Hello everyone, welcome to my first topic!
I’ve got this pretty interesting chinese x86 based tablet, a Teclast X4, and got Manjaro with Plasma running on it with working touchscreen and accelerometer based auto-rotation. It all works well enough, except for the CPU power. I know this type of CPU ain’t the fastest available, but right now it’s apparent more can be had from it. I’ll explain why.
Out of the box, a Geekbench5 benchmark would make it shut down from heat, reaching 97C then shutting down. After opening the device up, replacing the thermal pad on the CPU with proper paste, bending the copper cold plate for better contact, and applying thermal pads between the cold plate and the devices’ casing solved that issue. Now max temps are 60C under full synthetic load from s-tui (stress with a terminal gui), and Unigine Heaven running at the same time.
S-tui shows CPU package power draw is never more than 6W, a typical power limit for these chips. On Windows, there’s apparently an application for modifying the factory set power limit. Sadly this does not work in Linux, as shown in this thread. Similar chips can gain a lot of performance from increasing the power limit as shown by TechTablets.
On this tablet the BIOS appears to be unlocked, as all options are visible, but modifying the power limit or even disabling it does nothing, so I guess the BIOS is not actually unlocked at all.
Would anyone know what other options may be left in gaining more performance on this device? Is there still a way to increase the power limit?
Thanks for your time! I hope you find these passively cooled thin devices as interesting as I do!