Why the heck is this Latitude 7430 running like it has a thermal limit of 60C? It’s set to performance mode under power management in its UEFI.

This model has an i5-1245U if anyone is familiar with this weirdness. I already checked and re-did the thermal paste.

@maddy maybe stupid question if you already redid the paste, but is the cpu cooler fan plugged in to the rigth header?
like if plugged into a casefan header it would spin but the thing might run limited because nothing is connected to the cpu one

@4censord It’s a laptop with only one place for the fan to plug in.

Though not necessarily a stupid question because I have forgotten to plug in a CPU fan on a laptop after taking it apart for cleaning/maintenance.

@maddy power scheduling in the os perhaps? maybe the cpu governor?

@liv Using Performance with power-profiles-daemon and powerdevil in KDE, and in a CLI install environment using powersave governor with balance_performance under energy_performance_preference, I get the same behaviour.

My ThinkPad X13 with the same CPU doesn’t exhibit the same behaviour with the same kinda software setup, so I’m kinda confused. I’m thinking it’s a limitation baked in by Dell, potentially.

@maddy maybe the thing this fixes?
https://github.com/erpalma/throttled

If you run Linux that is; on windows maybe some weird platform drivers missing that would do the same?

@littlefox I’ve used that before for my T480 with some success. This chipset may be too new for it to work, but worth a try!

@maddy my work laptap (a different Latitude) sometimes just boots into a “slow” mode; rebooting occasionally helps
(yes, I know this doesn’t actually shine any light into the causes)

@dakkar I’ve seen similar on client laptops. In this case, it’s consistent across reboots and UEFI updates.

Oh shit, managed to resolve this by installing thermald and running thermald --adaptive

Now it’s running right up to the high 90s (Celsius) with proper boosting behaviour and everything.

Same chipset on my X13 Gen 3 and it runs fine without thermald. Weird.

@maddy Are the power limits (/sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/constraint_0_power_limit_uw for PL1 and /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/constraint_1_power_limit_uw for PL2) set the same? If they're different, that could be why. On my T480s PL1 defaults to 15W (IIRC) which limits CPU speed significantly. (You can also use turbostat to see the power limits)

@maddy There’s also the CORE_PERF_LIMIT_REASONS (0x690) MSR that could help with figuring out why it’s throttling. I wrote this program to parse the output: https://paste.sr.ht/~noisytoot/394b22d4dbd10deb4d4df6e611bf79f6b159263f. It’s based on the datasheet for Haswell though, so things might’ve changed since then (you can check the datasheet for your CPU to see if it’s still the same)