S-XPS 1645 AC Power Throttle Issue Investigation

Thank you Mitchell2.24v for clarifying this.

 

It seems we'll use this trick forever...and ever...

Maybe there could be the possibility to take a legal action.

 

Anyone knows the part number of the 90w adapter Dell sends with the XPS1645?!

 

My original that got very hot was CM889 and the replacement one is YP368 which isn't so hot, both are part of the PA-3E family.

 

Mine is HA90PE1-00, Rev A03, U680F . It doesn't feel hot... because maybe I'm comparing to the huge brick I5150 adapter I had previously... that was really hot...

 

Hello everyone! I dont want to be blamed as a lazy guy, but as someone who has just got aware of this problem, please someone tell me if what I understood is right.

In order to solve this Throttle problem:
1- get the latest bios update
2- throw away your 90W adapter
3- get a 130W adapter from dell
4- install ThrottleStop
5- you're done.

right?

 

i just ordered this adapter for my xps 16. Is it ok, because its nots saying any companability with xps16?
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Power/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=19&sku=A0589634

 

Dell folks are still working on Step 1. Step 3, while useful for some, need a successful combination of Step 1 to have a real effect. Also, this adaptor is not 'qualified' for the system meaning they just don't know yet or due to due diligence can't say whether it's good or bad. I'd wait for Step 1 for the time being if you don't see anything wrong with your system.

 

I don't know if this company is good or bad but here's what one should be looking for. The Dell PA-4E.

http://www.nbcomponents.com/product_54651.html

This website claims that it is an Original Dell PA-4E 130 Watt adapter. 19.5 volts is what you should be looking for times 6.7 amps gets you 130 watts of power.

thodoris kountouriot: They may have rounded the 19.5 volt spec on the adapter you just purchased up to 20 volts in their ad.

If you want your computer to work at 100% of its capabilities then set clock modulation to 100% in ThrottleStop. If you want to understand clock modulation and how it effects performance then go download a simple benchmark like Super PI mod. Run a 1M benchmark with clock modulation set to 100% for a baseline. Now run the same benchmark with clock modulation set to 50%. This will quickly show you the negative effect that over use of clock modulation can have on your laptop's performance.

Now set it down to 12.5%, start a benchmark, go for a coffee or a drive to the store and when you come back you will see what the Latitude E6x00 series can do to performance when it is worked hard. Oh I forgot, powerful laptops aren't supposed to be worked hard. You are to pay big $$$$$ for them and bring them home and put them on the mantle and admire their beauty.

According to Dell, "And your graphics-intensive applications run like a charm."

http://syndication.intel.com/Distri...87108301&contentType=0&cc=US&campaignId=18649



The marketing department says these computers are for "Extreme Gaming". Out of the box with a 90 watt adapter it sure isn't.

 

This was posted earlier:

http://www.getpartsonline.com/pa-4e.html

 

A Dell representative called me in regards to my BBB complaint and indicated that the product group is working through the problem and that there will be a BIOS update that will address the issue by the first-second week of January apparently.

 

Worth mentioning again, especially for the new guys to the forum - The strange keyboard problem (For want of a better term) Don't know if itr affects everyone but I only discovered it after somebody else here pointed it out. Basically the game you are playing seems to stutter and the framerate drops when you press any keys on the keyboard in the middle of the game. Even when running with a 130 or 150w adapter and with Throttlestop on full, it seems games throttle (Not as much as normal, but there is stuttering and crackling audio) UNTIL you put the laptop to sleep for a couple of seconds then wake it up again. It then runs like a dream (As long as Throttlestop is working and you've still got your adapter plugged in)

So to summarise, ideally, to play games fluently you must:

1) Have a 130 or 150w adapter plugged in
2) Have UncleWebb's excellent ThrottleStop running with clock modulation option set to 100% (Which means the CPU is being allowed to run at max power)
3) Make sure your power plan and your GPU Poweplay settings are set to MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE
4) When you first boot up your laptop, close the lid (So the lappy goes into sleep mode - make sure it is set to do this in the power options) Then open it up again after a few seconds.

Doing this, I'm getting easily 40 to 50 FPS on Dragon Age with the highest possible graphics settings at the full 1980x1020 resolution (Except for Antialiasing which I set to 0 as at this resolution, its not really neccessary in my opinion) Smooth as butter!

 

I run the benchmark with 'Super PI mod':
-without ThrottleStop I get a value of 13.900s
-with ThrottleStop enabled and with "Disable Clock Modulation" enabled (set to 100%) I get a value of 14.072s

What's the best value?

 

The latest version of ThrottleStop lets you dial in a Clock Modulation percentage.

For maximum performance, set it to 100%.

