M15x with gtx 460m is downclocking to P8 state?

Hey everybody, I have an alienware m15x with a gtx 460m in it, and I have a problem that is getting worse. Apparently, When my gpu is under heavy load (for example: playing Gta 4 or bf3) it plays well for about 5 minutes then goes to P8 state, (according to GPU Shark) In the beggining I could run most games like Just cause 2 or Prototype 2, and play them for hours at a decent fps. However, ever since I started playing bf3 and I also found out my cpu wasn't being used to it's full potential. It was limited by "msconfig" to 4 Processors. So, I set it to 8, and more processors were shown in throttle stop and my wei went up to 7.1. Now it started lagging every 5 minutes. However, when I put it back to 4 processors, (either in msconfig or task manager {by set affinity}) it will still go to P8 state but not as frequently and the lag time is less.

Can someone tell me what is happening, and why it gets better when using less cores?

I did overclock My GTX 460m to clocks 745/1490/1625(Core/Shader/Memory), that might be the problem, I didn't do it by 20 clocks everytime, just strait to those max settings.

Here is furmark doing a stress test while it went to P8 state.(It did it during a STRESS TEST)


I tried Nvidia Inspector, and going to the Nvidia control panel to check settings (Even things that limited the gpu were set to max.) and I also tried putting my computer in performance mode.

I honestly think that I fried my card a bit. It did turn off while doing a stress test when it hit 80c.

Here is what the graph of nvidia inspector looks like after playing gta 4:

Here are my specs:
M15x with 150w PSU
i7 720qm running 8 threads
16GB of RAM
GTX 460m 1.5GB
500GB HDD

EDIT: Everything was running fine until bf3, however, it did throttle from time to time. BUT THIS IS NOT THROTTLING!!! OTHERWISE IT WOULD SAY IT IN FURMARK!!!

 

Have you checked the temperatures?

 

Yes the temperatures are fine, the worst it got was 80 degrees then shutdown. But that doesn't happen during games only stress tests.

However, I did find a solution, apparently if you downclock your gpu with msi afterburner it will stop it from downclocking to the P8 state.

My settings are 25mhz downclock on all clocks.
Core clock= 650mhz
Shader clock= 1300mhz
Memory clock= 1225mhz

This solved the problem!

Can someone tell me why?!?

EDIT: Everything is mostly stable now. Because what i did before is that i updated the vbios for the gtx 460m. The clocks weren't stable so I restored my original vbios ( thank goodness i kept a copy!) now the card was able to play just cause 2 for a few hours!

In the end... Don't update the gtx 460m's vbios from the dell website. That's what i learned.