G73SW CPU running 2.90 GHZ - won't throttle

My CPU won't throttle down! Task Manager shows CPU usage around 14% all the time. Help!

 

How many threads are you using, what is your current power plan. 2.90GHz sounds about right for one thread in use.

 

All of them, it always throttled before. Temps are running higher than normal with this issue around 56c.

 

You cannot be using all 8 threads at the same time, your CPU would cap at 26GHz at most, what you should do first is find out what is keeping your CPU at 14%. Once you find the culprit, kill the task and check your CPU clock again, it should downclock properly.

Windows will switch task between cores quite often unless you restrict it to one core in particular, that is probably what you saw in the performance graph in the task manager.

 

Found the issue, Windows Presentation Foundation Font Cache was turned on in Windows Services. Disabled it and all is back to normal. I guess if you want your processor to run at 2.90 GHz all the time just enable this service!???

 

It is normal for the multipliers to be all over the place in core i CPUs, they switch back and forth at a moment's notice. Anything that will put a light load on the CPU is likely to make it clock up, putting the power plan on battery saving will usually put a stop to that as it will limit the maximum CPU state. You can also customize the power plan you use on battery to prevent this if battery life is a concern. Otherwise, your CPU running at 56C is pretty much harmless, i mean i ran my 920xm near it's limit at something like 95C without running into issues

The only concern with the higher idle temp might be the fan noise. Just in case, your CPU has also built in safety features, if it ever gets into the dangerous temp zone (100+C) it will throttle or shutdown.

In any case, glad you fixed your problem.

 

14% means that one of your cores had 100% load. (100% / 8 virtual cores = 12.5%)