The ThrottleStop Guide

Hi, is it possible to get a run through of what settings you did to BIOS/your system before you tried TS? Or is there any procedures to go through before setting the above settings in TS? I have already tried to emulate all your settings.

Attached is mine and it seems like I cannot match even your VID despite your TS being "off"

 

I didn't change any relevant bios settings or do anything that would change voltages, besides the undervolt in throttlestop.
The lowest VID I noticed was 0.5945 ish with multiplier of x8
If your VID isn't going quite that low and you want it to you can of course just undervolt further in TS

 

Does this mean that I can only accept that my VID is higher?

 

Your default VIDs might be higher than mine but what I mean is: you're not stuck with the VID that you have.
If you want to lower your VID more, just increase the undervolt in Throttlestop

 

okay, then I guess I have to play with the undervolt on my own.

 

Why does Throttle Stop open when I run any game?

 

Because it has a big bug in it. What version are you using? I think this problem has been fixed in TS 8.35. Thanks for mentioning this. I will send the updated version your way for some testing.

 

TS 8.35 is not public?

 

Not yet. It takes forever to get some feedback so I have to sit and wait and wait and wait before I can finalize and release a new version. I will send you the test version if you are having the same problem as above. Thousands of people have downloaded TS 8.30 but only a few people have complained so when this happens, I have to assume that there are no major issues. I have no idea if TS pops up when gaming for everyone or this is only a problem for a few people using a specific GPU or a specific GPU driver.

The good news is that 7th Gen Kaby Lake support seems to be working OK.



I am waiting to hear if voltage adjustment and Speed Shift still works. I will probably wait to hear about that before publicly releasing the next version.

 

I play with TS8.30 for a while and have no pops up problem. Will check 8.35 and report tomorrow, I mean... Today, but later ;-)

Wysłane z Mi5

 

Hey im sorry if this was asked and answered already, but how do I get ThrottleStop to only Show as Icon in the System tray? I set a Task to run it at Login nbut id like to have it not showing up on the dock at all and only run in the Background in the tray. How do I do this?

 

No problems whatsoever with the new version!

Thanks!

 

H im stupid, I found it! Was always looking at the Options

 

Happend to me a lot. For example, its impossible to play Battlefield 1 WITH DX12 and throttlestop. If i try it, as soon as BF start loading, TS comes into first place. Anyway, DX12 sucks with my 860m

for your info,

4710HQ, nvidia 860m optimus

 

Omg, I have this problem of TS 8.30 popping up all the time when gaming. So much to the extent, I can't use my gaming laptop for gaming anymore without turning off TS. Can I have the new test version to see if it resolves my pop up issue?

 

I'm having and issue with my TS not wanting to close into my system tray, instead it just sits in my taskbar and refuses to go into the system tray.

Is this a common issue with the newest ver, or am I just stupid?

 

@boricuafly also reported this, I think the new Beta 8.35 fixes that

 

Is Task Bar checked? If Task Bar is checked, ThrottleStop should minimize to the task bar. If Task Bar is not checked, ThrottleStop should minimize only to the System Tray / Notification Area which is usually at the lower right. If you are still having problems, try cleaning your icon cache.

http://www.digitalcitizen.life/how-clean-notification-area-icon-cache

Next version with a few bug fixes should be ready in a few days.

 

I've tested v 8.35. No popup issue at all (v 8.30 was also good for me).

 

I can confirm that I also have the issue with Throttlestop 8.3 popping up when fullscreen gaming.

2 different laptops, same issue.

Thank you

 

@unclewebb - what causes the crash
(IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL)

when undervolting?

 

Simple answer.

You answered your own question!

Give that CPU some more voltage and see what happens.

 

welp

other than core/cache/iGPU do you think there's any other area that can be undervolted to save power and improve efficiency of battery life?

 

I just noticed something interesting - if I switch displays, e.g., but plugging my big monitor into the Displayport connection - or if I unplug it to go back to the 4k display on my laptop, Throttlestop pops up in the middle of my screen. I just minimize it and it goes back to its customary place on the taskbar. This is not much of a bother to me, but I wonder if it could be related to popping up when a game starts... I haven't been playing any games lately, so wouldn't have seen that. I continue to be a big TS fan all the way back to the early days of my AW M15x.

