Acer Aspire E5-551-T374 CPU Throttling when gaming/rendering

Hardware Hub Laptops & Netbooks
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So after talking
with Acer about the problem I am having with my main laptop, which is
an Acer Aspire E5-551-T374. The problem I have told them about is my
AMD A10-7300 keeps wanting to clock down quite a bit from it’s stock
speed of 1.9Ghz, keep in mind it was doing it before I upgraded
anything in the unit; It still does it even after upgrading the HDD
and RAM as well. The unit is running a Hitachi Ultrastar 7200RPM 1TB
Drive and 16GB of G.SKILL Ripjaws 1600 2X8 DDR3L Ram, and Windows 10
Home 64-Bit. I’m now investigating which games have an affect on the
clock speeds. The first game I have tried was Metro 2033 with low
settings running DX11, it is one of my favorite games to play when I
wanted something with an apocalyptic theme. Using task manager to
monitor my CPU speeds, the CPU clock goes down to 1.06Ghz from 1.9.
It ranges from 1.06 Ghz at the lowest and to about 1.13 Ghz at the
highest in metro 2033. The next game I am trying out is Farsky, which
runs in the Java Environment, so far it is a little better, but still
stutters a lot; with the CPU speed at 1.33 at the lowest and 1.45 at
the highest. The gameplay experience is a little more acceptable
compared to Metro 2033 with the input lag and major stuttering. There
is one thing I am noticing, I don’t even hear the fan increase it’s
RPM. The fan is working, and I feel air coming out; but the fan is
not speeding up as the temps increase. The next game I am running is
Bioshock infinite, just sitting at the start screen the CPU is at
1.06Ghz once again; setting are on the medium preset with a
resolution of 1366x768, the only temp I can go by is the GPU temp
which is the only temp being reported in HWMonitor, so the thermals
aren’t much of an issue currently. I am beginning to wonder if it’s
an faulty CPU, bug in drivers or the bios. I am currently running on
BIOS version 1.15, Crimson 15.30 which is the latest version of
Graphics Drivers AMD current has out. I also noticed when rendering,
the CPU would clock down as well; thus really increase the time frame
of getting my videos onto YouTube. The next game I played was
ToonTown, it’s a pretty old game seeing as I played it when I was
quite young, probably 9-11 years old. It ran quite well on my laptop,
there was some lag, but that was often from the servers not being
able to keep up. But in cases when there isn’t much going on in game,
the framerates are pretty good, probably about 25-30 FPS average I
would say. I’ll have to try some of the older games pre-dating back
before 2006-2007, to see if I get the same exact results.

Part two of my
notes, when I am doing my everyday tasks like checking my facebook,
twitter, ETC my CPU clocks usually hover at 2.22Ghz to 2.80Ghz
average just doing Facebook and Emails. Which sort of baffles me,
isn’t the CPU supposed to clock down when not doing demanding tasks
like gaming or editing a video?

So after running a malware and virus scan, nothing was found. The next thing I did was
try to unpark the CPU cores, no luck there. So at this point, I am
going to call it safe to say it is a hardware related issue or a bug
in the bios. There isn’t much more I can do at this point

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I'm not sure if this is the case, but if the powertune features on an APU work similarly to the way they work on a modern (GCN 1.1) AMD GPU, then the unit will only try to control temperature (by dropping clock speed and raising fan speed) when the unit is at or near the target temperature.

The higher clocks in low-CPU usage likely occurs because the chip is cool enough under those type of loads to run it's full clock speed. As load (and thus current draw) increases, the clock drops to maintain temperature.

Use Core Temp to check your temps on an AMD CPU. If they're at or near the temp target (whatever that may be) when the throttling is normal behavior. While it may be possible that your issue is somewhere else entirely, my first guess would be that you have a cooling problem. Could be that the thermal solution on this laptop just isn't efficient enough to maintain high clocks with that APU. While unfortunate, it does happen with certain laptops.

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The temps are always constant regardless. As I mentioned, I don't even hear the fan spin up either. The only time I hear the fan RAMP up is when I'm updating the bios....

and the thermal sensors don't even show properly on my core temp either. just 16 degrees. No max, no min.

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it is possible that the fan is not going while in windows. thus causing cpu to overheat while gaming. load up either catalyst or crimson control panel and set fan speed to max and see what happens. if fans fail to ramp up its driver problem or a dead fan.

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How am I going to do that with a laptop? There isn't an option to do that, last I checked was last night. Will be sending it in tomorrow regardless.

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Just throwing this out there... Maybe the iGPU is so crappy that the CPU doesn't have to work that hard to keep up.

That laptop is nowhere near gaming spec.

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It kept up for a while, running most of my games at 720P on mostly medium settings running an average FPS of 25-45 in most of my games. Hell it even live streams. I consider it a budget gaming laptop. It's better then most in its price range

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http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/mobile?os=Windows%2010%20-%2064 should be the link to the newest drivers for your laptop. give them a try. worst that can happen is nothing changes best that can happen is it fixes the issues

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Don't know if the APU drivers have been fixed, but I can confirm the fan bug in the drivers. In windows I had to use a utility like msi afterburner to keep my 250X from exploding in my desktop. In linux the os would just crash out. They fixed it after 3 months but I got a new card by then.

Try using an external utility like MSi-A.

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So basically, it would effect the Laptop APUs as well?

11

No clue, but it would make sense.

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i would assume any glitch like that that effects as many cards as it has could and possibly would effect APU as well. especially laptop APU where MOBO fan control may not work in windows and only works in bios. best method to trouble shoot fan and heat issues is to play with settings and rule out points of failure. yes it takes time but you can end up saving your self a long wait.