What's throttling??

I see all those threads about throttling, but they all are about the How and Why's, but none seems to tell me what throttling is / how i can recognize that my laptop is throttling.

I have no clue about what it could be??

I've got a 1640.

 

there is power throttling which i think is the main thing being discussed now.. The 90w adapters on the 1645 werent enough to power the system, so the bios would slow down the cpu significantly to keep it at the 90w limit(or whatever wattage dell deemed safe). on the 1645 this translated to a crippling performance loss when gaming etc. And it looks like other systems like the 1647 and 1640 have the same slow down, although not as bad as 1645 it would seem.

when your cpu + gpu is loaded like when gaming the cpu should be at its max rated speed, which is controlled by multipliers. throttlestop can log these multipliers while you game, and see if they drop due to throttling.

 

In these cases, It is a limit placed on the processor speed. There are several methods that Dell is doing this on their laptops. The two methods used on a 1645 are limiting of the processor multiplier or the lowering the processor speed. You will see this by the machine slowing down while doing intensive processor work.

It appears that dell strategy was to lower the processor speed to limit the power the machine was using under these situations. It was very apparent on the 1645, but this strategy may have been in use for a long time, it may not have as significant of impact, or not come in as easy as it did for the 1645 on other models.

 

thx for the info!