HP Envy 17 Sandy Bridge Awaiting HP's fix? read

Marcus2137 is the latest happy HP ThrottleStop user.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/7536328-post5031.html

Maybe HP will send me some money for this fix. It will probably save them from a lot of RMA and repair requests.

 

this is just superb work , uncleweb. what an great discovery and workaround!

 

pardon my observation here, but from what I'm reading here, iwantanenvy , the throttling behavior is generally not as severe as what you are experiencing -- so make sure you are running with the highest performance "on AC power" settings, and then see if you can duplicate the experiences (with and without throttlestop) predicted by bobmitch and uncleweb, and hope you don't have the experience of crimsoned, who had the throttling problem so severe he had hardware replaced (more than once)

 

By using on recommended battery setting...you are going to run at 800MHZ. Remember...battery setting is there to preserve energy and heat. Do a custom, where you can run high performance plugged in and battery on battery. You could be causing half your issues.

 

I'm hoping HP recalls all of these things....and everyone gets a free "next gen" Envy with better "physical" cooling.

 

I haven't picked up a lot of comments here regarding the cooling capacity itself. With throttlestop allowing full performance, are you guys seeing unacceptable temps?

 

I have posted numerous logs throughout the thread. Check those logs. I can say that with Turbo enable and not allowing the cpu to drop to at least rated speed...temps can run mid 90's. I set up an entirely different thread that gives some settings where you can use two profiles in TS. Profile 1 is full blown with turbo...profile 2 is set to run at rated speed. When the CPU throttles it does so between rated and turbo to keep temps in control. I experienced mostly high 80s. Look for the logs. Read my separate post on how to run TS with the Envy. It will give you some ideas...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-envy-hdx/579857-running-throttlestop-envy-17-sb.html

 

thanks bobmitch - yes I guess the high 80s temps is what caused me to suggest that isn't so bad. managable anyway. Inte'lls absolute maximums are 100c, right? NOt saying 85c is award winning; just managable

 

Heat can cause a lot of issues. At high 80sC temps...you are well within thermal limits. I am not crazy about a lot of heat. On my desktop, I have five fans running on med all the time. Somewhat audible...but the system is cool. Even running full blown 1900 x 1080 DX11 games...the machine never gets hot...just the video card in the 70's. But I have more direct control over the card fan using EVGA Precision. There is no way to cool these systems, other than the bios settings for fan and heat and whatever contribution Coolsense makes. I use TS when I know I have something that will cause throttling...otherwise, for example, I just finished Medal of Honor...not using Throttlestop...and gameplay was smooth...never feeling any jerkiness whatsoever. There will be times when a game or app will force a heavy load...that's when TS becomes very useful.

 

I guess people probably know this by now, but you cannot runt he FurMark test with just the Intel HD graphics. There is something within the test that it doesn't support...it gives you an error message.

 

Even the high performance option results in throttling at times...especially with CoolSense enabled. In fact, I think CoolSense always throttles down to 798 MHz.

Side Note: I'm starting not to like CoolSense 2.0. Why? I usually keep it on the "Auto" setting, but sometimes it likes to turnitself on...even when it's sitting stationary, and flat on a desk or table. I don't think it is doing a good job of sensing whether or not it is in a level, stationary position.

 

bobmitch -- yea I'm tracking. heat is not good; its just that I think you have come up with quite a dandy compromize with TS settings that will allow temps to reach the 80s, which the Envy is well capable of handling. a core temp of 80 certainly means the heat sink is cooler than that, so you won't be drying out the electrolytic caps in the motherboard, too soon...

and +1 on your recommendation not to run that hot unless you have to.

 

this is interesting. CoolSense 2.0 appears to more aggressively back things down, compared to 1.0. have you tried un-installing it completely?

 

Yea, since whenever it switches to 'ENABLED,' it almost immediately goes to 798 MHz about 80% of the time. I think I'll just leave it set to off. Unless I'm like at a business meeting or workshop, where I know i won't be doing anything demanding, and i just need my battery to last as long as possible

 

Remember to do some battery power consumption testing. A slow inefficient CPU is not always the best way to minimize power consumption. In some instances you are better off running the CPU as fast as possible so it gets the background tasks done quickly and then can go back into the C6 sleep state. This is important on the newer Core i CPUs because in the C6 sleep state, voltage and power consumption for that core drops down to zero. ThrottleStop allows you to measure the percentage of time the CPU package is able to spend in C6. The higher the better when trying to reduce power consumption. Some old school power saving techniques might not save very much at all on a modern Core i sandy Bridge CPU.

