to resolve the issue without disabling speed step.
 

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Morning all, 

I have a bit of an issue, which I have already "resolved" but want to check if there is a better way, or if this will cause any issues.

So the issue is that my laptop (a 4-5 year old XPS 15 - 9550) was running quite sluggishly, Im a software dev and noticed things like menus in visual studio taking time to pop out, files taking time to load etc.

I noticed that the CPU speed didn't seem to ever get above 1.6Ghz even when under load compiling code, or running a benchmark, Screen shot attached of HWMon after working for a while, running teams VS 2019 chrome and a few other small apps - that max CPY speed is what Im getting at, it should have peaked higher than that surely? especially with the temps as low as they are there's no reason for it to be throttled is there?

The spec is: 
i7 6700 HQ (2.6ghz)
16 GB Ram

Samsung 970 Pro SSD

I know the machine is getting a bit old but honestly other than this issue it meets my needs perfectly so I don't see a need to change it.

What I have done so far:
1. Disabled all window animations etc (At first I thought the issue was that things were taking a while to render)

2. Changed a few programs to always use the nvidea GPU rather than the intel (This made teams much better!)

3. Disabled speed step in the bios

That third change was the one that did it, the CPU is now running at 3.2 Ghz average which I guess means its boosting *all the time* (I'm not really into hardware so apologies if the terminology is wrong, last time I built a PC was back when Athlon XP2000 was the cutting edge CPU). 

Im not overly concerned with battery life, the laptop is docked most of the time because Im either working from home or in a clients office BUT what does concern me is that the extra speed means more power which means more heat and the 9550 isn't known for dissipating heat well!

Using CPUID HWMon I can see that my CPU is averaging 44ºC as I type this with little else running but maxed out at 80ºC earlier when I was in a teams call - I know this is within tolerances but its still hotter than it used to get where I would only see 80ºC+ if I was doing A LOT with the machine, not just running teams.

Is having speed step disabled going to screw my machine up? Is there something else I could try to resolve the original problem which doesn't involve disabling speed step?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

[porina]

Sounds more like a problem with Windows power plan settings. Have a play with those.

[David82]

14 minutes ago, porina said:

Sounds more like a problem with Windows power plan settings. Have a play with those.

Thanks for the reply, I forgot to mention that I had checked those, CPU min and max state are 5% and 100% respectively, Power plan is "Performance". 

Im going to boot from a linux drive at lunch (when I dont need to have the laptop on for work) and see if the the problem persists there, if it does then I guess that will confirm it s a hardware issue.

[DoctorNick]

6 minutes ago, David82 said:

Thanks for the reply, I forgot to mention that I had checked those, CPU min and max state are 5% and 100% respectively, Power plan is "Performance". 

Im going to boot from a linux drive at lunch (when I dont need to have the laptop on for work) and see if the the problem persists there, if it does then I guess that will confirm it s a hardware issue.

Set to balanced at default values. Try again. Most of the time it's not necessary to play with that

[Levent]

1 hour ago, David82 said:

Is having speed step disabled going to screw my machine up?

Nope.

 

1 hour ago, David82 said:

Is there something else I could try to resolve the original problem which doesn't involve disabling speed step?

Other than windows power plans, nope.

[David82]

22 minutes ago, DoctorNick said:

Set to balanced at default values. Try again. Most of the time it's not necessary to play with that

Doesnt seem to change anything still not getting above 1698mhz.

Other than setting it to "performance" I've not changed these settings at all - I'd not expect the "performance" profile to limit the CPU more than the "Balanced" profile.

Honestly at this point, I'm happy to just disable speed step and get on with it, as long as its not going to kill the machine - even then... If I get another year out of it I think Ill have done well!

[Somerandomtechyboi]

If you can try clocking it abit higher, laptop cpus will handle 95c just fine, heck some laptops run 105c fine, lower than 90c and you are prob leaving performance on the table

[David82]

18 minutes ago, Levent said:

Nope.

 

Other than windows power plans, nope.

Good to know, Im just going to disable it and keep an eye on the temps etc.

[David82]

2 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

If you can try clocking it abit higher, laptop cpus will handle 95c just fine, heck some laptops run 105c fine, lower than 90c and you are prob leaving performance on the table

I'm not overly interested in overclocking, I don't need a blisteringly fast PC I'm using a glorified text editor 95% of the day! I just want it to run at its designed speed! It seems to be capped at 1698Mhz at the moment.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

4 minutes ago, David82 said:

I'm not overly interested in overclocking, I don't need a blisteringly fast PC I'm using a glorified text editor 95% of the day! I just want it to run at its designed speed! It seems to be capped at 1698Mhz at the moment.

I think 3.2ghz is the max all core speed so if it runs 80c then id say its fine

[David82]

So bit of an update,

I have tried booting off of a linux usb drive and the system did not exhibit the problem.

I have reset all of the power management profiles to their defaults.

No difference.

I have also downloaded the intel Extreme Tuning Utility which shows the max core frequency as 1.7GHz.
Pretty much all of the options in the app are greyed out, so nothing I can change.

Im more annoyed that I cant find the issue than anything else!

[NinJake]

If the issue wasn't there while booted off a usb drive there's likely something going on with your operating system. You can try to do all the fancy checks and what not but if feasible I'd just recommend doing a clean install and seeing if that fixes it. I get you use it for work, but surely you have that data backed up somewhere... right?

[David82]

Just now, NinJake said:

If the issue wasn't there while booted off a usb drive there's likely something going on with your operating system. You can try to do all the fancy checks and what not but if feasible I'd just recommend doing a clean install and seeing if that fixes it. I get you use it for work, but surely you have that data backed up somewhere... right?

I did a clean install a few weeks ago because it was running slow... Not really an option at the moment because I have it all set up for working with my current client so Ill have to leave it for now.

I guess it could be something that was installed after windows that caused the issue, so Ill have to take some time to do a reinstall and then install each piece of software/driver individually and see at what point the problem comes back.

I have disabled speed step and its running fine (a bit warmer than normal, but fine).

[NinJake]

Before reinstalling. I'd also do a SMART checkup of your drive. Use something like crystaldiskinfo and see if there's any glaring issues with the drive your OS/applications are installed on.

 

Also was this "slowness" only while using specific software? Like it seemed slow in microsoft word but was fine while watching youtube etc?

[David82]

19 hours ago, NinJake said:

Before reinstalling. I'd also do a SMART checkup of your drive. Use something like crystaldiskinfo and see if there's any glaring issues with the drive your OS/applications are installed on.

 

Also was this "slowness" only while using specific software? Like it seemed slow in microsoft word but was fine while watching youtube etc?

Its definitely an issue with the CPU being throttled by something - Monitoring the CPU with speed step on shows the max clock speed at 1.6ghz but with speed step disabled its sitting at 2.6ghz

The slowness was system wide, everything from boot to opening menus in visual studio was slower than I'd expect from the hardware.