Laptop CPU locked at 400mhz, thermal throttling flags triggered but no sensors read high temps

[ShadowChaser]

This is a bit of an odd one for me. My Asus Flow X13 is behaving as if it is thermal throttling despite nothing externally appearing wrong.

 

Checking HWinfo64 the flags for thermal throttling are on under both HTC and PROCHOT EXT but I can't find any sensor reading that seems off-nominal. Could this be a software bug somewhere or is something I can't see getting hot? The last time this happened it was because one of the fans was left unplugged after a cleaning (oops) but this time that does not appear to be the case as I can manually force the fans on in software.

 

This happened after it died overnight (thanks windows modern standby) after draining the battery. I plugged it in and at no point has the CPU been allowed to clock beyond 400mhz. In the past when I see it getting locked a quick plug and unplug of the power cable or swapping performance modes fixes it, or a power cycle if those fail. This is the first time it's persisted so I'm left scratching my head on what I can do.

I have tried:

• Different performance profiles in both windows and armoury crate
• Switching between battery and wall power
• Rebooting/Powering from cold
• Manually forcing on fans in case it is something getting warm in the vicinity of the cooler

If it is software, should I be looking at wiping my install and starting fresh with windows or is the problem potentially deeper than that? If it is hardware, where do I even begin to try and isolate what's causing the issue? I'm planning on repasting this notebook soon but I imagine that if something is getting toasty it's because it's not contacting the cooling solution.

[Skipple]

A simple troubleshooting step would be to download something like Throttlestop and disable PROCHOT. See if that fixes the issue, and if it does you know you have something throwing bad info. 

 

I've seen this on my X270 when using a third party battery. I have to disable PROCHOT to be able to use the PC properly. 

[ShadowChaser]

1 minute ago, Skipple said:

A simple troubleshooting step would be to download something like Throttlestop and disable PROCHOT. See if that fixes the issue, and if it does you know you have something throwing bad info. 

 

I've seen this on my X270 when using a third party battery. I have to disable PROCHOT to be able to use the PC properly. 

throttlestop is intel only but I have tried ryzen controller which does not have the ability to change these flags. I don't like the idea of disabling a safety measure to begin with though.

[Skipple]

Just now, ShadowChaser said:

throttlestop is intel only but I have tried ryzen controller which does not have the ability to change these flags. I don't like the idea of disabling a safety measure to begin with though.

Ah gotcha. From what I've read, disabling PROCHOT doesn't actually disable all thermal monitoring, just certain ones. Also, disabling it briefly will at least be able to tell you if that's your problem or not. If you disable it and you are still locked to 400Mhz, you know PROCHOT isn't your issue. 

[ShadowChaser]

1 minute ago, Skipple said:

Ah gotcha. From what I've read, disabling PROCHOT doesn't actually disable all thermal monitoring, just certain ones. Also, disabling it briefly will at least be able to tell you if that's your problem or not. If you disable it and you are still locked to 400Mhz, you know PROCHOT isn't your issue. 

There does not appear to be any software on the amd side that can disable prochot for mobile chips sadly. I can't find anything as all the results are for desktop cpus.

[ShadowChaser]

Reflashing the BIOS has fixed the issue (not a new bios, even though I should do that) I should've tried this from the beginning but I hope that's not something to be concerned about.