Y570 GT555m Throttles Itself - hoping for some insight

Hey guys,

I have a Y570 with a problem that makes it nearly impossible to play games, which I find ridiculous on a laptop that has a GT555m GPU in it. Also have a Core i3 2330 CPU (so no Turbo Boost) and 4GB DDR3.

Specifically, my problem is with the GPU is throttling itself down to 40% usage or less intermittently in games. I can prove it's doing it by using EVGA Precision's on-screen monitor showing GPU usage, or by playing in a window and using MSI Afterburner's graphs. I've found that there's no link between the GT555m throttling itself and the temperature of the system (CPU or GPU) since severely underclocking the GPU doesn't solve it, and this throttling simply will just go away and come back as it sees fit. Sometimes it happens for a few seconds, sometimes it won't stop until I quit the game. It's maddening, and I've tried every solution I've found so far. I've tried ThrottleStop, playing with all of the power profiles in Windows and in Lenovo's software, different Nvidia drivers (most notably, the most recent ones posted on Lenovo's page as well as Nvidia's own most recent ones), pulling the plug to run it on battery, playing with CPU affinity, overclocking (and underclocking!) the GPU with MSI Afterburner, and flipping the GPU switch off and on. Nothing solves the throttling issue.

I have found some strangeness, however. In general, playing games on battery gives me frame rates that are generally cut in half compared to on AC power - and that's when the GPU is not throttling itself. (This alone weirds me out, and with all options on the PC set to "maximum performance" in Lenovo's software and Windows' own power management, I'm skeptical about how pretty much anything else could work properly.) When the GPU *is* throttling itself to 50% or less usage, pulling the plug can sometimes bring the GPU up to 70% (and pulling and re-plugging the AC will raise and drop the GPU usage directly), but the frame rates do not actually improve. This is maddening and very weird, and playing with the power profiles back and forth for hours have left me without even a single answer as to what the heck is going on.

Please note that the issue I'm seeing here isn't about FPS on the Y570 in general. When the GPU is running at 85+ % usage (which is easy to monitor using the above software), the frame rates are great in nearly everything I play. I'm not getting "hitching" or any very short-term FPS drops. This is the GPU deciding not to run at full capacity for whatever reason, and the frame rates taking a huge dive as a result, for seconds or minutes at a time, and it takes less than a minute of gameplay for this to start happening, and it never stops intermittently going in and out.

Thing is, I'm betting that a low-level Lenovo tech won't even understand any of what I just wrote if I try to explain it to them. Has anyone fixed this issue without replacing drivers, changing CPU minimums or maximums in Power Management, or goofing around with the power plans? Because I've done all that for many hours, and nothing has fixed it. Has anyone actually had this issue, sent their Y570 back to Lenovo, and got back a 100% fully working system?

I noticed there are modded BIOSes going around... what about those? Looking for help here guys. Thanks!

 

Are you sure that the GAME itself can completely utilize the GPU. Many games often do not use the GPU at 100%.

Sounds like a software issue to me.

In an extreme case: backup your data and reformat and get the drivers off the recovery partition on your drive and see if it still happens.

 

Yeah, absolutely sure. For example, Skyrim will start up and run at 60fps, with 95+% GPU usage. Yay! Then after a minute or two, the GPU drops to 40% or less usage and the frame rate takes a dive to 20fps - while I've been standing still in the same spot the whole time. I've seen similar results in Mass Effect 3, F1 2011, even Minecraft if you can believe it.

I'm already running the latest drivers Lenovo posted on their site, but if I still can't figure it out, I'll give that a shot, I suppose. I assume you mean actually going through with the full recovery. (Thanks for the input!)

 

Sounds like it's a thermal issue. Try setting your fan settings on "Efficient thermal dissapation" and see if it still does that.

 

Try this. Boot up your laptop, then put it on Standby, and then wake it up and try playing something and see if you still get those problems.

 

Have you ever run ThrottleStop with the Log File option checked while gaming? If it can monitor your GPU temperatures then check that off in the Option windows too so you can get some GPU temperature data as well.

The GPU usage numbers might be hiding the real problem.

