Advanced LG Gram 2021 tweaking

Hello. Just wanted to share what I've found out about LG Gram 2021 (I have 17Z90P-K.ADC9U1 from Costco) as I'm trying to tweak it for more battery life and higher performance. If you decide to do anything based on what I described, do at your own risk. Some things here can mess up your laptop and potentially even brick it.

• Headphones didn't work for me. This is because LG Update center installs beta version of DTS APO4x Service. It just crashed if trying to play any sounds with headphones plugged in. I manually uninstalled all DTS drivers in Device Manager -> Software Components (while checking "Delete the software for this device"). Then installed older driver in windows and everything started to work.
• ThrottleStop can't do much. I checked FIVR -> Disable and Lock Turbo Power Limits. After that I think when I enable custom Turbo Power Limits and unclamp PL1 it's able to keep turbo longer, especially if Performance mode is enabled. I also set Speed Shift, but not sure if it has much of an effect.
• Improve cooling capacity by repasting (I used Noctua NT-H2). Also add 1.5mm Arctic Thermal pad on top of heatpipe to connect it to backplate and use backplate as an extended heat sink. 1.5mm is enough for heatpipe to have good connection. 1mm would barely touch. Keep in mind that this will make the back panel very hot to the touch under load. Also, don't put the pad on heat pipe right on top of the CPU as that will block the hole through which air is being sucked in. Any ventilation needs to stay open as there's really not enough of it in Gram.
• Under load in power mode when turbo starts (I use ThrottleStop TSBench), Freq will go up to around 4ghz at 42W PKG Power, but will quickly hit thermal limit. Thermal throttling will go on and decrease frequency until thermal balance is reached. For me it settle at around 25W with freq around 3.2GHz. Eventually though PL1 power throttling kicks in, limiting CPU at about 18W and frequency of 2.8 GHz (which is base frequency for I7-1165g7). If PL1 Clamp is enabled it seems like power goes down further, all the way to 10-15W over time.
• Enabled all hidden Windows power settings following https://superuser.com/questions/143...den-power-and-processor-options-in-windows-10 guide. Then followed https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/h7yotl/psa_heres_how_i_doubled_battery_life_on_my_x1e2/ to update some of the power settings for on battery in Windows Power Options. Not sure if all those adjustments made a lot of difference, will have to wait and see.
• I've never seen CPU enter C9 or C10 states. It can enter C8 for around 1.5-2.5W power saving, however it's possible to put system in a mode that blocks CPU from entering C8. When laptop wakes up or starts, it C8 is enabled and accessible. However, if in Windows Power Options "PCI Express -> Link State Power Management" is set to anything other than "Maximum power savings" system enters mode where C8 state isn't available anymore and the only way to fix that is to put laptop to sleep / wake up, or restart. For example:
  • In Balanced power scheme by default Link State Power Management for On Battery is Maximum power savings, but for Plugged in its Moderate power savings.
  • Unplug charger and put computer to sleep, when you wake up C8 should be accessible.
  • If you plug power, on Balanced scheme Link State Power Management goes to Moderate power savings and C8 is now blocked until computer is put to sleep or restarted. Even if you unplug again and Link State Power Management goes back to Maximum power savings, C8 will remain blocked.
  • I fixed this behavior by adjusting Plugged in setting to Maximum power savings, just like when it's on battery.
  • If anyone knows why C9 and C10 are blocked, please share. It would be nice to be able to use those states.
  • With C8 state accessible on idle and with most normal apps running (Edge, Slack, etc) but on idle (so apps are running but I'm not interacting with laptop) power jumps around between 1.5W and 4W, with majority being around 2-2.5W. With most apps shut down I think it around 1.4-1.7 W on idle.
• It's possible to show advanced settings in bios (UEFI). Enter bios and press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+F7. It seems a lot of things can be messed with. For example it's possible to disable Intel Dynamic Platform and Throttling Framework. I honestly don't know what most of the settings do and it seems messing with them can lead to issues. I've tried to adjust some of the limits to enable C10 state or extend how long it takes for power throttling to kick in (since with the enhanced cooling via thermal pads 25W seems to be pretty stable), but doesn't look like anything got affected. It looks like it's possible to, for example, specify default power mode for when waking up, etc. If someone decides to mess with the settings, please post your findings.

 

I also created an app to switch to different Cooling (Power) modes. Then configured Windows Task Scheduler to switch modes dynamically. The app is in .NET and uses library fom the latest LG Control Center (Ver.1.0.2010.801), which is also in .NET. You can download it at https://mega.nz/file/jRghEKRB#mgU7Tf_BR6RAjGS98gqCyvqBpp95598T-zdSCFL2c64

Here's how to set it up:

• Performance mode is set when power is plugged in. Since optimal mode is set automatically when waking up or starting laptop, have to react to on logon, resume or AC power inserted events.
• Optimal mode is set on resume / start, so only need to react when unplugging AC power.
• You will need to open Task Scheduler and import tasks and will need adjust the path to the location of files.
• I also updated LG Onscreen Display shortcuts to quickly change power mode (CTRL+1 - performance, CTRL+2 - optimal, CTRL+3 - silent).
• When changing power mode it seems PL1 and fan characteristics change. Performance - 28W and goes to max fan much easier. Optimal - 25W and fan is much quieter. Silent - 12W and fan is barely audible.

