Hi,
there's another thread about someone having massive throttling issues (drops from 200 to 50 fps in games within a few minutes) that didn't really get addressed. I've got the S740 about a week ago and did all the updates (bios, drivers, etc.) and Lenovo Vantage tells me my system is up to date. There are no background processes running that hinder performance and that's not the reason at all.
When stressing the CPU (Cinebench, Prime95) HWMonitor displays about 22W Package Power continuously (after an initial spike to 35W), but as soon as I start a load on the MX250 GPU (FurMark) the Package Power rather quickly drops to 10W with absurdly low clock speeds even below the base clock of 1.3GHz. Closing FurMark and therefore killing the load on the GPU slowly returns the CPU to 22W.
For example: Using Cinebench R20 the system runs continuously at 22W, 2.5GHz and within a 80-90 temperature range. Simply starting FurMark and putting a load on the MX250 reduces the Power Package to 10W after maybe 1 or 2 minutes and the clock speeds are now in the 1GHz range or even lower and fluctuate wildly. Meanwhile the CPU temperature dropped to the 60-70 range, load on the MX250 is at 100% at about 70 degrees.
The temperatures don't seem to be the issue. From what I've understand the S740 has each component in the higher TDP-configuration and stressing only the CPU seems to be in that 25W range. Is this intended behavior? Is the TDP-limit shared? The way the system behaves completely nullifies the point of having the dedicated GPU since the gaming performance is completely destroyed by the low and inconsistent CPU clock speeds. It also seems pointless since each component is about 20-30 degrees below the actual limit.
I didn't expect the machine to game well, but at least older and less demanding games should run fine, but each game starts with decent performance for a few minutes and than drops precipitously due to the CPU limiting itself to 10W. CSGO starts at well above 200 fps- which is expected for the hardware -but quickly drops to 120 fps and after that to 60-70 fps and never recovers. Performance is also extremely inconsistent due to the inconsistent clocks that jump between 0.9 and 1.5GHz. The overall performance is on-par with my old Surface Pro 4 that featured a 6300U and no dedicated GPU.
Maybe that's intended design, but it's then quite pointless even having the MX250. I doubt the Intel G7 would perform worse under the circumstances. Or maybe I'm missing something in the configuration of the notebook. It's running plugged-in and set the Best Performance. I even tried a custom Power Plan but there aren't any options, even after enabling more features within the registry.
Best regards
there's another thread about someone having massive throttling issues (drops from 200 to 50 fps in games within a few minutes) that didn't really get addressed. I've got the S740 about a week ago and did all the updates (bios, drivers, etc.) and Lenovo Vantage tells me my system is up to date. There are no background processes running that hinder performance and that's not the reason at all.
When stressing the CPU (Cinebench, Prime95) HWMonitor displays about 22W Package Power continuously (after an initial spike to 35W), but as soon as I start a load on the MX250 GPU (FurMark) the Package Power rather quickly drops to 10W with absurdly low clock speeds even below the base clock of 1.3GHz. Closing FurMark and therefore killing the load on the GPU slowly returns the CPU to 22W.
For example: Using Cinebench R20 the system runs continuously at 22W, 2.5GHz and within a 80-90 temperature range. Simply starting FurMark and putting a load on the MX250 reduces the Power Package to 10W after maybe 1 or 2 minutes and the clock speeds are now in the 1GHz range or even lower and fluctuate wildly. Meanwhile the CPU temperature dropped to the 60-70 range, load on the MX250 is at 100% at about 70 degrees.
The temperatures don't seem to be the issue. From what I've understand the S740 has each component in the higher TDP-configuration and stressing only the CPU seems to be in that 25W range. Is this intended behavior? Is the TDP-limit shared? The way the system behaves completely nullifies the point of having the dedicated GPU since the gaming performance is completely destroyed by the low and inconsistent CPU clock speeds. It also seems pointless since each component is about 20-30 degrees below the actual limit.
I didn't expect the machine to game well, but at least older and less demanding games should run fine, but each game starts with decent performance for a few minutes and than drops precipitously due to the CPU limiting itself to 10W. CSGO starts at well above 200 fps- which is expected for the hardware -but quickly drops to 120 fps and after that to 60-70 fps and never recovers. Performance is also extremely inconsistent due to the inconsistent clocks that jump between 0.9 and 1.5GHz. The overall performance is on-par with my old Surface Pro 4 that featured a 6300U and no dedicated GPU.
Maybe that's intended design, but it's then quite pointless even having the MX250. I doubt the Intel G7 would perform worse under the circumstances. Or maybe I'm missing something in the configuration of the notebook. It's running plugged-in and set the Best Performance. I even tried a custom Power Plan but there aren't any options, even after enabling more features within the registry.
Best regards
Kühlung ist bei Laptops oftmals ein Thema ... mein Heim-Laptop (i5-8250U mit Geforce MX150) zeigt ganz ähnliche Probleme bei "anspruchsvolleren" Spielen wie Anno 1404.
