Significant Performance Drop on Battery

DaMoose19 · August 16, 2018

I have an issue with my Dell G5 underperforming on battery. It performs really well when plugged in, but when I unplug it, the CPU gets throttled down to 0.80 GHz. Sometimes it's barely usable when loading or watching videos.

The issue seems to clearly be that it is being throttled on battery. When I'm gaming or even doing a CPU stress test when plugged in it only mildly thermal throttles. The CPU is allowed to go to whatever level it wants/needs, and I am able to do my work. However, the moment I unplug the power cable, it throttles to 0.80 GHz (0.79 GHz, actually, and the multipliers for all cores are brought down to x8). Unity gets sluggish, and I can't play games.

Are there any suggestions on how to fix this? I am immobilized when it throttles. I have tried:

Updating the drivers
Updating the BIOS
Setting the Windows power profile to High Performance. I had to add this profile to the list, as it was not available by default.
Modifying the Windows power settings to set the minimum CPU state to 100% when on battery, just in case.
Going into BIOS and toggling the C-states and Speed Shift.

I also tried unplugging the battery inside for about 30 seconds. It appeared to help, but even when it's on high-performance mode on battery the performance isn't nearly the same as if it were plugged in. According to the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, it says that there is a power limit throttling or current limit throttling and the number of active cores goes down from 6 to 0 at times and the Core TDP is much lower than when plugged in. According to CPUID when idling it goes up to 1.6 GHz and the multiplier is at 24x, but when running a CPU stress test it goes down to 8x and to .79 GHz.