 

Excellent post, hope other Gram 2021 owners will try out these tweaks and report their experiences on this thread.

 

I suspect a lot of the tweaks will be applicable to older models as well. I also think that the command line apps I posted to switch power profile should work with older model.

 

I guess you have to wipe the nvme and start from scratch without all that LG junkware to get C9 and C10. I have them working without probs - but set a restore point before any major driver update in order if they get lost to restore them. 75% C10 should be there on idle 2-3 seconds after the last interaction. 30-50% C10 for very light load. C10 makes all the difference when it comes to power use - it improves about 0.7-0.8w per hour and you will even have better benchmark all core and single core results.

Do not install anything from LG except the control center.

And yeah - as I wrote - I get constant 25W PL1 for over 15 minutes (never looked at it longer) if the ambient temperature isn't too high so it is throttling before. And this does not matter on the lg cooling mode at all. But yeah I set PP0 power limit to 180 in Throttlestop. That is the important thing to prevent early throttling.

I get 12-14 hours of work time at 80% display brightness - using edge canary with performance mode switched on. Do not think of getting there using Chrome or edge without performance mode. Problem is - canary is unstable as **** while watching video. Some weeks it's okay - right now if you do not pause a video - and leave the tab it will crash the tab after 5 minutes or so. Can only restart the whole edge browser to get back into the tab. However since months performance mode seems canary only, not even on the beta channel it is available (which is annoying as canary updates every day).


If anyone could make the performance cooling mode available outside the lg control center, I could ditch that piece of junk too. So annoying it resets on hibernation/reboot.


Thanks for the bios tip - never heard about that one.

 

Wo great, you unlocked a huge mistery. Inside the advanced CPU config there is a view configure turbo options.

Problem is, can't change anything useful there.
Only useful thing is energy efficient turbo, I guess disabling this then unlocks options in throttle stop.

Package tdb limit is 28 (without lg junk installed to lower it), pl1 is 30, and pl2 is 60. Setting the time will not change anything as long as you have lg crap installed. With LG control center uninstalled - it actually is using the 128 seconds. LG control center is overriding those values. It still goes down to 25 after 128 seconds instead of 28. There must be some windows driver installed by LG that changes this.

Max turbo power limit for me is 4095.875 - I guess this one is CPU depending.


And there is a nominal, up and down value, likely the lg control center is using them for optimal, performance and silent. Down is set to 12w, nominal to 28w, and up to 15w for me. However in up I have 30w PL1. So I increased that too to 40.
PL1 duration here can be increased from 28 seconds to 128.

So now it's only up to your cooling to dominate all LG gram benchmarks (not possible for me in Cyprus heat right now).

It's booting in nominal. That will be active until LG control center/drivers takes over if installed.


Plus most importantly, in platform thermal configuration you can alter the fan speeds. The default is 100 percent over 71 degrees, and 75 over 55 degrees. I lowered the temps to 48/67 or so (there are steps - it's not freely adjustable)


And we'll, that one is very interesting too. I guess everyone noticed that the gram charges like a brick, inside the bios fast charging is disabled, so the mistery why that thing is not charging over 40w/h is cleared up. I will leave it there for battery life. LG must have had an idea when disabling it.

I just got 2040 points on Cinebench R15 in optimal mode (but yeah I reduced the fan thresholds a bit to activate earlier) at 32 degrees ambient temperature. That should be an easy 2300 points at 15 degrees or so. ( I also repasted that CPU with Arctic MX5 cause the factory job was a mess).

The big difference - PL1 is now 128 seconds instead of 30 seconds only. That is the intel max. I am unsure how to increase overall tdp - could not find it in the bios.

 

Oh yeah if battery life is important to you, disabling intel acoustic noise management in bios helps to enter lower c states faster. It is actually set to 2, which is pretty aggressive. But disabling is 1, so it will get you even more c10. I think this saves about 0.1w - I cannot hear any coil wine so it is fine. Besides everything I found was configured already best way to save battery.


After how many seconds does it drop below 25w? For me it drops from cooling capacity (just held it in front of aircon that blows out air at around 18°) 30w (CPU only) to 25w after 128 seconds. At 25w now in 25 degrees air conditioned room it runs at 83-84 degrees. At 30 degrees ambient temperature it runs at 95-97 thermal throttling around 24.5w (thanks for the repaste). I tried this with several runs of Cinebench R15 after each other - and it held at least 10 minutes -then I gave up.

