How bad really is to keep thermal throttling continuously?

[Gat Pelsinger]

One of the reason that I am thinking about daily driving this Elitebook that I keep mentioning is because its firmware very surprisingly allows me to increase the PL1 to whatever watts and it just works. Btw, yes, it is the one having problems but it is working fine in GNU/Linux with hyper threading disabled and I can have turbo boost working. With monitoring, I can see that with unlimited power, its thermal solution will let me get around 30 watts all the time. That is one extra billion cycles on all 4 cores when running on 18 watts of PL1. But the problem is, the temperature will be pegged at Tjmax all the time. How bad really is it to keep thermal throttling? I mean I don't really care about life span much, but I am only worried about fire suddenly starting, the battery combusting, or that 1 cubic nanometer of silicon going under physical changes which will bring the whole CPU down. This is a refurbished laptop after all. At the most, I can setup a key bind to let the power go down when I feel a little generous. Even with lifting the power limit, it is only going to thermal throttle when gaming, which I don't do much nowadays, so day to day tasks are going to do fine.

 

Plus a side question, I keep the performance profile to max both in Windows and GNU/Linux. So the CPU should be continuously on turbo. Is there really not much difference to keep it on balanced? My senses think there must be latency in changing the frequency dynamically all the time. But is that even worth it?

[Blasty Blosty]

24 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

I mean I don't really care about life span much, but I am only worried about fire suddenly starting, the battery combusting, or that 1 cubic nanometer of silicon going under physical changes which will bring the whole CPU down.

If you do not care about lifespan, it is okay. And nothing bad will happen, it is exactly why thermal throttling is in place, to stop bad things happening

[Blasty Blosty]

25 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

Is there really not much difference to keep it on balanced

More of a marketing kinda term in my experience, not much performance difference

[podkall]

I'd only have to ask why would you leave CPU almost cooking at the thermal throttling limit? Is the performance difference that noticeable to be worth it?

 

One thing is Watts and Ghz the other thing is actual performance you gain from it.

[Alex Atkin UK]

33 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

One of the reason that I am thinking about daily driving this Elitebook that I keep mentioning is because its firmware very surprisingly allows me to increase the PL1 to whatever watts and it just works. Btw, yes, it is the one having problems but it is working fine in GNU/Linux with hyper threading disabled and I can have turbo boost working. With monitoring, I can see that with unlimited power, its thermal solution will let me get around 30 watts all the time. That is one extra billion cycles on all 4 cores when running on 18 watts of PL1. But the problem is, the temperature will be pegged at Tjmax all the time. How bad really is it to keep thermal throttling? I mean I don't really care about life span much, but I am only worried about fire suddenly starting, the battery combusting, or that 1 cubic nanometer of silicon going under physical changes which will bring the whole CPU down. This is a refurbished laptop after all. At the most, I can setup a key bind to let the power go down when I feel a little generous. Even with lifting the power limit, it is only going to thermal throttle when gaming, which I don't do much nowadays, so day to day tasks are going to do fine.

 

Plus a side question, I keep the performance profile to max both in Windows and GNU/Linux. So the CPU should be continuously on turbo. Is there really not much difference to keep it on balanced? My senses think there must be latency in changing the frequency dynamically all the time. But is that even worth it?

Modern CPUs are pretty much designed to run at the thermal throttling point, laptops have done for decades already.

 

In theory they will wear out slower if you run them cooler, but it doesn't seem particularly common for people to report CPU dying, outside of the recent BIOS issues both AMD and Intel had.

 

I ran my 9900k in the 90C+ under load for years and it still works fine.  I wouldn't want it sitting there 24/7, but under normal usage I think its fine.

 

On the flip side my 5950X died recently, but it behaved oddly from day one so it seemed I just got a bad chip that was faulty from the start.

 

As for power profiles, yes there is a latency penalty for using Balanced, you may notice slightly more hitches in games if it doesn't clock up in time.  But mostly its about power consumption, which is why I have a dedicated gaming rig set to Performance mode but my regular desktop and server are left to throttle down when idle.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@podkall

 

You do know 4 billion cycles (+1 GHz on 4 cores) is a lot, right? Yes I do see some noticeable performance. Chunks in Minecraft load faster, that it is soothing.

[podkall]

6 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@podkall

 

You do know 4 billion cycles (+1 GHz on 4 cores) is a lot, right? Yes I do see some noticeable performance. Chunks in Minecraft load faster, that it is soothing.

I can relate to what you're playing:

[podkall]

7 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@podkall

 

You do know 4 billion cycles (+1 GHz on 4 cores) is a lot, right? Yes I do see some noticeable performance. Chunks in Minecraft load faster, that it is soothing.

but did you know MC only uses 1 core if it's Java?

[Gat Pelsinger]

34 minutes ago, podkall said:

but did you know MC only uses 1 core if it's Java?

I don't know what exactly you mean but your are wrong. Minecraft can use all the threads. Plus I am running with a bunch of performance mods.

[podkall]

1 minute ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

I don't know what exactly you mean but your are wrong. Minecraft can use all the threads. Plus I am running with a bunch of performance mods.

only Bedrock is multi-core, unless there was some major update to Minecraft Java:

 

[Gat Pelsinger]

@podkall

 

Bro I don't know from where you got this information. Probably only in the olden days Minecraft used to only use 1 thread. If you fire up Minecraft, does it not use a lot if not all the threads?

[Gat Pelsinger]

@Blasty Blosty @Alex Atkin UK

 

But what about the battery? The whole chasis also gets warm, so is there any threat to the battery? Also, on Windows I can control the fan speed and I will try to get something similar on GNU/Linux. Is putting the fan on 100% the whole time okay? Of course it will wear out but excluding that.