Joe

 

Hmm, is it possible that we get a version of throttlestop with the option to disable the CPU monitoring? I think this takes up too much power when in battery mode and causes the CPU to waste cycles on monitoring itself and display it on the software.


And if I understand correctly, the "Do not reset FID/VID when exit" means that the CPU/iGPU will still be undervolted + limit the frequency (disable turbo) with the set value in throttlestop at the moment it exits?

Because I was thinking of making a .bat that starts throttlestop then exits it a minute later if I'm on battery power (to maximize battery life, due to the issue above). But I am not sure if Throttlestop will keep the undervolt if it exits.

 

Is there a "safe" range for the undervolt, or is it just up until the system is no longer stable? I've pushed mine to -185mV now, and it seems stable in tests with AIDA and while playing games. Runs a lot cooler too, and the fans are nowhere near as aggressive as they were before. But I am starting to get worried since this is sort of the limit of how far I've heard of other people pushing it.

 

Each and every CPU behaves differently, even between same make and model, so you will have to find your own safe operating range.

 

You might think that ThrottleStop takes up too much power but it continues to be one of the most efficient monitoring tools available. I always look into ways to make it more efficient but you need to realize that there is not a lot of fat left on ThrottleStop to trim off.





At the moment, Task Manager shows that my laptop has over 1200 threads of background junk running on it. All of Windows + ThrottleStop is consuming 0.3% of a quad core CPU. Process Explorer says that ThrottleStop, when minimized to the Notification Area / System Tray, is consuming 0.03% of the CPU. I could probably write some code to suspend all monitoring but it would be difficult to notice any difference. If I get it down to 0.02% or 0.01%, the difference in performance will be equivalent to a fart in a hurricane. Difficult to notice or measure, and much more important things to worry about. I might add this option anyhow because you are not the first person to ask for it. I just don't think there is much to be gained.

ThrottleStop already has an INI option that can force it to exit so no need to write a script. Just use

ExitTime=5

and this will force ThrottleStop to exit approximately 5 seconds after it starts. That should give it plenty of time to set your CPU up and your undervolt and Disable Turbo should be in effect as long as you do not have any other software running on your computer that interferes with these settings. Use something like HWiNFO to confirm that your undervolt is still in effect after you exit ThrottleStop.

Instead of going down this road or undervolting your CPU to the verge of a BSOD, why not use the TS C State data and learn how to make your computer more efficient. Get the C0% number as low as possible and get the C7 time as high as possible. Most people have a pile of stuff running in the background on their computers that are sucking up far more CPU cycles than ThrottleStop is as well as interfering with C State residency percentages.

 

Version 8.35 made this go away, so it may have been the same mechanism. Thanks, UncleWebb!!

 

I can confirm that I have this bug too. Task Bar option is checked but non functional (Win 10 Pro 64bit).
What is interesting, after setting win task scheduler to auto start TS, TS starts correctly in the background (i.e. task manager shows it), but no tray icon to be seen, still. Which is fine by me (clean)

 

What are you trying to accomplish? If Task Bar is checked, it will minimize to the Task Bar, not the System Tray. If Task Bar is not checked, it should minimize only to the System Tray. If this does not work properly, you will need to clean your Windows Icon Cache.

http://www.digitalcitizen.life/how-clean-notification-area-icon-cache

If you are using the Task Scheduler to start ThrottleStop there is an important option that controls if you will be able to access the ThrottleStop user interface.

If the option, Run only when user is logged on is checked, you will be able to access the ThrottleStop user interface either by the System Tray or Task Bar.

If this item is NOT checked in the Task Scheduler, ThrottleStop will start and run in the background. You will see it in the Task Manager but you will not be able to access the user interface. Kind of like a silent mode so a sys admin could sneek this program into the start up sequence and no one would be any wiser though there might be less complaints about throttling and sluggish performance.

