Graphics card up/down clocking causing stuttering

Hi all,

If you've been following my posts recently, you'll know I recently purchased an m570tu with some annoying stuttering issues that I couldnt get rid of. At first I thought the graphics card was broken, but then found out that whenever the graphics card and the wifi are enabled, the graphics card goes mad on downclocking and upclocking.

Everytime it changes the core and memory clock speed, it causes a ton of interrupts and the system lags.

Does anyone else have this problem, and is there any way to prevent this continual downclocking and upclocking?

It only happens when on mains power - when on battery, it stays at 200mhz, but when on power, it continually shifts between the various ranges, causing lots of stuttering and interrupts to be generated.

I'd greatly appreciate any ideas or thoughts - thanks

 

The issue that usually causes downclocking is overheating but sometimes that is not the case.

To monitor your GPU's temperatures, use a program like HWMonitor. Allow the GPU to stay below 97C.

IF temperatures are much below this and it is still downclocking, disabling powermiser (assuming that your computer has an nVidia GPU) should allow the GPU to run at it's higher frequency.

 

well that sounds awfully familiar (same thing happened to another NBR member).

here is the test, remove the battery, then go play some games.

if the system turns off on you, then that means it was trying to switch to battery mode.... which means that you will have get a replacement power brick/adapter.

if not, then uninstall the Nvidia drivers, clean out all remnants of the Nvidia drivers with programs like Driver Sweeper. Then install new drivers (start with official ones first)

 

If you cut the wifi off when it's in the middle of shifting/stuttering, do the symptoms go away immediately?

 

Thanks for the replies,

If I cut the wifi off, the graphics card stabilises and stops down/up clocking, which is a little strange and the symptons disappear immediately.

I've monitored the temperatures and they seem perfectly fine, so I dont think it's an over heating issue

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There's a way to find out if this affects you, as you may not notice it in certain usage. First of all, enable the wireless and ensure you are plugged in (not battery), and then run the DPC Latency checker.

Now, right click on the desktop and open up the nvidia properties and see if you get quite a few red spikes. Run GPU-Z as well, and see if the graphics card does a lot of clock changes.

Now, disable the wireless and repeat the process - it should stay completely stable the entire time.

I'm wondering if there's a conflict between the Intel Wireless 5100 and the 9800m GTX, or whether it's just my machine

When using both the wireless and the graphics card, this can happen a lot in normal usage, and leads to stuttering causing audio problems and system lag. When playing games it can cause lag and stuttering at times, although most of the time the graphics card stays at its same clock so its not too bad. It's worse when just using the computer normally, as the wireless seems to send the card somewhat mad.

 

I remember someone else having an issue with the wireless card (this exact same model maybe?). The 5300 is the wireless card that I've seen included in a lot of people's M860TU's, at least put together in the US (is yours European? I vaguely remember the previous wireless card issue being UK) and that's worked fine; I believe it's a more expensive wifi card model.

The wireless works fine alone? Have you taken the back off your notebook and checked the wireless card slot? Check to make sure that it's not loose and/or properly seated.

 

Is your wireless card configured to use some sort of adaptive power consumption, such as dropping the amount of power it consumes when the system is running on battery, but going for maximum performance when the system is running on A/C?

 

Thanks for the replies,

Yes - it is European, UK in fact, laptop, and with the 5100 wifi card.

The wireless as far as I know isnt using any sort of adaptive power consumption that I can see, although maybe it's hidden somewhere I'm not seeing. I presume the graphics card is, but I cant find any particular settings.

The only odd thing is that alone, the wifi and the graphics work fine - it's only when they're combined that there are issues. Unfortunately using them together is exactly what I needed the laptop to do!

 

go to Control Panel > Network Connections >
... then right-click on the Wireless Connection, choose Properties

then on top, click the "Configure" button

(under the Advanced tag) you will find the Intel wifi card's settings.

