Clevo HotKey application, causing problems for intel's turbo boost.

(Great... Managed to spell the name of the application wrong, in the title! I meant "Hotkey.) -_-

Hello, i just bought a new Clevo W350. (Or Multicom Xishan W350 as it is called where i live). And i'm having a lot of trouble with the turbo function of the cpu. I discovered that if i unplug my power cable, and reconnect it. The turbo boost function of the computer stops working. (The cpu wont go higher than 2.3Ghz, no matter how much i stress it.) Only way to solve it is to fiddle around with the different power presets, back and forth, and if im lucky it suddenly works again. Restarting the computer also works.

I am using a modified version of the stock balanced plan in windows. (Every setting is the same as the "high performance" plan, when plugged in.)
In the hotkey app, i have set it to user configured, with a "balanced" power setting. I tried switching to the high performance setting, but it didn't fix the problem. After a lot of headscratching, i decided to uninstall the hotkey
application, as i had a suspicion that it had something to do with the hotkey power settings, colliding with the stock windows setting. And what do you know, uninstalling hotkey fixed the problem. Speedstep and turbo are now functioning perfectly. But now the hardware buttons for wifi and gpu switching doesen't work. I guess they need hotkey installed to be working. -_-

Has anyone ever had problems like this? What did you do to fix it?

 

I installed HotKey and everything works smoother for me. The only thing that would be nice is to be able to change the keyboard LED colors, but blue is fine by me. I'd rather lose that ability than have to deal with hotkey F'ing up all my power settings constantly.

 

When i went to bed last night everything was working. When i woke up this morning. it didn't. The computer stayed on all night, downloading stuff. Restarted the computer, everything working again.
Started a game, played for a bit, but when i shut off the game, i noticed that it was no longer working. I ran Prime 95 to double check, but no it wasn't working. So i guess the hotkey app had nothing to do with it.
The cpu will not ever exceed 2.3Ghz no matter how much i throw at it. I just don't understand. It's working fine when i restart the computer. But stops working if i start a game, or let the computer idle for a while. What the F... is happening?

Starting to get a litte bit sick of this laptop now. When i got it, i ordered it with 1600Mhz ram, witch i discovered ran at only 1333Mhz. Had to learn how to flash the SPD of the RAM before i got it to work.
And had to pay 20dollars for an apllication to do so. (had something to do with the computer not being able to understand xmp profiles). Then i had problems with several games not utilising the geforce gpu. So i had to go into Nvidia control panel, and force them to use the Nvidia gpu. And now this!

How the h... is an average consumer, going to understand how to get these things to work? If i had bought this computer to someone, who didn't know that much about computers. I would have returned it immediatly.
They would never be able to get these things to work.

 

You could download ThrottleStop 5.00 and set the multiplier to Turbo and have the ThrottleStop to run on start up by adding it as a task in the task scheduler. That way the CPU is always on Turbo mode.

 

Thank you!!! This worked, i just clicked "set multiplier" setting to "turbo" And everything seems to work now. I thought this would lock the cpu at 3.3/3.1Ghz. But speedstep is still working fine, it idles at about 1200Mhz. And Increases to 3.1 under load. So again, thank you very much.

 

No problem, there's another useful tip on this, you can enable Power Saver that will make the all cores run at 800MHz and only increase the clock when the 1 of the cores' utilization reaches the given %, to set the given %, go to Options and set the PowerSaver C0% to the value you want, I found 50 works pretty good. That way when the CPU isn't in use, the CPU will be underclocked to 800MHz, and when any core utilization exceeds 50%, it'll pump the clock speed to Turbo boost clock. Remember the PowerSaver C0% isn't depending on the total C0%, it depends on any of the 8 cores.

 

Not necessarily... Hotkey seems to change (overwrite) parameters of the windows power profile. Even if you uninstall Hotkey, it may have left your system in an undesireable state.

There are a series of advanced power settings that for some reason, Microsoft decided were better left hidden from users. These control a number of power and performance management features. Some may not make sense to most users but some are somewhat understandable, like turning Turbo Boost ON/OFF, allowing/disabling some degree of Core Parking, Adaptive Display Brightness, AHCI Link Power Management. Other more obscure parameters govern when the CPU clock frequency is increased/decreased based on current CPU usage and history. Maybe in you case, Hotkey has mucked-up these parameters in a way that causes your machine to get stuck in a low-performance state (but it thinks it's doing you a favor)...