Cinebench R15 max score still a lousy 2180. I would have expected a better result (will be possible in winter of course)

 

okay sorry- checked again. I can only get it to 80 seconds before PL1 kicks in at 25W - not 112 or 118. I do not understand why. Well its better than the default 30 seconds. but something is fishy. You can check that the right PL1, PL2 is set by deleting throttlestop.ini - rebooting and look what values it defaults to.

If I run your performance mode - then C9/C10 is disabled. Running optimal mode C9/C10 is enabled again. Maybe that is your problem? Anyhow I do not see a reason to use that performance mode - except the fan spinning faster at low temps I get no benchmark improvement whatsoever - Edit will be better for 2-3 seconds only - meaning taking longer to heat up to 67 degrees.
I is no improvement with working on my lap - because C9/C10 goes missing and hence temps go up a lot for low loads which renders the faster fan useless. Effectively the lg gram then has the same temp on my lap as in optimal normal mode. Rather decrease those temps for fan going 75% speed and 100% speed even more in bios.

Again Edit - the time until PL1 limit kicks in seems to be not limited by time, but by speed. So actually if I enable performance mode - it will kick up the fan much earlier - and if held in front of aircon - use 38W PL2 limit for about 30 seconds - then directly dropping down to 25W.
Instead if I just use optimal mode - and normal 25 degrees room temperature - it will run faster for much longer - and after 80-90 seconds drop to the 25W limit.
In the end Cinebench R15 always runs about the same points - the differences are tiny.

So performance mode will help for very short burst loads - but is not really helping for anything that runs over 1.5 minutes. In the end it needs the same time (but more battery if run on battery - and on AC simply being louder). I even set the lock bit in the bios - no help. Those values can be set as well or as ignored also by Throttlestop.

Would need to find a way to stop this calculation. In winter my room temp is 16 degrees - love that for working. That should mean 36-37 watts can be cooled - yet LG only allows 25w after 30 seconds of 38...Running in circles here. Will not be possible to get over 2180 points in Cinebench R20 on the gram with the i5-1135G7 (still that is way better than kinda any review scored, but the main part is simply the repaste).

 

Thanks for sharing and exploring bios.

* I installed Windows 10 from scratch, but installed LG Control center and all drivers from LG. Will look into getting rid of them I guess. Have never seen C10. Which Bios version are you running? Might try to also do fresh install on another drive just to see if I get C10 then to see if driver really causes the issue. Did you see it C10 from beginning, without having to mess with any settings?
* The command line app I published doens't need LG Control center installed. It uses some libraries from it, but looking at the code it seems they send commands directly to hardware via some windows interface, so it should just work.
* I was able to get 1.2-1.8 W "idle" with most apps running but without interaction (so not true idle) by optimizing cores parking. This is when 6 CPU cores are parked. It was tricky to get parking to work correctly. For some reason certain Power Options profiles didn't want to park on battery, no idea why, even if I copied all of the hidden settings from one profile to another. In the end I took copy of Power Saver power scheme and configured it. This is my power scheme: https://mega.nz/file/OUZxxQRZ#ksIEisLWkhQvqhmM-yfAeBXQlFiCB85szTjeoQkpOj8 - you can import it using powercfg or QuickCPU below.
* Found pretty cool app to mess with power options: Quick CPU - Real time performance optimization and Sensor monitor (coderbag.com). Word of caution, use it to edit existing profiles, but don't use sliders directly in UI. It wants to create it's own power scheme and will then update it. I'd suggest still ThrottleStop to mess with all CPU power settings.
* Discovered that messing with SpeedShift affects boost, but doesn't seem to affect lower frequency. If I set SpeedShift above 128, it changes initial Boost frequency. For example at SpeedShift 180 I only get 3.2 GHZ boost. At 200 I only get 2.8 GHZ boost. If I don't set it at all, SpeedShift is still enabled, freq still goes down low as expected and boost still goes all the way up to max.

 

About resetting on hibernate, see my 2nd post on how to fix that. You can use Task Scheduler to launch my app to set it to whatever you want.

By the way, do you stay in performance mode on battery?

 

On optimal power setting running from battery, PL1 kicked in after around 55 seconds.

 

Well the way PL1 kicks in is somehow related to the workload. Set PL2 to 27w and you can go the full 128 seconds until PL1 kicks in. Set PL2 to 38w and it will kick in very soon. I run windows power saver mode all the time, but configured it to be pretty fast. I somehow hope in power saver mode - windows does less background messing around. It's really crazy how much stuff windows does in the background vs say Ubuntu Linux.

on a clean windows install C10 is active.

The main thing I change on battery vs AC is the speedshift value. I use it at 128 on AC, and 170 on DC. For some benchmarks speedshift 80 or so gives you a bit higher results. - the higher the speedshift value the less the max speed, however 170 is still allowing multi core to be faster than the cooling/PL1 can handle. It ramps up much slower though, goes more into deeper C-states, so runs colder and uses less battery.
Speedshift is the most important thing to change.

