How to Supercharge the M11x with Core i5/i7 UM CPUs

What TDP/TDC setting are you using?

A user was testing on his M15x the other day and we learned that as the CPU heats up, the amount of power consumption also goes up due to internal resistance within the CPU increasing.

With the UM CPUs, if you are setting your TDP to the bare minimum like 20, you might run into this problem. At the start of your game you will be running faster compared to half way through your game when you start going over the turbo TDP value and your turbo boost will be reduced as your CPU heats up.

If you are using low TDP/TDC values then try significantly increasing them while gaming so they don't become a limitation of getting full turbo boost.

Any mod that increases CPU performance will decrease battery life. If this is a problem then use a battery profile and set that profile to the default TDP/TDC values. ThrottleStop can automatically switch profiles based on AC or Battery power so you can have the best of both worlds. You might even be able to decrease the turbo TDP/TDC values on your battery profile and increase battery life. Once set up correctly, you should be able to ignore ThrottleStop in the system tray and not have to give it a second thought whether plugged in or not.

 

I run TS on battery, ONLY if I am in SC2. I have the slowest computer of all my friends, and as such, I try to extract every ounce of power possible (thank you, UncleWebb!)

 

unclewebb, TS is awesome. Finally the m11x plays SC2 at good frame rates. 30-40 in 3v3 using all ultra except shaders on med. Thanks for all the great work.

Now here's a question I'm hoping someone can answer. I set the OC to 160 and it runs great. But sometimes if I reboot the system, it goes back to the default 133. I even go back into the BIOS settings and it still shows 160.

Has anyone experience this and maybe found a solution to that. I have to go into the BIOS and "save and exit" to make sure that 160 takes effect.

 

Have you done any stress testing at 160? If your computer is not reliable at that bus speed then it might not stick and will sometimes use the default 133 value instead. Other users are only hitting the low 150 range reliably. 160+ is living on the edge.

 

I have no problems running it at 160. The only stress test I've done are running games like L4D2 for a few hours or playing SC2 for 4 hours at a time for several nights. It seems pretty stable to me. I can try running the wPrime tests to see how it fairs. I know that if I push it to 162 or 164, then the games that I play will eventually crash.

That is a good point, maybe the system is detecting some error that is pushing it back to 133. I'll try lowering the it to 150s and see if it sticks.

Thanks!

 

I am sorry but this thread is very confusing for me... Can someone please give me the steps to OC my CPU

 

Ok, now I'm really confused. I thought 30/30 or 15/30 (or thereabouts) was the optimal setting. But for games you're saying it needs to be higher? If so how high?

 

IIRC, 15/30 is the default setting, so using those in TS changes nothing

There's really no harm in setting them both to something they'll never hit like 200. That way you don't have to worry about what to use

 

roxxor: I'm not yet sure what settings DivineAura was using.

If a person is getting less turbo boost as the CPU heats up then I would definitely raise the TDP/TDC limits much higher. These CPUs don't seem to be overheating even with full turbo boost so I'd follow corwinicre's advice and set TDP/TDC to an unobtainable value like 200 each or 100 each. Set them sky high so there is no chance your turbo boost will be limited. It's been proven here that there's no need to limit turbo boost even at full load on these UM processors.

blab8811: Read the first post and if there is something you don't understand then I will be happy to explain it. I don't want to start explaining everything in fine detail if you haven't even read that. Other users have read that first post and have been able to get things working so give it a try.

 

I was using TDP @ 20 and TDC @ 60 that time.....LOL!
I increased that to 100/200......gonna try the difference later
What is that Force TDP/TDC btw? Is it ok that I keep it @ 16?

 

Force TDP/TDC controls how often those settings are updated within the CPU. The smaller the number, the more often these values are checked and updated. 16 is a good compromise. Most users seem to get best CPU performance when fully loaded when this value gets reduced to 8. It was probably your TDP=20 setting that was limiting your turbo boost before as the CPU heated up. This is all new stuff so I'm still learning. You don't read about these kind of tricks in any book.

 

What's the ideal TDP/TDC setting if you plan to run the CPU on full load for 24 hours straight (plugged into power outlet of course)?

Basically, I'm trying to find a setting that will not lead to a heat-related crash in the middle of important work.

 

You can max out TDP/TDC and the CPU is still going to stay well within thermal limits. I've done a couple of 6+ hour video encodes using TS set to 100/100 and temps were in the mid 80s.

