Helios 300 Windows Balanced power plan, CPU doesnt downclock properly

iceman0124
iceman0124 Member Posts: 8

Tinkerer
edited March 2023 in 2017 Archives

 

   By default my unit shipped with the high performance plan while off battery, which IMO is totally unecessarry. I have been building gaming rigs for decades, and on my present gaming desktop, 4790K/32GB DDR3 2400 2X GTX 980 TI's in SLI, I use the balanced plan and have all low power states active.....back in the day yeah, C1E and such could cause problems with overclocking but we are LONG past those days.

 

  My CPU does downclock, although not often and for only seconds at a time on the balanced plan. My 3DM Firestrike score is actually about 80 points higher on balanced, and I suspect it would go even higher if it were downclocking the way it should....why? In lower states the CPU consumes less power and produces less heat, so in between tests when it downclocks its basically recovering , taking a breather if you will and allowing for higher clocks and longer periods of turbo boost when the horsepower is needed.....

 

   I'll go on and answer the question I always get.....Why wouldnt you want to run at full speed all the time????  If it degraded performance I wouldnt use it, but it doesnt...running full tilt at all times is like having your car sitting in park and the engine cranked to max RPM, your going nowhere very fast....all you are acomplishing is burning more fuel than you need, producing tons of waste heat for no reason and neddlessly increasing wear and tear on vital components....its the same with the CPU, desktop work, very llight workloads, it doesnt need to be pegged at 3+ GHZ....it should be bouncing between 800 to 2500 as needed by the workload.

 

   I've checked the bios and cant find any power state options, its been ages since I've done a deep dive into windows PP settings....usually just switching to balanced does the trick, but not on this machine,its almost always at between 3.2-3.8 GHZ, every now and then it will drop to 900 for a second, sometimes 1400,and 2500....but its rare and brief....

 

   How do I get it to downclock properly?

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