To slow your computer down for testing purposes, set it to 50%. For more accurate testing go into the Task Manager and set Super PI mod to highest priority.

You can also try running the XS Bench in RealTemp. It tends to have good repeatability.

 

Tried XS Bench in RealTemp:
-without ThrottleStop I get 1197 score, 12,221 secs, 2992.60 Mhz
-with ThrottleStop enabled and with "Disable Clock Modulation" enabled (set to 100%) I get 1198 score, 12,213 secs, 2992.60 Mhz

I see unimportant difference, so it seems my New Dell Studio 17 don't have "Clock Modulation" problems...
It has only a downclock of the CPU Multiplier at full load (CPU 100% + GPU 100%)

 

Try playing a game like Dragon age on max settings at max resolution with the ac adapter plugged in. I assume you did your test with the ac adapter plugged in? thats when the throttling occurs.

 

I'm sorry, I don't have any games, I'm not a gamer, I use my notebook for Audio/Video Editng.

 

clock modulation is the opposite. 100% is basicly no modulation. heres my results that i sent uncleweb a while ago.

Heres the results link. These tests are with full multipliers and turbo boost

its labeled wrong but at no modulation it posts a score of 1052. at 50% its down to 532 and at 12.5% its at 151. Thats 10fold decrease. Ive seen my notbook hit the 12.5% a few times. The scary thing about this, its virtually un-noticable. As the cpu runs at the same clock rate, same mult, same everything according to the programs. But as you can see performance is horrible

Now take that our laptop throttle to 7x before doing modulation. With 12.5% modulation and a 7x multiplier i was told by uncleweb my laptop achieved the lower score hes seen. which was like a score of 41.

edit: sorry i know its confusing i was adding more to help others. but it will throttle first before modulating. At least thats what ive observed. With modulation logging, we can finally observe what happes when playing games loading the cpu + gpu

 

Which power supply does studio 17 use?

 

Original DELL 90W Power Supply (PA-3E)

 

Tingler59: If you are not a gamer then this issue might not effect you at all or to the same degree that it effects the 1645 owners.

To see if your studio 17 uses clock modulation to control heat you need to fully load your CPU. I like Prime95 and the Small FFTs test for that. You might also want to try Hyper PI which can be used to run 8 threads of Super PI mod.

I think Hyper PI is more of a real world test if you're not a gamer. A Prime95 load is more load than many programs create.

Post a screen shot of i7 Turbo about 5 minutes after these programs have been running so I can have a look.

What your testing shows so far is that ThrottleStop places no significant load on your CPU. That's a good thing, especially considering the performance it can give back when these laptops are fully loaded or when gaming.

 

What multiplier is it supposed to reach? Mine stays at 12x (min. and max.) all the time under 100% load.

 

12x should be fine. I assume you're just stressing the CPU?

~Ibrahim~

 

im not sure for the 1645 if prime95 is enough to cause modulation. At least i havnt seen it. Ive seen throttling of course but not modulation. Only time ive seen modulation is when gpu + cpu are loaded during gaming. Really need to laod the cpu + gpu type combo to get it, which is what we are seeing in gaming im pretty sure with the slideshow effect at certain points.

Perhaps other systems that are higher end drawing more power then mine might hit modulation during just cpu use?

just wanna make sure, its kind of system dependant as well when these things will occur. Bottom line though it seems they all are affected when gaming etc. As it plays amazingly with tsop and 130w

 

I have Studio 17 (i7 q820, ati 4650 o/c to 745/890, 500gb 7200 HD, RGB Screen - this is crucial to performance issues) and I did have issues with 90W PSU on heavy load. I promptly replaced it with 130W PSU and still had some issues during COD4 until started using ThrottleStep (and overclocking). I actually SuperPi and GPUTool Stability Testing at same time which displayed some modulation/throttling behavior.

Also, as I noted above, I believe the 1080p RGB screen (really, B+GR on Studio 17) eats more power on full brightness then 900p screen.

 

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/3/1794507/ThrottleStop.zip

I guess the only way to find out more about who is effected by Clock Modulation is to add a logging option to ThrottleStop.

It's very basic at the moment but it's done. Now you can leave Clock Modulation unchecked in ThrottleStop and use your computer the way you normally do, in whatever demanding tasks you use it for and when you're done, you can go back and have a look at the ThrottleStopLog.txt log file and find out if your computer is secretly lowering your performance. The log file is only written to the hard drive once per minute or after you close ThrottleStop.

A column of 100.0 in the log file shows that your computer is always running at full speed with no on demand clock modulation being used. This is the modulation technique that the Dell bios uses on this model to control heat.

Thanks for clarifying what you've found so far on your system atlstang.