 

hello all,
i read this thread about 3 weeks ago and i was intrigued so i set out to do a lil testing. TS defiantly lowered my wprime time" im at work now so not 100% sure on the numbers" but i know default TDP/TDC settings i got around 38+ and using 30/30 @ 160Hmz OC i was getting around 26. i did however notice my multiplier was fluctuating alot is there a way to "fine tune" my TDP/TDC settings to Lock in the multiplyer ?

btw i was REALLY worried about temps but i noticed that they never exceeded over 64 i am using a laptop cooler pushing cold air right into the air port.

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

 

There is a setting called Force TDP/TDC in the Options window that can help maximize the multiplier at full load. Based on user testing posted here, a setting of about 8 seems give the best overall performance. Default is 16 so the benchers have something to fine tune and play with.

At idle or when these CPUs are not fully loaded, it is normal for the actual multiplier to hunt around a lot. Turbo boost can be constantly varying hundreds of times a second so ThrottleStop reports an accurate average of that. Most programs round that off to the nearest whole number or don't accurately report what's really going on so most people start believing that their multiplier is far steadier than what it really is. CPU-Z has chosen to report a high multiplier at idle for more consistent validation numbers. Threads on these CPUs are constantly going into or coming put of sleep states or using full turbo boost or no turbo boost or some turbo boost.

If you chopped 12 seconds off your wPrime time and you are running nice and cool at 64C then no worries. Play with the Force TDP/TDC option while running wPrime to try and get the last little bit of performance out of ThrottleStop. Enjoy your laptop but don't pay too much attention to the random looking average multiplier reading. Minimize TS to the system tray and be happy.

mcham: I haven't heard of any heat related crashes on the M11x. Some people are crashing because they increase the BCLK too high and don't fully test their overclock. They might be game stable for most games they play but their overclock is not 100% stable. You can increase the TDP/TDC values to the moon and these little UM CPUs still won't create enough heat at full load to lead to a crash.

 

uncleweb,
Thanks a lot for your answer, it clears up other questions that i had
regarding TS, i have been playing around with the Force TDP/TDC and i have it at about 10 i was just worried about it updating too much, wasted CPU cycles
used trying to write values that might already be set. now from your testing have there been any degradation in performance by Oc'ing the GPU as well as CPU+TS im aware that both CPU/GPU share the same cooling pipe so i can understand where things could get a little odd. but you think even a minor OC of the gpu would give me a better bump. im aware some people dont really worry about temps but im not the guy to push things OVER the limit just a little extra boost is more than acceptable for me.

Excellent work on TS.. this thread was a very educational and EPIC read.
big thanks also to all who asked great questions. and replied with GREAT answers

 

Updating TDP/TDC too frequently does waste CPU cycles. There is still a little to be gained when you go below 16 and it's usually around 8 where there is nothing left to be gained. The point where the multiplier is constantly maxed out in the log file may be a bit too far because of the wasted CPU cycles to do that. A slight bit of multiplier throttling might be the best point for overall performance. I don't own an M11x but that seems to be the general consensus here.

The thermal throttling point for a Core i7-640UM isn't until 105C so I think most people worry way too much about their CPU temperature when they really don't need to. If Intel thought a CPU running at a high temperature was going to quickly fail or fail within the 3 year warranty then they would lower the throttling point to prevent this from happening but they don't.

As long as your CPU is not throttling then it is running within spec so there is no need to worry. Dell also gave you the option to overclock your CPU in the bios. They didn't add this feature and market these laptops as overclockable because they didn't want you using this feature. I don't believe the bios says, "Use this feature and you will void your warranty." These features are there to be used and these CPUs do a 5 star job of looking after themselves no matter what software you are running on them. What the CPU really wants has precedence over all other user settings and software. Intel CPUs do an excellent job of protecting themselves from damage.

 

Hi Guys, sorry im a total newb at TS. I only know overclocking by FSB. I set my i7 FSB to 162, but multiplier gets locked at 9 when running wprime or prim95. What am I doing wrong here? Also the multiplier is locked to 10, I cant adjust it higher on TS.

 

Please read the first post carefully. What values you need to change are listed there.

 

Wow, cant figure out earlier how can i set the TDP, accidentally right clicked on the application. I thought I was suppose to right click on the menu bar or the icon.

Got 26.286 as the fastest wprime record i got Thanks a lot!

 

I updated the first post in this thread with a couple of pictures so this should be a lot easier for new users to figure out.