 

Well, on my computer it doesn`t work like that: once TS GUI is opened, it stays in task bar all the time and newer goes into the system tray, regardless of this option checked or unchecked. Clearing icon cache via linker bat didn`t help either. <- forget it, restart fixed it
About Task Scheduler, it`s exactly the other way around. When "Run only when user is logged on" is checked TS starts and stays in the background like it should be with this option unchecked.

Maybe this two issues are somehow related?

 

Sorry, I would like to learn from you with regards to using the TS C State data and figuring how to make my laptop more efficient. I am using i7-6700HQ, what are the steps to get my C0% as low as possible and C7 as high as possible? Also, what exactly does C0% and C7 mean respectively?

 

@artpra - When you first open up ThrottleStop, does the Notification Area / System Tray icon show up at all? In the Options window, is No Notification Area Icon checked? Did you originally run ThrottleStop in one folder and then move the entire ThrottleStop folder to a different location on your hard drive? I am using Windows 10 without any problems so there must be something else on your system that is causing these issues. I would get this working correctly before using the Task Scheduler. When using the Task Scheduler, the ThrottleStop task should be in the main Task Scheduler Library folder alongside Google Update, etc.



@asuslaptopfan - When a CPU has something to do, it will be in the C0 state. When it has nothing to do, it will drop down into one of the other C States so it can save power. First it will go from C0 to C1 and then to C3 and then C6 and if it still has nothing to do, a modern CPU core should go into C7. Most people install apps onto their computer with zero regard to how that app effects their CPU when it is idle. A CPU core in C7 is going to use less power and generate a lot less heat compared to a core sitting in C0. When your CPU is idle, the goal is to have it spend as little time as possible in the C0 state. A low C0% number means the CPU is able to process all of the various Window background tasks without needing to be active in the C0 state for very long. If you have a bunch of crap running in the background on your system then when the CPU is supposed to be idle, it is going to be busy processing this stuff. Try to get your CPU spending as much idle time as possible in C7. A core spending 99% of its idle time in C7 is going to reduce power consumption. If you install some software on your computer and now your cores are only spending 50% of their idle time in C7, power consumption and heat goes up, battery run time goes down. Intel XTU is a good example of this problem.

The C State data is a wonderful but seemingly rarely used tool. Go into the Task Manager and find out what is running on your computer when it is idle. If you see something that is causing a problem, disable it and see how that effects your C State residency time. One poorly written driver can be a nightmare. After first installing Windows 10, my laptop was burning through my lap. I had to poke around and disable some Win 10 features before my CPU would settle down. Like undervolting, this is all trial and error. I have no idea what software you have installed on your computer or what Win 10 features you are using and are not willing to give up. Everyone has different priorities. For me, a cool and quiet system is priority #1.

Edit - Here is a worthy goal to shoot for. A 4 core CPU averaging 98.8% in C7 when idle.

 

Hello,

new to the forum, writing from Germany. First of all a big Thank You! to unclewebb for providing ThrottleStop for us. Great tool!

Could you point out some of the things you did?

I am writing, because I have problems bringing down the idle wattage on my i7-6850K desktop system. I can get it to idle with C0 states around 3 %, Core C6 around 80-90%, doesn't do C7. Package C states are around 30% at C2 and C6 each, no C7 either (not offered in BIOS and enabling it with ThrottleStop won't do it either).

The CPU is hogging around 10W in idle state. Granted it is a fat CPU in a bigger system with two GPUs, but I was still hoping to be able to bring the Watts for the CPU down.

Resource manager shows "System" (0.7-0.8%), "Deferred Procedure Calls and Interrupts" (0.4%) and "Desktop Window Manager" (0.2-0.3%) as the most CPU consuming tasks, but of course I can't kill these. So my hope was that there are things I can tweak in Windows 10 to reduce the load created by these tasks.

Once again thank you!

 

I wish I kept better track of these things but I don't. You have to watch out when installing antivirus type programs as some of them are constantly grinding away in the background. I use Avast which is very efficient, when properly setup. And that is the thing. Every program and the operating system has features that you can decide to keep or get rid of. Some features in TS are totally unnecessary but users turn them on which only wastes CPU cycles.