Zinu: When fully loaded, the Core i7 mobile chips rarely have any turbo boost available so on an i7-720, a 12X multiplier will be your limit. This is an Intel limitation and there is nothing that can be done about that.

Now lets see some log files to see what's really going on during normal usage with these laptops. Maybe it might encourage Dell to look into this further.

 

This after 6 min of Prime95 Small FFT Benchmark:

 

Tingler59: That shows that your multiplier is at the correct level on each thread. There is no turbo boost available when fully loaded with Prime95 so the default 13X multiplier is correct for an i7-820.

This problem on this laptop seems to occur mostly when gaming or heavily using both the CPU and GPU at the same time. For most non gaming applications, you're probably going to be fine. When doing your above test you can use ThrottleStop and try setting Clock Modulation to less than 100.0%. The reported C0% numbers should take an immediate drop.

The C0% is a good number to keep an eye on with these new Core i7 mobile chips. It will react to the two types of clock modulation that are possible on an Intel CPU. The second type of modulation is harder to defeat.

 

unclewebb: Do you have any idea why play hardware accelerated flash video (Mobility mod + prelease flash) will cause cpu less throttled? It seems the video doesn't have to be playing, paused video also works. But once I close the flash window, cpu will be throttled.

 

yejun: What type of throttling? Post some screen shots so I can have a look. Pictures like the one above are a lot easier for me to get information from than having to ask 101 questions.

 

But this occurs when I stress at the same time cpu and gpu with Prime95 + FurMark:

 

Without flash video:
http://i50.tinypic.com/2gumrd1.jpg

With flash video:
http://i49.tinypic.com/21odnyv.jpg

And by the way, realtemp.exe doesn't run my latptop. i7turbo.exe seems ok. Here is the error from eventlog.

Update: At maximum brightness, cpu will be always throttled at 9x.

 

Ok... this keyboard uses way to much data to be a normal keyboard... theres lights which works fine for the laptop but it sends retarded text sometimes when i alt tab to another application... there seems to be a 3rd party program that this keyboard sends information to and the program determines what characters go on the screen and in what language, symbol or font. i get crazy fonts that are nuts. I had my laptop crash rediculously wierdly and i thought i had no proof. then it happend again and i had my ipod nano with me and i shot it!!! woot@ the bumblebee screen of death. yes it is not a blue screen so it is not windows related ish... but its yellow and black and says something wrong has happend. no duh. it has something to do with the grafics card and i assume it drew alot alot of power for VLC player because i opened a 1080p movie file and it started to lag and then died.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIvVESM8PUI

By the way, when my computer is idle it sleeps. i dont like this at all. you probibly think i sound like a noob but i am soo serious right now. i turned sleep off i toggled evey configuration possible and i have googled this and it seems that microsoft and intel have worked closly on the bios and setting for the nahalm moble processor that shuts off background applications, wifi, ect when idle so that the processor goes into a state of "deep sleep". I DONT WANT DEEP SLEEP. I WANT MY LAPTOP ON 24/7 IF POSSIBLE! if anyone can test this with thier system, just leave it on for 9 hours after you toggled with the settings and see if it sleeps. this is really frustrating and i cant download stuff that i have qued. downloading from internet explorer for 9 hours stops sleeping because there is a code in internet explorer to sustain the system when packets are being sent and recived.

 

Razr, not that I claim to understand your posts in toto, but I thought you were sending your machine back.

 

yes after a couple more dowloads =P

btw i think when the CPU is stressed on full and GPU is intensive... adding anothing application that uses both GPU and CPU crashes the laptop. First it says GPU not compatible or unrecognised and then goes into a fit with its colours and light show. The speakers rumble then plob a restart.

 

I get my XPS Studio 16 tomorrow. I also have a 130W adapter on the way. I have read this entire thread which made me hesitant in getting the laptop, but I just couldn't pass up their sweet deal.

I pray I don't have as many issues with the one I am receiving. With all the work so many of you have done, hopefully I can work around any issues. I do have a question about Throttlestop. Does it disable EIST and the other intel power save modes? Meaning, it runs at 100% all the time until it's turned off.

 

yejun: I have no explanation why your multiplier jumps up when running a flash video. The multiplier on the thread that is running your game jumps from an average of 9.7 to a hair over 17. Perhaps the slight extra load causes Speedstep to finally disengage.

Have you gone into your Control Panel -> Power Options and set your Minimum processor state to 100%? Try that and disable C1E and run ThrottleStop to try and force the multiplier higher if you have to.

Project RealTemp got side tracked by project ThrottleStop. Here's the latest version of RealTemp.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/u79b5p

I recently added some code to read ATI GPUs which still has a bug or two for some users. If this version of RealTemp causes a problem you can try adding this to the RealTemp.ini file.