And full package power (Throttlestop) for me at idle fluctuates between 0.4 and 0.8w - full system power electricity draw - that is what really counts is aroudn 1.7 to 1.8w with minimal display brightness - I feel because you are not using C10 you must be off at least 0.4-0.5w. And for low load without C10 you will use at least 1w more power - hence 25% percent shorter battery life or so...

I do not use core parking anymore - with C10 active it uses more power.

 

Oh - well after even running your tools once - out of hibernation C10 is broken. Usually I have no problems with C10 out of hibernation. Cannot touch any LG crap sorry, also not the libraries...

Without touching those things C10 is all well out of hibernation. Maybe that ****s up your C10 - you run your tool on startup, right? So no C10 out of hibernation.

1. Run performance mode - C10 broken. C8 is max
2. Use your tool to set optimal mode - C10 works.
3. Hibernate and wake up again - C8 max - C10 broken. (0.5w more power consumption at idle, 1w more a light load).Use your tool to set optimal mode again makes no change.
4. Reboot - do not touch any LG stuff. Hibernate - wake up again - C10 working.
5. Set optimal via your tool. Hibernate - wake up again C8 max, C10 broken.

C3, C6 and C9 are rarely used.


I would love a direct handling of the fan. Cannot get higher TDP with performance mode anyhow. But would love to switch fan to "performance mode" when working with laptop on my lap in warm climates. Cannot use performance mode however as this ****s up C10 and essentially just wasting energy.
I do not want to set fan to 100 percent all the time via bios, because this uses quite a bit of battery power too.


So yeah - do not install anything every from LG. Well you may need to if you want to update the bios - for that you need the lg update center as they do not publish the bios anymore. But then I saw absolutely no change from the newer bios vs an older one I was using. There is no changelog either therefore....

 

Would need to boot into linux and look if on linux you do not get that crappy PL1 time based on load behaviour. But then it is hard to see C states and power use and so on under Linux - without going into command line. Also cinebench and so on does not run under linux - so right now I will not do it. I guess windows itself gets this configuration somehow from LG - so even without installing anything from LG you get that crappy 25W instead of 28w PL1. I do not know if the U series intel tiger lake accepts PL2 for longer than 128 seconds - so maybe no matter the laptop - after 128 seconds its 28w max - as that is the max TDP I think for tiger lake U. Not sure if that is possible to be changed.

Anyhow as I already wrote - if you do not need a new laptop right now, wait for alder lake LG Gram. Intel tiger lake is a battery hog on light load compared to i82xx series - needs 1-2w more power on light loads even with C10 active. I do think with Alder lake battery life will be much much better. Not Apple M1 level, but much better. Maybe idling at 0.2w instead 0.4-0.8w package power and much more efficient at light loads (say 0.5w instead of 2-4w). So with alder lake the gram would run 50% longer. The only thing tiger lake is efficient at is playing video.... But even then M1 trumps it hard. From some reports I have read M1 is about as efficient on the new AV1 codec using software decode as tiger lake is on hardware decode. Quite a failure on intels part in general.

For AMD notebooks the problem is that 99% of laptops do not use power efficient parts for mainboard, networking an so on. So usually battery life for office work on AMD powered notebooks suck. There are only a hand full of exceptions. With intel offering networking, graphics, loads of controllers all out of their own platform - you get great battery life - if it weren't for that battery hog CPU. Everything else is really top notch from intel on efficiency nowadays.

 

In Performance mode PL1 kicked in roughly after 222 seconds (this is running TS Bench). However, it didn't really matter that much. After roughly 10 seconds at max power thermal throttling kicked in. Over the course of a minute or so it settled around 23W at 3.1 GHz. I guess that's the maximum thermal dissipation with fan at max and using backplate. When PL1 kicked it power limit was about 18-20 W to keep CPU at base 2.8 GHz, which is while slower, not that much slower than 3.1.

I stopped ts bench and restarted it after 10 seconds and enough power buffer has built up for PL1 to again kick in only after ~50 seconds.

 

I do not understand why your gram is dissipating so little energy - even more that you installed the thermal pad. What is your room temperature? Did you increase the offset from 10 to 3 degrees in throttlestop? On Cinebench R20 and with 33 degree room temperature - with cutoff at 97 (3 degree offset) in optimal mode my gram 16 can still cool about 21 watts (that is on the 3rd repeat run of cinebench R20 which is CPU only, in a CPU/GPU mixed scenario it can cool much more). and with performance mode this increases to 22.5watts- however without increasing cinebench R20 scores. And I do not understand how PL1 can become active at less than 25w power draw... For me it needs to be over 25w for minimum 30 seconds (with 38W PL2, with 30w PL2 PL1 will kick in way way later).

