So my parents have a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop, and it seems to be stuck running with heavily reduced clock speed, constantly at 499 MHz (it has an in i3-5005U with a base speed of 2 GHz, and iGPU is throttling too).
When the laptop is turned on or woken from sleep it runs at fullspeed for a short period of time before clocking down. I’m using HWMonitor to check temps and it’s still clocked down at 50°C and has a max of only 60°.
I have attempted changing the advanced power settings, buying a new charging cord, running a bootable Mint USB, resetting the CMOS, and always experience the same issue.
I’m used to hardware throttling around ~80°C so I didn’t think this was the case. I also checked HWInfo64 and the sensors tab say the thermal throttling flags are off.
I also had the impression that thermal throttling would be somewhat intermittent? This system refuses to increase clocks after it throttles, until it wakes up from sleep or power off.
After some temperature monitoring, there didn’t seem to be much consistency in when it throttled, but I did end up finding PROCHOT was tripping (even though it was nowhere near the 101 degrees C that PROCHOT was configured to), and that I could disable that using Throttlestop. A little hacky of a solution to run it every boot and lose that protection, but at least it’s usable.