I use Classic Start Menu instead of the Windows 10 start menu. Turning off the animations in there might help out. I also disabled Windows Update. A 6 core CPU has 12 threads available. If 12 threads are averaging 3% in the C0 state, that is equivalent to 1 thread needing to spend 36% of its time in the C0 state to process background tasks. That is nuts. Open up the Task Manager, go to the Details tab and start looking at what is causing the load. There must be something in there.

Try using Process Explorer. That program gets into more detail about how many CPU cycles are being consumed and by what.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx

Turn on the Cycles Delta column and click on this heading to organize the tasks on your computer based on how many CPU cycles they are sucking up.

Here is how the Resource Monitor looks on my laptop. Lean and mean.



Some people want TS to be a little leaner so I added a new feature last night that lets a person disable the CPU monitoring when it is not needed. I don't think this will make any meaningful difference but every CPU cycle counts when gaming or benching or running on battery power. Testing in progress.



Notice how each thread is spending very little time in the C0 state. And that is before I enabled the new Stop Monitoring feature. Maybe I need to install a fresh copy of Win 10 to a clean hard drive and keep better track of what needs to be turned off to get this OS ship shape!

 

I have managed to replicate the ideal idle C7 state percentage after realising what the issue was already. Seems like this C State mechanism is dependent on FID which can be adjusted via either set multiplier or power options. The FID/multipliers in turn affect your overall MHz.

Mine was previously running at 9 FID and only about 900MHz

But is running your processor at close to max MHz power efficient and temperature friendly?



edit: I also realised what the effects are of checking "Disable Turbo". It seem like when I left it uncheck, my professor goes to 33/34 FID, which probably gives marginally better C0% but it seems like at higher workload, it generates a more than proportionate temperature increase in CPU and GPU.

 

A simple OS reboot fixed all, TS works as it should now (with tray icon visible).

@TopTension
For creating clean, slim and lite installation of Win10 Pro i`m using MSMG Toolkit. After removing ALL Win10 components that Toolkit allows (Store, Search2, Cortana, all Metro crap, Win Defender, telemetry and more) you are ending with MUCH lighter Win10 Pro even more so than LTSB version. If you are after keeping CPU idle as much as possible - try it. There is a lot of crap running under the hood in standard Win10 installation, keeping CPU busy.

 

Thanks unclewebb and artpra.

@unclewebb Wow, almost everything at 0.00 in your resource monitor screen shot. But I must ask, how do you get perfmon.exe to 0.02%, it is around 0.15-0.25% avg CPU on my machine and I alreday hid the CPU diagrams and made the window rather small.

@artpra Thanks for the MSMG Toolkit link, at the moment MDL forums are down, but I will follow up on the link later.

@asuslaptopfan Stands to reason, that if you let your CPU run at full clock speeds and not slow down during quieter times it'll get the jobs done faster and has more time to sleep in C states. I don't think you will be saving anything though energy wise. The most energy efficient clock rate is in a processor register (somewhere around 1GHz +/- 200MHz depending on your CPU) and Windows will let it drop to that rate when idle. Have you watched the TS watt value when you have those high C state values? Is it actually lower or higher than in a "normal" FID setting?

 

Uncle Webb - thanks once again for a great performance program! Feel free to link me for any beta testing; I run very large real-time music software so that stresses CPU-memory-SSD.

On my Dell 9550 Skylake 6300HQ, "Core C State" is similar to what you post above.

However, "Package C State" seems to show C2 in the 93% range (0 shows for the C3, C6, C7 boxes in that section. Is it possible to move the package C States towards C7? What are the implications from a performance perspective? I have read older posts and assume that that I'm stuck but not sure if there are any recent Skylake - ThrottleStop info.

FYI - Package C State Limit - locked (and greyed out is C8). I also tried adjusting the C3 Interrupt Response limit from the C3 by clicking c7 but that does nothing (cant click apply and after clicking OK and returning to that C State window, C3 is once again selected).

Thanks and enjoy a ThrottleLess holiday weekend!

 

That's not how it works with the response limits. There are three values for the response limit. You select which value you want to change with the three radio buttons, then enter value you want below for the respective C state.