 

I have pretty much no idea of what im doing when it comes to this stuff but because of the good reception of this software i figured id risk the stability of my computer. i set my fsb at 154 and tdp at 30/60
this dropped my wprime32 from 35 seconds to 27. pretty nifty

after i closed ts and went back into it later it said i was at 10/30
i tested wprime and it was back up to 35.

?

am i always supposed to leave this running? how do i save the changes?

 

I believe that after adjusting TDP/TDC, if you click on the OK button that your TDP/TDC settings will be saved in the ThrottleStop.ini configuration file. If you exit the Turbo Power Limits window by clicking on the X gadget at the top right, that means "don't save" your changes.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511268.aspx

Some users have had problems with settings not being saved correctly to the INI file. If you right click on this file and select Properties and then the Security tab, check it to make sure that you have Write access to this file so things are saved correctly.

I'll double check to make sure TDP/TDC is being saved.

You only need to have ThrottleStop running when you want your M11x R2 to run significantly faster when overclocked and significantly loaded. Turn it off when not gaming or encoding if you don't like it or don't need it.

 

Thank you so much unclewebb and the hardworking testers in this forum!

 

It would be awesome if we could do a Fn shortcut key or something similar to turn ThrottleStop on and off. Is that possible?

 

Why not just leave ThrottleStop running 24/7? When it is minimized to your system tray it's incredibly efficient and only uses a very tiny percentage of your CPU. On an M11x when plugged in, I can't think of a reason to have it turned off. If you don't want ThrottleStop using high TDP/TDC values when on battery power then set up a battery profile with your default 10/30 TDP/TDC settings.

I'll put more function key features on the things to do list but I have to admit that it's not very high on the priority list. It's not that hard to click on the system tray to turn ThrottleStop on/off or exit the program is it?

 

I agree, it isn't hard at all. It would just be a "nice to have" feature, but not a high priority item by any means. I didn't mean to sound unappreciative. I love this ThrottleStop app, not just for its throttle stop feature, but also the temperature monitors in the tray. Thanks for everything!

 

CubsWin: Are you looking for a feature where you push a key like the F5 key on the keyboard and ThrottleStop toggles back and forth between "ThrottleStop Enabled" and "Monitoring Only" mode? Sort of like clicking on the Turn On / Turn Off button.

I'm not sure if I will add a feature like this but I might. I added the ability to toggle TS On and Off with the middle mouse button today by clicking on the system tray icon so that will be useful for some users. I also added the ability to run a exe or bat file after a resume from stand by which should be very useful for SetFSB users. I'll release a new version when I hear back from a tester or two. I'll also look into your idea. Just explain it in detail so I know exactly what you would like to see.

Thanks tulron41.

 

Exactly.
-

 

Speaking of temperature monitors, I see there's a record of highest and lowest GPU temps for the session. Is there a record of the same for CPU temps somewhere?

 

If you turn on a system tray temperature icon in the Options window and then hover your mouse over that icon, it will report the Min and Max CPU or GPU temperature. Right click on the icon if you want to reset the min / max data.

 

Hello all,

This a the wPrime scores of my M11x R2 (i7 640UM) :



Strange to see such a hight score (36,05) with an 166 OC with no TS whereas without OC (133) and no TS I had a basic score of 34,443...as if the OC was not a good thing witout TS !

Thanks a lot Unclewebb for this great tool !

 

^I believe that makes sense if you think about it. The results without TS show TB is more heat/energy efficient than OC'ing.

The purpose of TB is to be energy and heat efficient--i.e., to provide power while keeping heat and energy loss to a minimum. If OC'ing was more heat and energy efficient than TB, then TB would be irrelevant, and Intel would have just focused on increasing the clock rate instead of bothering with TB.

---
The problem is after a certain heat/temperature threshold, TB does become worse than OC, or at least less relevant as a means of providing such efficiencies, so they put in the TDP/TDC thresholds. Of course people don't care how efficient the CPU is when it's sitting on a desk on AC and want more speed. That's where TS comes in, with the ability to change those thresholds for when efficiency doesn't matter. TS let's M11x owners have their cake and eat it, too!

 

Turbo boost throttling in the M11x is not heat related. The M11x is being limited by the 10 watt turbo TDP power limit that Dell is using for the Core i5/i7 UM CPUs.

Overclocking in the bios causes a fully loaded Core i7-640UM to exceed the TDP limit. This immediately kills turbo boost and drops the multiplier to only 9. ThrottleStop lets you raise the turbo TDP limit so the CPU is allowed to use the 14 multiplier a lot more often for a 50% boost in CPU performance when overclocking.