[Blasty Blosty]

1 minute ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@Blasty Blosty @Alex Atkin UK

 

But what about the battery? The whole chasis also gets warm, so is there any threat to the battery? Also, on Windows I can control the fan speed and I will try to get something similar on GNU/Linux. Is putting the fan on 100% the whole time okay? Of course it will wear out but excluding that.

Yes, the battery will be affected, it's lifespan will be reduced under these conditions

 

The fan speed is also fine, they are rated and tested and can do more than what they say

[Gat Pelsinger]

1 minute ago, Blasty Blosty said:

it's lifespan will be reduced under these conditions

Don't really care about lifespan. Just need to make sure that it doesn't combust.

[Alex Atkin UK]

13 minutes ago, Blasty Blosty said:

Yes, the battery will be affected, it's lifespan will be reduced under these conditions

 

The fan speed is also fine, they are rated and tested and can do more than what they say

Unlikely, in laptops usually the battery is completely separate from the motherboard.

 

11 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

Don't really care about lifespan. Just need to make sure that it doesn't combust.

That can never be guaranteed, but how hot the CPU is running has absolutely nothing to do with that.

[Gat Pelsinger]

Just now, Alex Atkin UK said:

Unlikely, in laptops usually the battery is completely separate from the motherboard.

of course yes, but the chasis gets warm, and I think the battery does stick to the chasis?

[Blasty Blosty]

1 minute ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

of course yes, but the chasis gets warm, and I think the battery does stick to the chasis?

Nothing will ever "explode", if so that is a lovely lawsuit for you

 

There are tons of safety measures in place to stop computers harming themselves. Back in the old days though, pc's ran themselves till they died, no throttling or anything. Nowadays it is basically impossible to damage or kill a pc by just using it.

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

of course yes, but the chasis gets warm, and I think the battery does stick to the chasis?

The battery will get warm anyway and often its plastic so wont be transmitting the heat anywhere except directly behind the hot components.

 

Also legally laptops have to be manufactured so the surface temperature never gets hot enough to burn you.

 

1 minute ago, Blasty Blosty said:

Nowadays it is basically impossible to damage or kill a pc by just using it.

Not true for desktops (if you get the BIOS settings wrong), but should be for laptops where the manufacturer locks everything down.

[Blasty Blosty]

2 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Not true for desktops (if you get the BIOS settings wrong), but should be for laptops where the manufacturer locks everything down.

Yeah sorry I meant like that, no BIOS tinkering or anything, thanks for clarifying for OP

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 hours ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

One of the reason that I am thinking about daily driving this Elitebook that I keep mentioning is because its firmware very surprisingly allows me to increase the PL1 to whatever watts and it just works. Btw, yes, it is the one having problems but it is working fine in GNU/Linux with hyper threading disabled and I can have turbo boost working. With monitoring, I can see that with unlimited power, its thermal solution will let me get around 30 watts all the time. That is one extra billion cycles on all 4 cores when running on 18 watts of PL1. But the problem is, the temperature will be pegged at Tjmax all the time. How bad really is it to keep thermal throttling? I mean I don't really care about life span much, but I am only worried about fire suddenly starting, the battery combusting, or that 1 cubic nanometer of silicon going under physical changes which will bring the whole CPU down. This is a refurbished laptop after all. At the most, I can setup a key bind to let the power go down when I feel a little generous. Even with lifting the power limit, it is only going to thermal throttle when gaming, which I don't do much nowadays, so day to day tasks are going to do fine.

 

Plus a side question, I keep the performance profile to max both in Windows and GNU/Linux. So the CPU should be continuously on turbo. Is there really not much difference to keep it on balanced? My senses think there must be latency in changing the frequency dynamically all the time. But is that even worth it?

Its curious they let you change PL1, but at the end of the day its just an option letting you choose if you want to hard power limit below the TDP or let the thermal limiter do its thing.

 

Also when not gaming, absolutely no reason to use the performance power profile as it will just tank the battery quicker.

 

Risk of battery failure is down to if the refurbisher used a good quality battery or cheap junk.  There's nothing you can do to reduce the chances of it going thermal if they used junk, just don't leave it on charge unless you are there to supervise it.   Though a junk battery could go at any time, its just more likely when on charge.

 

This is one reason I wouldnt feel comfortable buying refurbished.

[podkall]

53 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

@podkall

 

Bro I don't know from where you got this information. Probably only in the olden days Minecraft used to only use 1 thread. If you fire up Minecraft, does it not use a lot if not all the threads?

It apparently does use multiple threads, but not in a way modern games do it:

 

[Gat Pelsinger]

@podkall

 

Yes I thought of the same but didn't bother to comment. But that still means Minecraft can use multiple cores. Not sure what you mean. Like having more cores is going to generate the chunks faster.

[podkall]

38 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

Like having more cores is going to generate the chunks faster.

I doubt it works like that, unless you actually know for sure

[Gat Pelsinger]

@podkall

 

Wherever you got this experience from is total false. Have you even ever played MC?

[Nayr438]

1 hour ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

But that still means Minecraft can use multiple cores. Not sure what you mean. Like having more cores is going to generate the chunks faster.

The main game loop including block, Player, AI updates are run in a single thread and less expensive tasks are split into multiple other threads, but these other threads still have to wait on the primary thread. If you pay attention you will probably see threads jump around cores frequently and often see them spike with a heavy load followed by it dropping to a single thread under heavy load while they wait. Anything more than probably 1C/2T for a Server and 2C/4T for Single Player should be negligible, not including whatever is needed for the system itself.

This is why projects like folia exist and why people often rely on multi-threaded chunk generators like chunky.