If ThrottleStop doesn't show your battery power consumption info then check out,

Osiris Development - BatteryBar, the most accurate battery meter for Windows

 

I'm curious to notice that:

- DV7s don't throttle back as aggressively as Envy's do
- Coolsense appears to encourage heavier throttling in the Envy
- the throttling doesn't occur until one engages the 6850 GPU

perhaps the Envy 17 throttling is indeed a deliberate thermal defense mechanism. consider that, in broad general terms (summarizing a couple of calculations comparing the two), the 6850 is on the order of ~50% stronger than the 6770 in areas such as GFLOPS processing power, polygon throughput, data fetch rate, etc. that translates into higher heat dissipation.

HP must not be positioning the Envy 17 as a platform that can sustain both heavy discrete graphics and the highest CPU loads at the same time. I wouldn't, personally, require that kind of service from the Envy, but that's just me. I'm not a gamer

 

Check your respective download pages. Get bios f.15 THROTTLING IS DEAD!

 

Fantastic!


KJ

 

outstanding. thanks for the pointer bobmitch. here is the text from the update, which is dated 5/27

"- Fixes an issue where the notebook operates slower than expected when running multiple programs. "

wahoo. anyone tested yet?

edit: nevermind I just read the owners lounge, lol good to see some real excitement there!

 

+1

 

Meh, I don't get the joke! haha.

 

It means update your BIOS and the throttling will be fixed! : P

 

Lol, I know that there is no such BIOS update.

 

Uhh I'm not sure you're serious or not but according to all the current members the latest BIOS update F15 does fix the throttling issue that several users have reported on...

So yeah they are being serious (while expressing their great relief/joy...lol).

Still unclewebb deserves a lot of praise for his throttlestop fix.

 

Yes. Check ur download page. For BIOS . Read the HP description!

 

Nice! This so is excellent.

@Dlleno: When yo say "Check yoru download page," where is that precisely. I cannot find where all the new software shows up

 

hp.com/support
pick your region, then click software/drivers. enter your product or have it auto-detect

 

chockyy, welcome to NBR and our Envy forums.


Here is the link you want:

HP® - Laptops, Desktops, Printers, Servers and more

Click on the bubble where it says drivers and downloads...then select your product below....its a snap from there. Please let us know if you managed to update your BIOS. All the members here are great and help eachother out, so ask whatever, its all good.

KJ

 

Thanks Killa Joe! Yes I did. I have fallen back in love with the Envy, haha.

 

Okay, I installed the F.15 BIOS update, and I'm still experiencing throttling from time to time. Suggestions?

 

That's strange, I'm not the best on this but are you on power or battery when getting throttling?

 

Tell us more please! What application/game are you using?

Could you run the tests as well please?

 

From what I can tell, it still is going to drop to 798 mhz if you're just running a I.E. or watching a video. It will also do it to cool down once the load on your computer goes down. So if you're playing a game and you minimize it to check the frequency or temperature the load lessens, and thus the computer will throttle the cpu to cool down your computer. So soon as the Load picks back up, it stops throttling and will let your computer go. The turbo boost doesn't kick in if your computer has a full load, though.

 

with a 100% load, mine goes to 1950 (or so. Whatever x20 is), then after abtou 2 minutes and the temperature hitting around 18, it bottoms out at 1895 (x 19) and stays there. It will go as high as 2900 if the load is ~15

 

are you guys sure CoolSense is OFF? I'm suspicious that it may influence throttling as well. witness the fact that the coolsense revision is also BIOS dependant

 

The v1 of Coolsense also has some interesting settings. I leave on performance all the time. If I put it on "Cooler" setting...it even tells you that it will set cpu speed to keep the machine cooler. So whether v1 or v2, you should be very mindful how you set it. I leave mine on performance and all works fine.

 

This morning, I was simply listening to some mp3s in Media Center. I also probably had Microsoft Outlook minimized. I was on battery power, and the ATI Graphics card. It throttled for about 15 seconds...the music slowed down to slower than half-speed. CoolSense 2.0 was enabled (while set to AUTO). But as soon as I switched it to "off" the throttling stopped shortly afterwards. I think it was great of HP to issue a "Quick Fix," but I still think they need to experiment more. Maybe give the laptop to some employees to take home and experiment under normal conditions. I'm sure whatever they do in their labs doesn't compare to regular, everyday use by normal people.