Copy and Paste a ThrottleStop log file into http://www.pastebin.com or similar and then post a link here so I can have a look. Send me a PM if you need to get my attention. There is always a reason for throttling. Not many performance laptops can run at their rated CPU and GPU speed when on battery power but when plugged in, you shouldn't be having huge drops in frame rates unless something is seriously wrong.

If it is not CPU or GPU temperature related then the next biggest problem is power consumption related.

 

You were right! After logging GPU usage in GPU-Z and then comparing it to the CPU voltage logged in ThrottleStop, there's an obvious correlation between the GPU usage dropping right as the CPU drops the voltage down from ~0.9507v to 0.7655v. I'm guessing that as the CPU hits somewhere around 75 degrees C, it's throttling itself?

I had uninstalled Lenovo's energy management software, but I'm going to try running it again to see if I have any control whatsoever over the fan in this laptop.

I attached the two log files in case you wanted to see more details.

 

Aaaaand now I feel silly. I had uninstalled Lenovo's energy management software when first trying to solve the frame rate issues, and at some point I looked at the top right panel on the y570, tapping the buttons just to see what they did. I figured that the one on the right was a Sleep button - after all, the icon is a moon, which I have seen on many other PCs as Sleep, but I had guessed that the reason it didn't work was because I had uninstalled Lenovo's energy management software.

I reinstall that software, tap the button after reading another post about fan speed on another forum, and quickly figure out that not only does this machine have fan speed management after all, but that this laptop shipped with the fan in "super quiet" mode. I had thought that the machine was running suspiciously quiet! It does baffle me that by default, the machine ships set up in a mode where sustained high performance comes second to noise. And I do think the way Lenovo's software and hardware come together is a little weird - seeing as I have to press a special button on the laptop to change the fan speed and that there's no mention of this function in the software until you press the button, but with a physical switch controlling the GPU state, I suppose I should have expected it.

But all I wanted was for it to be fixed, and I didn't care if I looked like an idiot. And now it's fixed, and I don't care about the rest - I appreciate the help, everyone!

 

Sorry to say I can't see it happening, I sold my Y570 i7 not only because I was disappointed with the GPU but because lenovo don't seem to care.

This should be the lenovo logo

 

Many of the Core i3 CPUs that laptop manufacturers are using have an Intel specified throttling temperature of 85C which is significantly lower than the Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs that are set to 100C.

Intel® Core? i3-2330M Processor (3M Cache, 2.20 GHz)

The throttling method that Intel builds into their CPUs at the hardware level is second to none compared to the algorithm that Lenovo dreamed up. An Intel CPU will continuously adjust itself, hundreds of times a second, so it maximizes performance even while it is running right at the maximum safe temperature.

Here's an example of a Core 2 E8400, with the fan turned off, over clocked and over volted, happily running Prime 95 at full speed while bouncing off the Intel thermal throttling core temperature for 3 hours without ever skipping a beat.

http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/276/hote8400fw5.png

Incredible technology. After this test I learned that Intel CPUs are nearly bullet proof. Core i based CPUs are able to run reliably at even higher temperatures. Hard to improve on that level of engineering.

What does Lenovo do? They create their won thermal throttling scheme that kicks in at a CPU core temperature of only 80C so that it bypasses the Intel thermal throttling scheme. Your ThrottleStop log file shows that Lenovo has decided to drop your CPU from 2000 MHz down to 800 MHz for almost a minute at a time and then depends on consumers being too dumb to notice.

Congratulations upaboveit for noticing when your Lenovo Y570 was performing like a piece of crap and being smart enough to fix it.

 

I am sooo grateful for this thread. For a year or more I've been trying to find a way to get above 880 Mhz (according to CPU-Z) and saw it very occasionally and very briefly hit 2794 Mhz. Thermal management never occured to me until I stumbled on this thread. Not only was it at the default "Super Silent" mode but I had it on top of another running laptop with its lid closed. Stupid, I know, but the implications never occured to me. As an electrical engineer I figured if there was a problem I'd get a thermal warning rather than silent degradation to 28% of rated performance!

I've never felt that this box was anywhere near worth the upgrade and I was right. It wasn't. The dual core Vaio I used prior was actually running faster! The Lenovo is now consistently 3.5 times faster than the whole first year I've owned it.

A new day dawns and thank you folks very, very much.