GTX 980m Limited by CPU....

Dude 105W is way way way beyond the capacity of the heatsink. Sorry if my post was misleading, but my 4900MQ most definitely throttles even with max fans + max modded U3 fans when benching XTU at 4.2GHz. 110+W is no joke at all, and in fact I should be amazed it doesn't throttle until about halfway through the run when it finally hits 95C.

 

That's why I set it for 70. I was just doing quick and dirty benches so the heat wasn't the issue, the power draw was. 105 hit 97C so I stopped trying to get any higher score.

Clevo machines, at least mine, will not supply more than 1.32v to the CPU. Shuts the machine off right away. So no 4.5GHz for me

I'm assuming it's not bad for the chip to hit 95C and throttle since Intel designed it that way but I was tweaking amperage and TDP to try to find the best performance with no thermal throttle.

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

 

I still think you're going to love the P370EM CPU & Slave heatsinks with some CLU on that CPU when you get those 980Ms... you're going to never use above max-fans and keep 4.4GHz :laugh:

I'm jealous T-T

 

I don't know it will make that big of a difference but I tell you what... having my fans off... with my machine at 4.2GHz... is awesome. lol

 

It's about a 10C difference under load, and that was with MX-4. Who knows if you get a good P370EM heatsink you could very well shave off 15C with Liquid Ultra.

And I keep forgetting your MX chip eats up as many amps and watts as you throw at it. My 4900MQ only takes as much as it needs so I don't even bother tweaking amps and TDP and just set some arbitrarily high limit. Strange though because my desktop 4930K behaves the exact same way -- amps and TDP are set to like 1000 or something (lol), but under load it doesn't go past 145W TDP, and that's only when running Prime95 with the chip fully loaded.

 

Your chip also does it a lot lower. My stock VID @ 4 is 2.262v which is nuts for a mobile chip.

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

 

You put a 5960X in front of me and I will make it draw like 300W. Under "normal" usage conditions for me. Don't underestimate my CPU needs.

 

Vader's on the loose...

 

It would make it a whole lot easier having new gen CPU's out at the approx time of the new gen GPU's.

Getting tired of having the ability to have older CPU's w/ newer GPU's... not there's a problem, but this example is a firm one

 

You do have needs indeed

 

it runs stable for hours and hours, but sometimes it'll just randomly restart. no bad temps or anything. its the 4810mq

 

All this talk of CPU limitation had me thinking about buying a cheap 2920XM CPU on ebay, I don't think I'll buy it because it's from the US and importing into the UK is gonna be costly with import & VAT duty (and I don't really need it really!). This is the link: Intel Core i7-2920XM 2.5GHz 8MB 5GT/s PGA988 Quad-Core EXTREME CPU, SR02E 381120843846 | eBay
Has anyone had experience buying from the US and importing to the UK, did you get charged import duty? (I'm just playing with the idea of buying it, and more learning about the pitfalls of buying from places like US & China - all laptopmonkey's stuff seems to come from China now!)

 

That does not look right. It looks like you run out of power sometimes more than anything. Random shutdowns or BSODs even with good temps once you've fiddled with the settings for the CPU are an indicator of your settings not being compatible. You probably need to increase some values, but I'm not sure what aside from voltage. Sorry.

 

May or may not need to change voltage depending on your chip, but definitely should up the current limit to at least 100A and turbo boost (short) power to 90W.

 

If there is instability without heat problems, it may be a bit too little volts in processor cashe. increase CASHE processor voltage offset a bit if you have the adjustment for it. :thumbsup:

 

If the cache ratio is at the stock x38, there is no reason to believe that the cache voltage needs to be increased unless the FIVR isn't doing its job or the input voltage is too low. Since that's stock voltage, I'd say he'd do better to give a +25mV bump to the adaptive offset for the core and he'd be totally stable.

91A is enough to sustain 4.2GHz on one core in almost all apps with the stock voltage.usually but I'd have to see the stock VID to tell.

You'll TDP throttle before that. 67W will get you between 3.6 and 3.7GHz

 

It has always just been vat for me.

 

Bring on DX12

 

You know that normally i appreciate your info and wisdom, but not this time, this is NOT bottleneck, i think some of you have never experienced a real bottleneck, this is just standard increase because of increase in frequency. MSI GX series have a real bottleneck, this is not

 

All this talk about 980M SLI being too powerful and CPU bottlenecking got me curious, and I decided to do a very quick investigation of my own.

So what I did was downclock my desktop Gigabyte 970s to match HTWingNut's 980M OC speed. After a bit of fiddling I managed to come pretty close @ 1265 core/6010 mem. My desktop cards still have the advantage of 1 extra SMM = 128 cores, but I'd say for all practical purposes this should result in less than 5% difference at 1080p.

Sleeping Dogs is the only game I have with a built-in benchmark right now, so I used its Extreme Preset and ran the benchmark with 4930K set to different speeds. Results below:


Going from 4.5GHz to 3.0GHz on 4 cores, there is an 8.5% reduction in average FPS, from 123.9 to 113.3. Somewhere between 2.5GHz and 3.0GHz the bottleneck becomes more apparent, and once you drop below 2.5GHz all bets are off.

From 3.5GHz to 4.0GHz there is about 5% performance to be gained, and of course that tapers off from 4.0GHz to 4.5GHz. But there does seem to be an ever so slight bottleneck if you run you CPU below 4.0GHz.

What's interesting is that above 3.5GHz on 4 cores, the minimum FPS pretty much stays the same, but even at 3.0GHz you don't see much decrease. Just for kicks I threw in a data point for 4.5GHz on 6 cores, and as expected the improvement is negligible, and easily attributable to the margin of error.

I don't want to infer too much from a single game, but if Sleeping Dogs is representative of your typical non-CPU bound game, then I'd say if you pair 980M SLI with 4710MQ, it would be wise to max out its OC bins (3.5GHz 4 cores, 3.7GHz single core) so you're only losing about 5% performance. If you want to squeeze a bit more performance without breaking the bank, 4810MQ seems like a solid choice since you can OC it to 4GHz on all 4 cores, and beyond that diminishing returns rapidly set in anyway.

Besides, keep in mind I can't downclock the vram on my desktop 970 to below 6010MHz, so even with my desktop 970s downclocked it still has a very hefty overclock on the memory compared to 980M's stock 5000MHz. If you don't OC your 980Ms and run them at stock the CPU bottleneck might be even less apparent.