CPU Throttles Noticeable When Charging i5 4210U

MocknozzieRiver

Hello!  I have an Acer Aspire R13.  It's the model with an i5-4210U CPU, 128GB SSD, and 8GB of RAM.

 

Recently the CPU has been throttling enough to make a very noticeable loss in performance.  For example, I'm watching a YouTube video and it's running at about 2.3GHz.  The video is nice and smooth.  I plug it in so it doesn't die, and the CPU throttles as low as 0.77GHz, the video's framrate diminishes and it freezes frequently.  My computer gets sluggish simply working on the desktop too.

 

I've checked all my power settings, switched between the default ones... made a custom power setting that has everything on high performance when plugged in.  Tried setting minimum power state to 100 and it changes nothing.  ThrottleStop helps... eventually.  It's not reliable.  Sometimes it fixes the issue, sometimes not at all.

 

Also, it's not thermal throttling.  In the attached video, you can see a live temp monitor in the toolbar; the temp is in yellow and to the left.  It stays a completely acceptable temperature at 60 C.

 

And here is the video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3tnoWrIKUG9Q3NyeUVsTXItU3M/view?usp=sharing

 

Any way to fix this?

 

JordanB

Check the Acer Care Center application on your computer for BIOS update.

 

Or you can check here:

 

http://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/drivers

 

If you want to know what your current BIOS version is:

 

1. Right click on the Windows Start button

2. Left click on Run

3. Type msinfo32

4. Click ok

 

According to the BIOS description on some R13, they did an update of EC which should probably fix what you're experiencing.