At 20 degrees room temperature the cooling game is on another level - 27-28w in optimal mode. So I run into the 25w limit constantly. It will then sometimes fluctuate a bit between 24-26 watts - but mainly at 25w - and only 80-85 degree core temps. So PL1 throttling not thermal. 10 degree ambient temperature however are similar to 20 degree additional offset. tiger lake works much better in colder ambient temperature.
I guess you have the i7? The i5 runs much better. And I set PL2 to 34-38w depending on use - it's not gaining much at higher wattage anyhow - even worse for single core. No gains to be had from over 4000mhz... Those 4700mhz only make sense for a couple of seconds usage on the gram cooling - but then if it's only a couple of seconds you will not notice the difference anyhow. A 3500mhz max 8 core instead of the current quadcore would be much faster in real life - and need less battery. That is why alder lake will be so much better. Most software now runs multithreaded if it needs a lot of power - and 8core at lower speeds are just way more efficient vs 4core at higher speeds. I guess tiger lake H in a 28w TDP package will feel faster than tiger lake U in a 28w TDP package and actually use less energy in real world tasks (plus score much better at benchmarks - except single-threaded of course where it will not lose out much either)....

 

About power mode, have you tried to change TDP Boot Mode from Nominal to Up? That might just set power mode to performance on every boot so that you don't have to worry about it changing back to optimal.

My room temperature around 22-23C. Also, I'm not sure if it matters, but my laptop has 32 GB ram, not 16 GB and 2 SSD drives. I'm not sure if that increases the load or affects thermal in any way.

Yes, I have i7. I'm aware i5 might've been a better choice, but I need 32 GB and the only option was with i7. And even that isn't advertised widely, no reviews ever mentions 32 GB and that's only available at Costco, nowhere else, not even mentioned on the LG website catalog. Can only find this on model LG website through google by model number and direct link to LG website.

 

Btw, thermal pads gave about 10-15% improvement. Without them it was even worse.

 

For Intel Acoustic Management, there's no 2 or 1. It's enable/disable flag with various settings. Do we have slightly different bios/model? My bios version is T2ZF0320 X64 and EC Firmware Version 34 (based on hwinfo).

What is your idle PKG Power? Do you park any cores?

With 6 cores parked on optimal after some bios tweaks (not sure if mattered, disabled Intel Acoustic management, turned off CFG lock), I'm seeing 1.1-1.4 W PKG Power on idle but with most apps running.

With all apps shut down (except services and ThrotleStop) on idle I'm seeing 0.8-1.1 W

 

well I also have 2 NVME drives - should not matter at all if they are idle - and make sure to enable Devsleep/DIPM/HIPM or how that stuff is called. It's not enabled by default (only HIPM).The LPPDR should not matter either - it uses very little energy.

I was thinking about removing the covering of the holes - the open area is pretty small. Did you think about taking that paper like sheet of plastic out? Well in my bios the boot mode was always on nominal - and nominal has the highest PL1/PL2. Nominal is supposed to be the 28w, up the 15w and low the 12w before I just increased them all to 28w but that did not matter concerning the 25w PL1 kicking in.

You can configure the acoustic management from 2 to 10, with 2 AFAIK the most aggressive - while disabled actually is 1. 10 is the least aggressive - meaning the fastest out of any C-State.

I already had changed some stuff when I started taking those pictures.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/PCQEKzKAo67wYoVZ8

But not the Up/Down/Nominal is only activated if you set configurable TDB Lock to enabled. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. I tested this out with throttlestop reboot and deleting the throttlestop.ini before reboot. I feel like this max turbo power limit of 4095 is somehow the critical thing - but impossible to set that to say 8000. I think this is the PL2 headroom. But something is messing up the 28W TDP and setting this to 25W. I now set it to 30/34 for battery and to 32/38 for AC - while however only the second actually is used as PL1 throttles at 25w no matter what I setup once the power limit is used up (which is used up the faster the higher the PL2 is actually used - so never with room temps above 26-27 degrees.


Also the critical trip point I think is somehow set differently on windows boot. If you hit 101 degrees it is instant hibernation (can hit quickly by messing with offset temp, so never go lower than 3 degrees offset). There are quite a few settings in the bios that could brick your laptop - so research everything well that you do not fully know. I'm on a newer bios version now - used to be on an much older one. Have to check again but I think mine is April not March.

 

Have you tried to disable Intel Dynamic power management completely to see if that affects PL1?

 

No - I did not dare to....

BTW here are my current settings - most pages that I changed at least:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/vgKkDukrxBs7w1yy5

Note that my up/down/nominal settings are greyed out - as I do not use LG control center - no need to configure them. Just in case I increased all of them... They do work as a limit if I set them below 25w for PL1... But anything above 25W makes no more difference - once that power budget is used up - it goes to 25w...

And at 22-23 degrees room temperature I feel you should have way way higher dissipation.

Oh and I am on the same bios - used to be on a January bios before.

 

I have tried to disable Intel Dynamic Power. It boots fine, just throttling happens much, much faster, within seconds. So if you want to disable and experiment with other settings it seems to be fine.

