Core clock, and voltage drops under load, Throttlestop showing power limits

DarnieArnie · May 22, 2022

So it's a slow Sunday, and I was bored, so I wanted to see my Cinebench score. Fire it up, running smooth, then 30 seconds to a minute in my clock speeds and voltage drop (pictures are attached). Thinking that was odd I launched ThrottleStop and ran the test bench. Sure enough around the halfway mark (30 seconds) I see the power limit pop up. Look into the limits and it's showing under Core: PL 1, and under Ring: EDP OTHER. At idle my clock speed is 4.8-5.0GHz. After 30 seconds of stress it's dropping to 4.2-4.4GHz. So I'm curious as to what could be causing this. Have not made any changes in the BIOS, only recent additions were a new GPU and PSU. The PSU was from a friend that had it leftover from his previous build, so it is used. First picture is idle stats, second the limit errors ThrottleStop showed, third is the drops I'm having under load during the Cinebench run.

Specs:

i9 10850K

MSI MPG Z490

Crucial Ballistix 3600 DDR4

EVGA 3080 FTW3

EVGA G3 1000w PSU

unclewebb · May 24, 2022

@DarnieArnie

Open the ThrottleStop TPL window and see what the PL1 and PL2 turbo power limits are set to. If the turbo power limits are at default settings, the 10850K will throttle like you are seeing.

Your screenshot shows throttling at the 125W power level. That is the rated TDP for a 10850K.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/205904/intel-core-i910850k-processor-20m-cache-up-to-5-20-ghz.html

Go into the BIOS and increase your PL1 and PL2 turbo power limits if you want your CPU to run faster when it is fully loaded. Limit Reasons shows that PL1 is the reason for throttling. Always look under the Limit Reasons CORE column for items lighting up red. I set my 10850K to 300W. Make sure you have adequate cooling before doing this.

If you change the power limits in the BIOS, delete the ThrottleStop.INI configuration file before running ThrottleStop or else it will continue to use the previous values that were saved.

DarnieArnie · May 25, 2022

On 5/23/2022 at 11:02 PM, unclewebb said:

@DarnieArnie

Open the ThrottleStop TPL window and see what the PL1 and PL2 turbo power limits are set to. If the turbo power limits are at default settings, the 10850K will throttle like you are seeing.

Your screenshot shows throttling at the 125W power level. That is the rated TDP for a 10850K.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/205904/intel-core-i910850k-processor-20m-cache-up-to-5-20-ghz.html

Go into the BIOS and increase your PL1 and PL2 turbo power limits if you want your CPU to run faster when it is fully loaded. Limit Reasons shows that PL1 is the reason for throttling. Always look under the Limit Reasons CORE column for items lighting up red. I set my 10850K to 300W. Make sure you have adequate cooling before doing this.

If you change the power limits in the BIOS, delete the ThrottleStop.INI configuration file before running ThrottleStop or else it will continue to use the previous values that were saved.

So really this would just be regarded as normal behavior? Was thinking something was wrong, during one of my other issues which ended up just being a dead AIO, was running a bunch of tests but maybe I just never noticed the Limits popping up and the drops in frequency/voltage because I was looking at temps. I may look into raising the TDP, was also interested in undervolting, being a fellow 10850K owner, have you undervolted yours, any advice for that?

unclewebb · May 25, 2022

47 minutes ago, DarnieArnie said:

normal behavior

Power limit throttling is normal when the power limits are set to their default values.

49 minutes ago, DarnieArnie said:

undervolting

Set the CPU to however much voltage it needs to be stable. Instead of an undervolt, I adjusted the load line settings to reduce the voltage. I prefer running all cores, all the time at a fixed frequency of 5000 MHz. It is less work to find a stable voltage if you do this but you lose some light load MHz compared to using default turbo ratios.