Speedstep/Turbo Boost help on a i7 2630QM.

Hi,

So this is a bit of a lengthy problem, so I'll do my best to explain it and hopefully get to the bottom of this. Please let me know if I have posted this in the wrong section or anything. I'm totally new to these forums.

Okay, so the problem started a while ago. I bought my new laptop for Starcraft 2 as it met the minimum system requirements and seemed to deal with them pretty handily. The laptop shows up and, at a glance, seems to smash SC2 on Low settings (90-120 FPS) which is fine for me, I would rather have smooth framerate than fancy graphics for a game like SC2.

However, once the games pick up, I get MASSIVE stutters in the FPS and it goes from silky smooth to like... unplayable ~20 FPS, sometimes lower. Frustrated, I begin searching for answers. I eventually find this post in the SC2 forums: CPU Random Spikes 100% FIXED!!! - Forums - StarCraft II

So, I give it a shot and it is fixed! The game now no longer loses massive FPS drops. I was elated! However, I then noticed that my game was running at like 60 FPS and in times of action, would drop down to 40 FPS. Not nearly as drastic as with speedstep enabled, but still a noticeable hindrance on my game. So I begin to look, and it turns out the intel turbo boost technology doesn't work without speedstep enabled.

SO, here's the problem. With Speedstep enabled, my game runs amazingly for like 40% of the time but unplayable for the rest. With it disabled, the game runs really smoothly for much of the game but drops down when there's a lot of stuff going on (because it is locked at 2.0GHZ when it should be able to boost up to 2.9GHZ).

Is there any fix for this, or am I screwed?

Edit: MSi GE620 is the laptop.

 

You could download Throttlestop and check whether you get throttling at some point in the game. If there is throttling, you could try disabling BDPROCHOT in throttlestop to see if that helps. That is of course if your CPU isn't running too hot.

 

Will do, but at this point, I'm fairly certain it is Speedstep that is the culprit. When I monitor my CPU with it activated, it seems to activate Turbo Boost for the game (bring it up to the advertised 2.9GHZ) but randomly drop down to the Speedstep 1.6GHZ. It's completely random. The main thing is that Turbo Boost only works when Speedstep is enabled in the BIOS. Without Turbo Boost, the CPU only runs at a constant 2.0GHZ. There's no way to disable Speedstep while still having Turbo Boost enabled to bring the CPU up to 2.9 during gaming.

This is with it set to High Performance, by the way.

I have my laptop on a pretty big cooling mat, so I'm not certain it is heating related.

 

It's sounds like a massive thermal throttling. Try to enable speedstep but lock the cpu@2GHz with throttlestop. Then the game snhould run fluently without slowdowns.

 

ThrottleStop was designed to manage the problems you are having. You can set it up to vary the amount of turbo boost based on either the CPU or GPU temperature. You don't have to choose between full turbo boost or no turbo boost. Download ThrottleStop and learn how to use it.