E6420 BIOS bugs

Hi all,

It seems that BIOS bugs in Dell laptops are never ending story.

A few months ago I reported CPU performance issue caused by a bug in BIOS revision A06 and A07. This issue has hopefully been fixed in BIOS revision A08. However, other old bugs in BIOS are still not resolved and new bugs are identified.

The first one "old bug" is a false positive LCD error 2000-0415 reported by Dell diagnostic utility (for BIOS rev. A07 and A08).

This issue was also reported by CHRIS_83 here and other users on Dell forum:
E6420 - Bios A07 - Diagnostic false positive - Lcd Cable - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

Today, I discovered next issue. Windows Events Log reports within the first minute of Windows startup several warning messages for all CPU cores:

Log name: System
Source: Kernel-Processor-Power
Event ID: 37
Level: Warning
User: SYSTEM
The speed of processor 0 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 9 seconds since the last report.

Log name: System
Source: Kernel-Processor-Power
Event ID: 37
Level: Warning
User: SYSTEM
The speed of processor 2 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 9 seconds since the last report.

Log name: System
Source: Kernel-Processor-Power
Event ID: 37
Level: Warning
User: SYSTEM
The speed of processor 4 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 9 seconds since the last report.

Log name: System
Source: Kernel-Processor-Power
Event ID: 37
Level: Warning
User: SYSTEM
The speed of processor 6 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 9 seconds since the last report.

Log name: System
Source: Kernel-Processor-Power
Event ID: 37
Level: Warning
User: SYSTEM
The speed of processor 1 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 9 seconds since the last report.

Log name: System
Source: Kernel-Processor-Power
Event ID: 37
Level: Warning
User: SYSTEM
The speed of processor 2 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 9 seconds since the last report.

Log name: System
Source: Kernel-Processor-Power
Event ID: 37
Level: Warning
User: SYSTEM
The speed of processor 5 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 9 seconds since the last report.

Log name: System
Source: Kernel-Processor-Power
Event ID: 37
Level: Warning
User: SYSTEM
The speed of processor 7 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 9 seconds since the last report.


This is Event Log form my E6420 working under Windows 7 Pro 64bit (CPU i7-2720QM and BIOS rev. A08).
I'm sure it is not motherboard or heatsink isssue, because I'm just after replace of motherborad with heatsink in my notebook and the same warning message is reported in Event Log.

Can anyone else confirm this issue?

Best regards,
Adam

 

I have the same error codes in my E5420 BIOS A05

 

It looks more like a logging bug rather than a performance issue.

Going back through my event log, it seems to have been always doing that since day 1 with A04 firmware (factory-loaded). The entries always immediately come after a "system is going to sleep" event and "system is coming back from sleep" event and say that the system has been in "reduced performance state" for hundreds of thousands of seconds that seem to line up with when the system went to sleep.

Not a critical bug, but it should probably be fixed.