Acer Aspire 5349 low CPU frequency under load when plugged

IRBabuin
IRBabuin Member Posts: 10 New User

Hello

 

I have an Acer Aspire 5349 which initially came with a Celeron B815 and 2G RAM. I upgraded to an i7 2630QM and 6G RAM. Everything is fine until I do some serious work (rendering, encoding etc) PLUGGED IN. WHEN THE LAPTOP IS PLUGGED IN, the CPU frequency jumps periodically between 800MHz (minimum) and the maximum allowed by the thermal roof of the CPU (mostly 2.4GHz). If I do the same things with the computer running on battery power, everything is normal, meaning that the CPU jumps to the highest allowed frequency and slowly reduces as it gets hotter. That means about 2.6GHz with all 4 cores running and scales back to about 2.2 (4cores) when it reaches 80 degrees.

 

Before anyone gets on the "this is not a laptop than can handle that cpu bla bla" bandwagon, read this:

The above behavior is present on ALL power plans (powersaver, balanced, highperformance), even if the CPU performance is set to 100%.

The same with an 95W Acer adapter.

The same with the battery removed.

The same on Win7, 8, 8.1

Same with SSD, HDD

Same in various encoding and benchmarking software.

The CPU does not overheat and does not throttle back, normal operating temp (browsing, music, movies) is about 43degrees and when encoding or benchmarking it gets to about 80 degrees and stays there (well done on the stock cooling Acer !).

I saw on the Lenovo forums that they had a similar problem and it was solved with a BIOS update, I think this has the same problem. http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-3000-and-Essential/G505s-slow-CPU-speed-whilst-charging/td-p/1255661

 

Please help.

 

Answers

  • JC_1234
    JC_1234 Member Posts: 198 Troubleshooter

    I'll ask the question; did you update the BIOS, I show they have version 1.08 dated 05/30/2012.

  • IRBabuin
    IRBabuin Member Posts: 10 New User

    The bios version is already 1.08. Weird thing is that it says in Aida that the BIOS is dated 29.11.2011....

This discussion has been closed.