Do you know if there's a way to see fan speed by chance?

About the holes covering of the backplate. I was thinking about it too, but the uncovered holes are right above the CPU. I suspect they were made that way to suck outside air directly into CPU area as there're very few holes for the intake. It seems like the rest of the grid was covered the way it is on purpose and you might make the whole situation worse, so be prepare to apply covering back.

 

Okay that is the same as uninstalling it inside windows. You could try disabling thermal framework, but I think then it will throttle earlier too respectively disable the turbo. Effectively intel designed this as overclocking. So if you disable things, it will fall back to max non oc speed, which is 2400mhz for tiger lake U...

 

Through some experimentation I was able to pinpoint what was causing C10 state to become unavailable:
* Latest official intel display driver from intel website. Uninstall it and intel command center (not sure if command center matters, it's a UWP app), deleting the driver. Restart to install driver from Microsoft website.
* Telegram OpenGL media acceleration.

With 3 out of 4 cores parked and C10 working properly on relatively fresh windows I get 0.5-0.8 W PKG Power.

With apps running and 3 cores parked get around 0.9-1.2 W on idle.

Switching between different profiles as on my 2nd post doesn't seem to affect C10. It works fine when switch to power or optimal, on wakeup or whatever. It seems all the issues were due to the driver and telegram doing something weird with graphics that wouldn't allow CPU to go into C10.

 

Actually Intel Graphics Commander Center can be installed, just Panel Self Refresh has to be enabled. As soon as that's disabled all % goes from C10 to C8 and C10 doesn't get activated again.

Still, on the latest driver from intel website even with self refresh enabled C10 never happened. I'm guessing maybe some LG specific driver is installed by Windows that allows self refresh to work with CPU correctly. Not sure at all how that works.

 

Looking at older posts it seems people had to do some crazy modding on older models to have sustained 25W: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/new-lg-gram-17.827017/page-16 and http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/new-lg-gram-17.827017/page-8

Based on that I'd say having 23W sustained sounds pretty good. It's good enough for me. There's pretty good thermal buffer, so it takes close to a minute to get to 23W and then power throttling will kick in anyway eventually. I think I can always add just laptop stand with fan to improve backplate heat dissipation, but not sure I really need it.

What is your sustained thermal dissipation?

 

I could cool 28 watts at optimal with 20 degrees room temperature. However max is 25 as PL1 limit kicks in.

At 30 degrees it's only about 21 watts.

Around 23-24 degrees room temp I get to 25 watt cooling sustained in standard mode

As is said as soon as I activate performance mode c8 max so not usable. And yeah panel self refresh always activated.
That's why I had to return my first LG gram, it's panel would be unusable with panel self refresh activated

Note the i5 is more efficient at 25w vs i7. As the additional cache needs quite some juice and is rarely needed.. c10 shuts down the cache so that is why at idle with c10 package power is nearly identical (0.5 Vs 0.4 for lowest)

 

This is very good review on i7 vs i5, where they look at what you're talking about - Intel, what HAPPENED? Core i5 vs i7 Laptop Performance (hardwarecanucks.com)

About PL1 and times, I believe with intel dynamic throttling enabled it works like power buffer. When you used up certain amount of joules, PL1 kicks in. That means more W you use, faster you'll get into it. Power Consumption: Intel’s TDP Shenanigans Hurts Everyone - Intel’s Tiger Lake 11th Gen Core i7-1185G7 Review and Deep Dive: Baskin’ for the Exotic (anandtech.com) talks about this. I might be misunderstanding how it all works though.

 

Yes I know, rests to find out where LG set the 25w. Cause that is what I have as base tdp. Increasing the pp0 power limit expands the budget, but 150 or so is the max it accepts.

In the bios it looks like it was set to 28w (the max possible) but for mine it is clearly 25w. If you are on 18w it is way worse

Those two values are the most important ones. If you increase the base. Tdp the power budget above will be calculated smaller, and if you increase the budget longer time for pl2

 

That review was for a laptop where cooling is very good, if cooling is also a bottleneck, like on the gram, then the i7 is even worse, as it produces more heat at the short very high speeds. Especially single core on the gram the i7 cannot go faster than 4500mhz anyhow, but when it does it will produce a lot more heat...
Plus speed increases per watt get lower. Essentially above 3000mhz any increase costs a lot of power. Over 4000mhz it's getting really bad. Lots of power for little more speed. So the 4.7 Vs 4.2 in the gram cooling make no sense. It's only 2-3 seconds before it has to decrease to 4500...

20w pumped into a single core cannot be cooled on the gram. I always speak about multi core cooling CPU only capacity. If all cores and GPU are running, the area getting hot is bigger and the cooling can move away much more heat. If only single core CPU it's much less.