NoATIGPU=1

ThrottleStop is presently designed to over ride Speedstop. Think of it as a tool to be used when running at full load like when gaming. When not gaming, you don't seem to need it. It's easy to toggle on and off in the system tray.

 

Awesome. That's what I assumed, but I just wanted confirmation. Since you are the author that's about the best confirmation I can get.

Once I test it out and find it's useful to me, I'll most definitely donate like so many others here. Thank you for all your work, Unclewebb. Dell should hire you for a contract to fix their problem.

 

Hi All,

I have been reading this thread for a while and almost cancelled my order for the 1645 due to problems discussed, however I didn't and I recieved the laptop three days ago. I was very lucky, recieved the system exactly two weeks after ordering. I have now been playing with it for the last two days with the first day for re-installing and seting up etc...

I'm not an expert on this; but I cannot replicate the throttling issue. I have tried:

3Dmark06 - 7068 with AC connected
Bioshock - Highest setting with no lag and constant fps (I know not that intensive but its there none the less)
Crysis - Highest settings! (no AA) No lag and runs like a dream.

I would also add that I have had i7Turbo running in the background and the multiplier never dropped below 11.5 when fully loaded (it sits @ 12-13 99% of the time, mainly 12, but very occasionly goes to 11.5 when the game isn't doing much). It does clock up significantly, with the turbo boost, whilst loading the software but drops rapidly to the 12 when actually using. Interestingly the system ramps down to a x7 mulitplier when I'm just sat not doing a tremendous amount in windows? not sure if normal but good at least with the battery life.

The other pleasant surprise is the heat. This includes the laptop and adapter. The CPU and GPU have yet to go above 71 degrees (again loaded) and generally sit at 45. There is no problem of heat build up around the system and the adapter gets only warm and certainly not crazy hot as has been the case with other systems.

Basic details:

fairly standard 1645 with Win Pro, WLED screen and standard remainder. (I'm UK based so the system was built in China (don't know if that makes a difference but worth noting))

Overall I am extremely pleased with the system and although I am guessing my lack of knowledge is missing something re: throttling, if the system can handle Crysis at highest setting it has got to be doing something right!

Now will someone tell me what this idoit is doing wrong not finding problems with the system!!!!

 

unclewebb, I too will donate once I get my 'puter on Christmas day and get Throttlestop up and running.

 

Only two things come to mind. Brightness: try turning it all the way up. Screen: it's predicted that the problem doesn't affect WLED users as much as it does RGBLED users.

~Ibrahim~

 

Your system runs okay, but probably not as good as it could. my 3dmark scores are fine and like yours.but 3dmark doesnt use the cpu and gpu a lot like games do. But i have the wled, where rgbled draw more power, and the problem shows up faster and is worse with rgbled etc.

different applications will vary in severeness. ya have the wled screen etc so it is not as pronounced. I dunno how much strain bioshock creates, the multiplier on games like crysis should be well into the 15x range and not go under that really. I thought games where playable before on the 90w, but with the 130w its amazingly smooth to where i cant go back, and i can max out the resolution etc to 1080p with still 60fps, where without tsop its like 25. If you dont have the 1080p and the 900p screen, thats probably why its fine on the framerates on a lot of things, as lower resolution isnt that bad and is what i was forced to run on the 90w for decent performance.

not saying your wrong, but if its like mine its okay on the 90w. Just if ya get a chance try the 130w with throttlestop and notice the difference. I would assume its a big one, as it is on mine. The feel is awesome

 

Update on my notebook:

the tech came and replaced the motherboard. Still not functioning.

I got on the phone with Dell and they are sending me a new notebook.

I'll be waiting about a month for it.

Perhaps they'll send the right PSU and updated bios? <sigh. doubt it.>

 

Why not just return the broken one?

 

I'm not sure what you mean. They are sending me a brand new notebook because of the problems I'm having with the current one. Implicit to that agreement I will be sending them the bad notebook.

 

Sorry, I am not native in english. What I mean is return will reset the 21 days, but exchange will not. So just in case Dell will never solve the throttling issue.

 

Which im guessing will not solve it.

 

Oh, I see what you mean. Actually, the fact that they agreed to reset my return policy was the reason I decided to go with it. Originally I asked for my money back. This way, if there is still no fix on the horizon by the time I get my computer, I will return it and shop somewhere else. I refuse to pay $3k for a crippled high-end computer.

 

Just got a call from a real nice lady from Dell to tell me that there will be new bios coming out... Hopefully this will help with the throttling issue.

 

Hey, Tuesday has come and gone, anyone hear from Dell?