C7 saves more energy, but it takes longer for the CPU to wake up, so performance, especially when you need quick reaction, suffers. Probably not a so good, when you are running audio software and the processor needs to wake up in a hurry because the ASIO driver has new audio samples available that need to be processed by your music software.
.

 

Thanks TopTension

What is your view for having "Core C State" at C7 for music software for max response? I am running SpeedShift with EPP=0 via ThrottleStop FYI. Goal is very highest performance possible - no issues with heat with this software...

 

I haven't tried it yet, but in general people with music software do not like C states, the higher the worse.

That's why unclewebb has added the "Interrupt Response Limit" ( see here). If you set ridiculously low values there, the CPU won't go into C sleep states bypassing locked BIOS settings and will respond quicker to audio requests. It will consume more power though, you can't have it all.

I am not fully clear about the response limits, I am guessing it means something like "yeah, you can go to sleep in C3/C6/C7, but I want you to be awake within xxxx nanoseconds, when an interrupt comes up". If this time is too short, the CPU won't go to sleep.

Maybe @unclewebb can clarify?

 

Progress!

Thanks to the FIVR page in ThrottleStop I realized that my System agent voltage had a +.3V offset, when Auto is selected in the BIOS. Since I am not overclocking my DRAM I set it to 0.001 in BIOS (entering 0 turns on Auto which is really +.3) and my idle wattage with browser, email, skype etc. all running dropped a full 3W to 7W.

Much better and everything seems to work just fine with the Prime95 RAM intensive torture test.

 

I am not very sure but I think the TS watt value should be lower and there is lower temperature as well. So I am quite satisfied for now.

 

Thanks for the tips TopTension.

Unfortunately, in ThrottleStop adjusting the three Interrupt Response Limit "Time Limit" values for C3, C6 and C7 to a low number (e.g. 1) seems to do nothing to C-State percentages on my Dell 9550 6300HQ.

So I took your advice and tried a different tack. In BIOS I disabled EIST and C-States. In ThrottleStop, I disabled SpeedShift (but still run the undervolt). I disconnected networking. That provided excellent real-time audio performance (similar benefits as completely disabling antivirus).

Also CPU temps stay below 40*C so I don't think disabling C-States for this application is dangerous but let me know if you disagree

However, the CPU seems to be bound at 2.3GhZ and is not going to turbo ranges (upto 3.2 GhZ). Turbo is enabled in BIOS. ThrottleStop "Clock Modulation" and "Set Multiplier" checkboxes don't seem to help. Is there a way I can get turbo speeds again?

EDIT - I tried running with SpeedShift enabled EPP=0 and that seemed to allow the processor to ramp up to 2.8 GhZ (C states seem unchanged)

 

You did check the "Valid" box next to the Interrupt Response Limit values?

But if you can set it in BIOS you don't need this workaround anyway.

 

Yes, the "valid" box was checked although I'm not quite sure what that is.

It is nice to have all the tweaking components in one place (undervolt & SpeedShift are not BIOS options on the Dell 9550, whilst C-States and SpeedStep are BIOS options).

I will say this combination is very snappy!

 

I suspect it turns the feature on and off but I am not unclewebb

I have pretty much given up on reducing the load on my i7-6850K system. Some of the CPU consuming tasks are things I want or need like the Logitech mouse driver and sometimes Skype and 7W is not that bad for a 6 core CPU with a rather high idle frequency of 1.2 GHz. Thanks to ThrottleStop I could at least reduce it from 10W.

What I like about this CPU is that it only ramps up the clock on one physical core when there is a single thread load, that should conserve some energy. I have an i7-4710HQ laptop and a i7-4790 desktop system and both CPUs turn up the clock on all cores, when one core has some load. Don't have a i7-5xxx-CPU for comparison, so this was new to me.

Here is the laptop and the i7-6850K compared with a single load thread:



The dark blue bars show the CPU clock with the brighter tips indicating turbo boost. The laptop CPU switches all cores into turbo boost mode, although only one thread is active. Not so the i7-6850K.

 

I can no longer click the CPU Temp checkbox for notification icons.. It was working then after a reboot I can't select CPU Temp :/ Any ideas? Version 8.30