 

Discovered some more things affecting C10:

* When slack is running. When window is opened, CPU won't go into C10, only C8. As soon as I minimize Slack, it jumps into C10. I tried to disable hardware acceleration, but with no effect, not sure what they're doing.
* After waking up Intel Graphics Commander wouldn't let CPU go into C10. I tried to go into settings, but for hardware it would just blank window. As soon as I uninstalled it, C10 became available the same second again. Not sure if there's any benefit to have it installed and using it, but for sure it can make things worse.

 

Yeah, on booting panel self refresh is always enabled, but less aggressively. So I think it saves some more power

 

Well, actually Intel Graphics Command Center is needed. If it's uninstalled and PC is rebooted, it CPU won't enter any power saving at all, including C8.

After reboot it's installed automatically, but not until it is manually started would C8 and up become available to CPU again. Took me a while to figure out why all of a sudden I was loosing C8.

 

I am new here with my new LG gram (17Z90N-V.AA77G with Windows10) and this is just what I was looking for, to make the silent mode permanent.
It also works on my "old" model. Thank you very much for this app.

 

This would also be my favourite solution.
I successfully used nbfc (Notebook Fancontrol) with other notebooks.

In thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/new-lg-gram-17.827017/page-7#post-10889881 it seems that user Pflugshaupt made a working config file for it.
But with my LG gram the nbfcservice keeps stopping and starting again about once a second.

 

Again I wanted to thank you for your app, it is a super time saver. I don't need the task scheduler since I need only from time to time the performance mode, but the LG Control Center is a pain in the neck to switch modes.
Also thank you for the Advanced Bios Settings, I was looking for it everywhere, not the same as the previous generations.

 

About PL1 limit. It seems to me that it's driven by Base Frequency. After Power Limit kicks in, it changes between 18W and 22W, but frequency stays at 2.8 GHz, which is base frequency for I7-1165G7. So, it might be just the limit either in CPU itself or EC.

I think LG Control Center changes things by emitting bytes directly into hardware. I think performance, optimal and power save are on the EC level.

 

Does performance mode for you work without disabling C10?


Could you try cinebench r20 and look at throttling? What wattage do you get there on the second or third straight run.

 

When PL1 kicks in (around middle of 2nd run), package W is at 20W and CPU is at 2.8 GHz, but this is with clamp off. After a little while it can go up to 23W and then might lower back to 20W. I'm guessing this has to do with power buffer and how it replenishes if not running at turbo (above 2.8?) speed.

In optimal mode with clamp on, after PL1 kicks in, at first it's 20W and 2.8 GHz, but over time it goes down to around 12W and 2.2 GHz, and then I think settles around 10W. I'm really not sure what Clamp does and I don't understand the purpose of limiting CPU so heavily over long term of heavy usage. This is default behavior out of the box.

If we look at i7-1165g7 specs ( https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...-12m-cache-up-to-4-70-ghz/specifications.html), TDP-up frequency is 2.8 GHz. TDP-up is 28W, but on intel website that W is "Configurable TDP-up is the average power, in watts, that the processor dissipates when operating at the Configurable TDP-up frequency under an Intel-defined, high-complexity workload." I'm reading this that at 2.8 GHz package power won't exceed 28 W, but can certainly be less, as long as CPU is maintaining 2.8 GHz.

I'm guessing that manufacturer can select maximum TDP and based on that maximum base frequency would be set. When you change to different power plans and have HWInfo running, you'll see right after you change that for performance it's 28W, for optimal 25W, for silent 12W. However, as I mentioned above if you turn off clamp for PL1 (it is enabled by default in ThrottleStop), then regardless of what plan you choose system will work at 28W package which for me is 2.8 GHz and around 20W constant consumption. It seems at this point only fan profile will change (I'm suspecting in EC).

Of course, this is all with Adaptix enabled with it's power buffering algorithms.
Some reviews of adaptix: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/6 and https://www.techspot.com/review/1932-intel-core-i5-10210u/

Side note, in bios it can show fan speed, so there must be a way to at least read it.

 

About C10 in performance mode, I don't have any problem with it. Changing power modes doesn't seem to affect C10. What does seem to affect is having certain programs running, or even config of the program:
* If cinebench is running, won't enter C10, even if minimized
* If slack is running and visible, won't enter C10. If minimize slack or move to another virtual desktop, enters C10 fine
* If telegram opengl acceleration is running, won't enter C10, even if window isn't visible.

In relationship to power consumption, I can see C10 giving some power advantage, but not as much as parking 2 out of 4 cores. I tried to park 3 cores, but computer just becomes too sluggish. I suggest you look into that if you haven't done that, as parking seems to mostly turn off the core and automatically turns it back on when needed. The downside is that it takes a while to turn it back on, so if there's spike of load PC will be slower until the core is un-parked. You can configure in power options how quickly to park or unpark, etc. It's in hidden options for windows power options.