 

You are right... these aren't the usual type of settings we would use so chances that someone discovers it and reports it are low.

The only suggestion I have is for you to be pro active... call up HP and tell them to forward this to the team in charge.

 

Here's another throttling event:

This morning, I was on a video call using Oovoo (which is a program similar to Skype--basicaly, their competition). The only applications running in the background were Microsoft Outlook (minimized), and two Internet Explorer 9 tabs (Facebook, and the FedEx tracking website). My system throttled down!!! For about 60 seconds or longer!!!

I am on the ATI video card, HP Recommended power setting, and my laptop is on AC power!! Why does my system throttle? Do I need to remove CoolSense 2.0? Re-install BIOS F.15? Re-format the entire system?

 

On battery power....you do realize that the machine defaults to "Speedstep"?
Speedstep will run your CPU at 800 mhz to conserve battery time. What compounds the situation is that you run the ATI card on battery. The ATI will consume quite a bit more power off battery...so much so that it may steal from the CPU....

 

I believe I mistyped that. I was "NOT" on battery power. But still, I must disagree with you...I opened the Advanced Power Options, which I'm lookin at now. I noticed the default Processor settings for the HP Recommended setting are the same, regardless of battery of AC power:
Minimum processor state: 5%. Maximum processor state: 100%. System cooling policy: Active.

 

The Minimum processor state setting is what controls whether your CPU throttles down. On AC power set that to 100% and that will help. With a Core i mobile CPU, there is no easy way to keep the CPU fixed at the default multiplier. They automatically enter the deeper sleep states like C6 and when they do this, the average multiplier as reported by RealTemp will be doing a lot of jumping around at idle.

You should also do some battery power consumption testing with this set to 5% vs 100%. On some CPUs, the penalty isn't that much. If you are having usability issues on battery power when it is set to 5% then you might be better off leaving it at 100%.

Battery Bar reads power consumption data directly from Windows so give that a try to compare power consumption on battery power between 5% and 100%.

Osiris Development - BatteryBar, the most accurate battery meter for Windows

ThrottleStop can also show the same data. Go into the Options and turn on Battery Monitoring and then cycle the battery button which is the button to the right of the Save button. It will show the same power consumption data as Battery Bar since the data is coming from the same Windows source. By doing some testing you might be able to come up with a better compromise. Software should not be locking the CPU to 798 MHz when on battery power. You're better off letting Windows and the CPU manage this. It seems to be more sophisticated than the HP app.

 

I want to say that I have the CPU throttling issue too on my Envy 17 3D, , on Intel or AMD graphics. Yes, I have installed the F15 BIOS. I have CPU throttling issue even only if running the prime95 , and it starts in less than 1 minute.
HP support recommends deleting temp files, and cleaning the startup programs (the standard steps that they know not related with the problem). Any suggestions?

 

1. Check coolsense...make sure it is on "performance" and not "Coolest Mode" Coolest mode will throttle your CPU as well.
2. The throttling issue was hardware, so something is interfering with your cpu. That is why make sure to check 1
3. If you have Coolsense 2.0 set it to "Off" and see what happens.

In most cases throttling came from loading the GPU and CPU at the same time, unless you have something else going on...

Also...try this:

http://www.hwinfo.com/

You want hwinfo32

 

Thanks Bobmitch, the first point works.
When I started the FurMark the Speed fall but not to much, till 1600 Mghz, and the temperature of the CPU rise till 85.
When I started the TS the speed go to 2000, that is expected for 2630 and the temperature rise to 97, AMD till 83
Thanks again Bobmitch, at least the speed drop but not much.

 

Others have reported much lower heat with the 2630QM!

It also depends on the enviroment that you are using the Envy in or the heat is not getting dispurst properly by the heatsink/heat pad.

 

hey guys.

I been keeping tabs on what's going on, and I heard there was a BIOS fix.

How is the bios fix working thus far?

 

Throttling gone. Under full load of CPU and GPU...usually see min rated speed for CPU. Temps up a bit...but managable

 

Even with the BIOS fix, I STILL get throttling from time to time, usually when CoolSense kicks in. I can hear the fanspeed increase, and I know it's trying to slow the processor down and keep from overheating. Sometimes my system even throttles the speed down using the Intel HD graphics, but this is rare. Overall, the machine throttles a lot less often than before the BIOS fix...but the problem isn't 100% gone.

 

Do you have Coolsense set to ON?