You can reveal these parameters with a registry tweak, and perhaps try to see if it's some of these settings that could be the problem. Here's some suggestions on how to reveal the settings:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/416916-clevo-bios-thread.html#post8773184

 

Thanks for the tip, i will look into this later, right now i'm just happy everything works. Altough i need to have throttlestop turned on at all times for it to utilize turbo boost.

Then i guess this is what happened, Hotkey has overwritten the standard power profiles, and this is what's causing my problems. I guess i could look into this, but i don't really know what to look for, as i don't know what the various standard settings are, and what's been modified by hotkey. I guess a clean install of windows without powerkey would solve my problems, but i don't think i will bother with that now, i'd rather use throttlestop to get it working, rather than having to install everything again. But i appreciate your information, it is really interesting. But it kinda makes me wonder why they would add these features to begin with, if they can cause problems like this. They should have had a version of hotkey without the power settings, as you need hotkey to use some of the hardware buttons on the computer.

I have attached a few screen caps. One where throttlestop is enabled, and one where it isn't. CpuZ's measurment of core speed seems to stay almost the same. (2300 without throttlestop, 2900-3100 with trottlestop). When plugged in. HWinfo shows the different cores rapidly changing from 1200-3100. (With throttlestop enabled). When i unplug the powercable. Everything stays the same with throttlestop on. And when i turn throttlestop off, the cpu seems to fluctuate between 1200-1500Mhz, only increasing to 2300Mhz when i push it. Is this normal for this computer? Is this the way it's supposed to be?




Again, thank's for your help guys, i really appreciate it!

 

I decided to look into the hidden power settings, here is what they revealed:

Can anyone tell if anything seems wrong? As i have no idea what the ideal values are.

 

There is no right or wrong settings. It really depends on how you want your PC to behave and under what conditions.

One thing to try is to run the following command in a command prompt window when your PC is working as you expect:

powercfg /q SCHEME_CURRENT > SchemeCurrent_OK.txt

Then run it again when you think it's running in limp mode:

powercfg /q SCHEME_CURRENT > SchemeCurrent_BAD.txt

This will dump all the current power settings in effect at the time. You can then compare the two files line-by-line to see if any of the settings are different between the two scenarios. When you have your plan on Balanced, perhaps windows automatically decides to override some settings? If there is no change between the two files, then maybe it's not a windows power plan issue, but more of a higher-level BIOS/EC processor or platform management issue.

 

Ok, thanks. I will try that later today. Should i try it while stressing the cpu with prime 95, or when it is at idle? Maybe both?

 

Ok. I have now tried this. I tried it with throttlestop on/off. And after reboot. Compared the .txt files, and they where exactly the same.

BUT, i am now positive i have found out what's causing the problems. Ok, so i rebooted my computer, and ran prime 95, while monitoring cpu speed. Everything fine so far.
Ended the test. Plugged out the power cable, put it back in. Still works. Put the computer to sleep, startet it again, Still works. So i was a little confused. I then decided to start up 3dmark, while still having CpuZ and other monitoring tools running. And turbo boost suddenly was disabled. And after som more testing with prime 95 and different apps, i have come to an conclusion.

And the conclusion is. Every time the Nvidia GPU is enabled, turbo boost on the cpu stops working. and it locks the cpu to 2.3Ghz max. I know this because every time i ran a program set to use the nvidia gpu, turbo boost shut off. And every time i closed the program defined to use Nvidia GPU. The cpu speed shot back up to 3.1Ghz.

What could be causing this?

 

And Throttlestop solution is not enough to prevent Nvidia from affecting your Turbo? I just leave Throttlestop on even on battery, it actually does power saving/conservation really well IMO.

 

I am currently using throttlestop, with power saver enabled. And that option actually works even better than it would if i never had used throttlestop. So i'm happy. Just wanted to figure out why i had so much problems. But i'm not going to care. Everything works fine now, and i'm very pleased with the laptop now. Thanks for all the help guys!