 

On using thermalpad to connect heatpipe to the back plate. From all benchmarking it seems that it helps more with initial thermal capacity, so turbo lasts longer before thermal throttling kicks in. It probably helps with heat dicipation, but probably not that much since there's no air blowing at the back plate. I suspect with laptop fan pad it'll give much more thermal headroom, but only for 2 minutes or so until power throttling kicks in, so not sure it's really worth getting such fan pad.

 

I just tried ThrottleStop TS bench again and in performance mode performance is better:
* Thermal throttling is settled around 25 W
* Around 28 W it jumped back and forth between thermal and PL1 power throttling, so I guess power throttling is at 28W
* 20W throttling kicked in only after around 4.5 minutes
* After a minute power limit went up to 23 W and higher as thermal throttling started to kick in again around 24-25W
* Only after around 6 minutes that 20W thermal throttling kicked in
* Up to 6 minute mark Limits window in throttle stop is showing PL1 red only for CORE, if it's power throttling
* After 6 minute mark PL1 red lighted up for CORE, GPU and RING. That's when got hard 18-20W limit and frequency settled at 2.8 GHz
* Around 7.5-8 minutes 20W power throttling was lifted and frequency went up again until started to hit thermal throttling again.

So it seems throttling fluctuates back and forth. TS Bench loads CPU pretty well.

 

well for me the TS bench at 27 degrees aircon never went below 22 watts or 3000mhz on performance mode. Just ran it for 15 minutes. Kinda settled on 3050 and 22.5-23 watts. PL1 kicked in at 1 minute mark or so - went off again ( I cleared it so I can see if it comes on again) and was never seen again. 27 degree room temp I simply cannot cool more.

At 15 minutes ran your tool to set silent mode - kinda settled at 2750-2800mhz and 19-19.5w

For my gram 16 clearly its set to 25w not 20w like yours. This fan is really not very effective. I think most of the heat is transferred away via the case. Otherwise cannot explain that tiny difference from silent to performance... Optimal is somewhere in the middle. So your thermal pad doesn't change too much - because the case is anyhow used already. The lg gram 17 obviously having the bigger case can get a tiny bit more heat build up, bigger area to heat up. A bigger heatpipe would be the main thing to speed my laptop up at high ambient temps. At 22 degrees anyhow its the PL1 25w limit that I cannot cross. I kinda feel in passive move my gram could still cool 15w at 27 degrees room temperature. At silent mode the fan is anyhow dead slow already. at 20 degrees room temperature likely without fan attached 20w.. (yeah that Arctic MX5 clearly helping here - but same as your thermal pad - mostly helps for short burst - long time the important thing is the case temperature vs ambient temperature. That is also why 20 vs 27 room temperaure makes a way higher difference than anything else.) Putting some more heatpipes leading nowhere where space permits would also help...

That is also why I am sure removing that sheet covering the holes would help. However for me in real life - it would be even worse as my main problem is the laptop running too hot on my lap at 30 degrees room temp that I often have (that's okay if there is constant wind - in the evening when the thermal wind is gone, I need to go for aircon, same in the morning).

 

Is that gram 16 with i5, not i7? And yeah, sounds like your system has better heat dissipation.

With pads, the backplate gets extremely hot. If you touch it for more than half a second you'll get burned.

 

yes - i5-1135g7, I first had a broken one with i7 (panel flashed all the time with panel self refresh activated) - returned it to amazon (I think there was a full batch of them - several people reported that problem in amazon.com reviews) - and got an i5 model from spanish market. However yeah the repaste helped a bit. And for 1 day I had the i5 and i7 side by side - the i5 faster in all multi core benchmarks, more or less same speed in single core benches (except a select few) - and much more efficient on battery life. Both identical software. But yeah if you need 32GB - seemingly there is only the i7 right now. The i7 makes no sense at all. If you need more power - need an i7H not i7U.
Yes maybe on games the i7 is a tiny bit better - but then you would want an i7H anyhow... As intel gets very inefficient at higher speeds - 8core vs 4core is likely better anyhow for everything... But yeah Alder Lake will solve this for sure..

 

Yeah, I need best battery life with 32 GB and 17 inch. What I have right now seems to be pretty much the only option.

 

BTW - the 80% option for battery in the bios is not working inside windows (just like some other options as we know). Maybe works for linux?

 

Just to share more findings:
* Slack actually has no effect anymore on C10. It can be opened or not, doesn't matter. Not sure why it did in the past
* Sometimes cores stop parking after waking up. At that point only restart fixes it. I once switched to power options scheme that had PCI express at no power saving and parking started to happen again. However, that blocks C10 until restart. In other cases that scheme wouldn't bring parking back. Not really sure what's going on.

 

https://www.notebookcheck.net/ADATA-XPG-Xenia-14-Laptop-Review-A-New-14-inch-Favorite.549923.0.html - interesting review here. The performance is a bit better, but CPU cooling itself doesn't seem to be that much different. What is different is additional cooling on mosfets. The fan itself might also be larger?