Sager NP4658 - significant cpu throttling problem

Hey. I just received a Sager NP4658 last night (built off of Clevo W650SF). My specs consist of the following: i7-4810mq, 16gb ram, NVidia 840m, 512+240gb ssds, and an IC Diamond thermal compound upgrade.

After I set it all up, I tested some of my resource-intensive programs, only to find out that they don't seem much faster than my old laptop with a first generation intel i5 (especially single threaded where it only made a small-ish improvement).

I installed Intel XTU, and enabled all the throttling-related information, and every time I stressed the CPU, the "Current limit throttling" meter kept spiking up to around 40-100%, and the CPU clock frequency only goes up to around 3Ghz (on battery it throttles even further, to around 1.7Ghz). Looking at the Core Tuning options, I saw nothing that had to do with Core Current Limit (here's a screenshot of available options), but I've seen others with a sager with this option in XTU. Overclocking the core multipliers (temporarily) didn't help either.

I really don't get what the point of having such a restrictive. My CPU temperatures are consistently low, even under (throttled) load, AND the battery life is also already excellent on it.

What can I do to increase this limit to fix the throttling??

 

While you are lacking quite a few options, your CPU is downvolted already. You should set the dynamic CPU voltage offset to 0 and see if you still downclock; though this will indeed raise temps and power consumption.

 

I've already decided to go back to regular voltages and settings. Nope, I believe I'm still throttling quite a bit.

Here and here are snapshots of what I get under load (using multi-threaded Any Video Converter to convert a test HD video file, something that sticks my older laptop's cores to 100% quite nicely). CPU temperature is only at 63C, not going any higher than 39W tdp, and only 3.09Ghz (occasionally hitting 3.29Ghz for about 2 seconds at a time).

Single threaded benchmarks however reach around 1955, which is not far off however from the 2099 that passmark's database has. But when I'm using/rendering single-core applications under load, the active core count is at 1 core which is normal, but the clock speeds do not exceed 3.59Ghz (and at 3.49Ghz 80% of the time), while the cpu total tdp is fluctuating between only 23W-27W, and I get a fluctuating reading of 60%-90% for 'Current Limit Throttling', which still means overclocking wouldn't do anything of course. The single-core performance I notice in programs isn't nearly as high as I had hoped.

If I actually had the ability, I actually wouldn't mind doing a mild single-core overclock and blowing a noisy fan into the vents while I'm doing these mini single-core rendering tasks if that'd help with performance that way.
(but mainly, I wish these few intensive single-threaded programs I use were updated to reflect multi-threading in the first place, which I doubt will happen)

 

You definitely have a problem with that thing. I can get my laptop to stick at 100% CPU load with ease. I suggest contacting their support.

 

question that has to be asked is have you set it to high performance and not balanced or power saver mode.

 

I thoroughly adjust my power settings to my exact preferred settings on all my laptops I own. I stick to my customized "balanced" preset most of the time.

But even setting the power preset to "high performance" makes no difference
(except for the fact that it keeps my fan spinning longer on idle and is obviously causing a power waste)