MacBook Pro 15" 2017 CPU throttling in Windows 10

[mrochester]

Hi all.

I do a fair amount of gaming on my MBP 15" 2017 including Steam games installed on Windows 10 (Bootcamp).

I've got one game open now and it is lagging and stuttering. Looking at Task Manager I can see that the GPU is at 100% load but the CPU is hovering at just under 1GHz. If I open up CPU-Z and run the CPU bench with 8 threads the processor tops out at 1.15GHz (my CPU is a Core i7 at 2.9Ghz).

Additionally, in Event Viewer I can see a number of warnings for 'Kernel-Processor-Power' that states the speed of each processor is being limited by system firmware.

Can anyone confirm what appears to be the obvious that I'm being throttled?

Any way around the throttling? The laptop fans are going full-pelt.

Many thanks.

M.

 

[cruisin]

A CPU benchmark with 8 threads will generate a lot of heat, so it will always throttle in a laptop. The rated speed (and turbo) are for situations when you are underutilizing the chip so you can take advantage of the thermal headroom and run 1 or 2 threads faster. The system firmware sounds like the Intel firmware seeing the heat and cranking everything down until it stops melting itself. In a situation where you have a better cooler, you might be able to use the full speed on 8 threads.

To get around this either make the location colder or move to a desktop that has a full-size fan and heatsink. Laptops are entirely too thin to run at their full speed for long. Even gaming laptops cannot handle the heat unless they become thicker to fit in more cooling (and essentially become compact desktops). I once tried to run a laptop benchmark in 10ºC weather, and aside from the cold hands the CPU did manage to reach the advertised speeds on all cores.

You can try to turn down the graphics a bit until it stops lagging (drop down to 1080p at least), but you are essentially trying to game on a non-gaming laptop. The heat has to go somewhere.

 

[mrochester]

A CPU benchmark with 8 threads will generate a lot of heat, so it will always throttle in a laptop. The rated speed (and turbo) are for situations when you are underutilizing the chip so you can take advantage of the thermal headroom and run 1 or 2 threads faster. The system firmware sounds like the Intel firmware seeing the heat and cranking everything down until it stops melting itself. In a situation where you have a better cooler, you might be able to use the full speed on 8 threads.

To get around this either make the location colder or move to a desktop that has a full-size fan and heatsink. Laptops are entirely too thin to run at their full speed for long. Even gaming laptops cannot handle the heat unless they become thicker to fit in more cooling (and essentially become compact desktops). I once tried to run a laptop benchmark in 10ºC weather, and aside from the cold hands the CPU did manage to reach the advertised speeds on all cores.

You can try to turn down the graphics a bit until it stops lagging (drop down to 1080p at least), but you are essentially trying to game on a non-gaming laptop. The heat has to go somewhere.

I should have probably mentioned that I last played this game on the same laptop about 6 months ago without this lag or thermal throttling.