 

Actually, it's not altogether uncommon for there to be conflicts between the graphics drivers and the wireless drivers, in particular because each can be an FSB-hog. Given that, all it takes is a bad installation, or a poorly written driver, to cause all manner of queer problems like stuttering.

Another component that shouldn't be overlooked is bluetooth; if you have bluetooth enabled as well as wireless, both together could be consuming a lot of FSB bandwidth as each repeatedly polls its respective hardware looking for signals to attach to.

Basically, the underlying problem is that the wireless driver (and the bluetooth driver, if memory serves) will constantly poll their hardware devices to determine if a signal is present that they can connect to. If a signal is present, things usually go smoothly, the hardware gets the signal and packets start flowing in. However, if no signal is detected, the hardware will continue searching until it hits a built-in timeout. The driver also just sits and waits to hear back from the wireless card, and blocks on the FSB until it either gets an answer back or hits its own timeout - where no signal is present, it usually ends up waiting until it hits its built-in timeout, at which point it drops the current polling attempt, and returns control of the FSB to the system. The timeout period can be rather long in comparison to the typical time-scale on which computer components operate.

Of course, while the wireless driver is sitting there twiddling its thumbs waiting for the NIC to reply or the timeout to happen, it's monopolizing the FSB and preventing any other component from using the FSB to communicate with the CPU or some other component.

In the case of the GPU, this can be a dire situation because the GPU depends on the CPU and system memory to do a lot of its work, and must keep its own processing in sync with the output it receives from the CPU. As a result, if it cannot communicate with the CPU because the FSB is being hogged by the wireless driver, the GPU must stop what it's doing and wait, which shows up in delayed updating of the video display, which begins to act in a stuttering manner if the demands on the FSB are serious enough.

In your situation, it's interesting that the problem only occurs on A/C, and not on battery; that suggests to me that there is an adaptive setting on the wireless driver that causes it to reduce its demands on the system when it's running on battery, which may have the effect of reducing the amount of time the driver spends polling the wireless card (since each polling attempt would cause the NIC to expend considerable power hunting for signals that are strong enough to connect to). If that is the case, then that reduced amount of polling may be freeing up enough of the FSB bandwidth to permit the GPU to do its work unimpeded.

 

Thanks for the replies, quite useful reading, and similar to what I was expecting

I dont have bluetooth, so at least I can rule that out of contributing to the problem. Also, the wireless signal should be perfect, and when the graphics card is disabled, the wireless has no problems, and is nice and stable.

It seems the reason it only happens on AC is that on battery, the graphics card clock is fixed at 200mhz, wheras on AC, it seems to vary between 5 different levels (almost madly when wifi is on, nice and stable when wifi is off).

 

The wireless signal should be good because the interrupt the wireless drivers typically get to use in order to poll the hardware has very high priority and will typically trump something like a video driver.

 

Thanks for the reply,

It seems the problem is becoming yet more interesting. Today I tried plugging in an external monitor into my computer. When the wifi is enabled, the laptop screen continually flickers and is unusable, and the GPU core clock and memory clock continually go mad.

When the wifi is disabled, the system is mostly fine, but there's still the occasional flicker on the laptop screen.

I've attached a GPU-Z graph - in the first half, the wifi is disabled. When the wifi is enabled, the core clock and memory clock go all over the place!

Does this point to the graphics card being the problem, perhaps?

 

is the pcie also changing from 16x to 1x? if you click your graphics card tab (gpu-z)it should show what it is now. right after it starts to stutter again, check to see if it drops the lane speed to 1x.
also check powermizer settings. make sure it is set to full power.
when the stutter happens, also check disk activity and cpu activity.
also watch the battery indicator light. the minute it starts stuttering see if that light drops to battery charging then goes back to full charge.

this will take about 20 minutes or so to go through all these things...let us know how that turns out.

 

afaik (and certainly on all the systems I've used) powermizer doesn't activate when an external screen is attached, so your gfx card shouldn't be downclocking at all in that situation