It's nice for Dell to market the M11x as "overclockable" but they forgot to tell buyers that overclocking the M11x in the bios can make it run slower. It's pointless to include overclocking in the bios if you don't also include a bios option to adjust the turbo TDP limit.

 

Thanks for this. I see in the main TS window that there's a button with GPU and temp and clicking on this gives the session's high and low. Is there an equivalent for CPU I'm missing in this window?

 

There's nothing yet in the main window for min and max CPU temperatures. Only in the system tray pop up info area. I'll put your idea on the things to do list and add this to the main window too.

 

Thanks for taking this up.

 

Thank you very much for this!

My results with wPrime on 32M calculation are

native clock - 38 s
native clock with TS - 31 s

overclock@162 - 39 s
overclock@162 with TS - 26 s

The difference is very significant. TS also show my cpu running at 2.2 Ghz constantly.

Force TDP/TDC option doesn't seem to affect much though. Less than 1s improvement in speed when changed the number from 16 to 8.

TS is a must for everyone who wants to get higher performance from m11x!!!

 

Thanks for your results Gainsayer. I liked your last sentence so much that I decided to add it to the first post and added a direct link to your results.

The Force TDP/TDC option is for the final fine tuning of this feature. It allows a user to customize ThrottleStop to exactly what their individual CPU likes best.

 

Passmark CPU benchmark is showing major improvements with ThrottleStop...

No OC or TS... 1913
No OC with TS on... 1939
OC to 164 with no TS... 2004
OC to 164 with TS on... 2423

A ~400 point jump is pretty significant in my opinion, you can compare that with practically any other processor's score here... PassMark - CPU Benchmarks - List of Benchmarked CPUs

 

I like math

BCLK 164 / 133 = 23.3% increase

BenchScore 2423 / 1913 = 26.6% increase in performance

ThrottleStop is definitely letting your CPU operate at full speed. TS is in the middle of a work over. I'm hoping to make it a little more efficient to get a few more benchmark points out of it. I also added on a Max temperature column since many users like to know that data. If you like this new feature when it is done, you can thank caduceusnz for the idea. Here's a sneak peek.

 

Can you combine Real Temp into TS?

 

Just wanted to thank you for your work unclewebb.

Thanks once again. The performance increases seen are simply amazing!!

 

If time was infinite I could.

You're not the first person to ask me that question. My friend burebista has already got a name for it; RealThrottle. Maybe someday.

Your welcome Radam.

 

Thanks everyone for your support but I just wanted to make everyone aware of one of the forum rules.

If you've made a donation and mentioned it in one of your posts, that is contrary to the above NBR forum rule. Can you do me a favor and edit that information out of your post? Thanks.

 

Just a big thank you for unleashing the beast within the M11xR2. I think any prospective M11xR2 buyer needs to know about two things: the hinge issue and ThrottleStop. The former is the major risk of owning it. The latter will make you want to take that risk.

 

I've been using ThrottleStop with improvements in framerate as expected. However lately I'm noticing that as the computer gets really hot, the WiFi card starts to get disconnects. For example, when playing starcraft 2, I am getting more WiFi disconnects, as if the heat is making the WiFi card unstable. Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I am using m11x R2 with Dell DW1520 WiFi card.

I tried turning ThrottleStop off and the problem went away while gaming. I turned it back on and the problem came back. I suppose it could all be purely coincidental and possibly unrelated... The requirements are full load, high heat, active WiFi use, ThrottleStop turned on, and all these happening simultaneously for at least 30 minutes. My TS settings are TDP/TDC=100/100 and Force TDP/TDC=8. Could this be due to overly aggressive TDP/TDC settings?

UPDATE (Nov 13, 2010):

I replaced my Dell 1520 Wifi mini card with an Intel 6300 Ultimate-N Wifi mini card and this solved my problems. I am also getting stronger signals even though I am still using only two antennas (the 6300 can support up to 3 internal antennas). I played several hours of starcraft 2 with no more WiFi disconnects.

 

I got connection issues while overclocking to 160Mhz or higher, changed my wifi channel from 1 to 11 solved it (Apple Airport Express), with 133Mhz and 150Mhz it worked fine @ channel 1

 

I thought the different channels are only for overcoming interference (e.g. microwave oven, etc). My Wifi card is already at channel 11, but I can try changing it to another channel.

 

hmmm can you do this one optimization by stevenx network throttling by stevenx

hope it helps.