Anyone experienced this? (Power Throttling A515-43)

gwynbleidd

Summan6145 said:

pssyche said:

I have the same issue with exact same model. Bought it for my niece as Xmas present, to use primarily for school/homework, but also some light gaming since I saw on YouTube reviews Ryzen 3500U running Fortnite comfortably over 60 fps, but mine barely does over 30 on lowest settings at 720p. I have latest BIOS installed and downloaded latest chipset drivers directly from AMD. I did manage to get better performance by forcing it to run at higher TDP using https://gitlab.com/ryzen-controller-team/ryzen-controller, but that's not something I'm comfortable running all the time since kids are using laptop primarily. It's ridiculous really, paying for hardware and then not be able to use it at full potential...

What settings are you using in Ryzen Controller? I just bought this laptop and im getting the same issue

It's not really an issue to begin with. I was wrong in my assessment.
It turned out that the "high performance" phase was just a turbo window, the APU uses more than 15 watts (~30) at first, that's why the performance is great, but then it goes back down to its rated TDP (15w), ~6 of which is what I can see reported in AIDA64 and HWiNFO64 (CPU cores) and the rest goes to the iGPU. A better monitoring program would be AMD μProf, it shows you the actual power consumption of the APU and PPT slow and fast limits, STAMP limits...etc.

If you want it to stay at that higher performance level using more power, you can always tweak the settings with Ryzen Controller but I wouldn't recommend it.
You see, this laptop is cheap, and Acer probably opted for the lowest grade chokes and ICs (VRM components) that can run this thing for a reasonable amount of time to make the biggest profit, so if you plan on gaming on it while running at 30+ watts, it will probably die (VRMs) much sooner than you'd think. I know I sound like some dead beat support guy by saying this, but it's the truth. That's why in the desktop world, the Z motherboards (overclocking ready) on the intel side for example, are usually equipped with more VRM phases and higher quality components + giant heatsinks to cool them. The VRMs on this laptop (and many other models too) not only lack heatsinks, but have no airflow of any kind.

So conclusion is that there's nothing wrong with the laptop. The only thing that's still puzzling me is how Acer Support didn't have a clue even though I asked for a higher level technician in the email, they just told me to send the laptop in for a repair service. If anyone from Acer Support is reading this, feel free to take notes.

PS: I selected my own response as the answer since there wasn't a problem to begin with. Thanks for everyone who tried to help.

rich1974

this topic should be sticky.
you tell me, i guess that this kind of laptops are not meant to be used for long time at a very high load. at first, it gives you a feeling of performance but after a few minutes it goes back to designed performance. mostly about the cooling system to be able to keep a reasonable temperature. this is my value for my acer aspire a315-41, amd 2200u, vega 3. 

Suvan

@gwynbleidd what are your cinebench r20 and CPU-z scores. Please tell. 

Suvan

@gwynbleidd i have been experiencing the same issues, is there any fix you have tried?

rich1974

there is no fox for this, it is a design issue and is controlled by bios.

Suvan

@rich1974 the acer aspire a315-41 (3500u) gets better scores in benchmarks.

rich1974

of course it gets, but for how long? install amd uproof, and please report the tdp. (stapm fast, slow, etc). 
i am assuming that you don't have a discrete video card.  
this topic worths much more attention. 

Suvan

@rich1974

its this right?

no this does not have a discrete graphics card. the G variant has a discrete graphics card.

also its worth telling that the acer aspire a315-42 (not 41) also has this same problem

the acer aspire a315-42 has the same motherboard,bios,etc which is found in my laptop (a515-43)

I think there is something wrong with the bios of this laptop.

rich1974

thanx! that 15w limit should be 25. this is what I have on my 2200u. 
this apu is more gpu oriented, while stress the cpu, the apu is capped to 15 w. but if i stress the gpu using furmark, the apu stays constant at 25w. 
you can install furmark and conduct some tests. 
also, you can run the chinebench 20 single core and compare it with mine result. i get around 315-320p.   
you can watch uproof at the "socket power" section while running stress tests. your feedback would be much appreciated. 

Suvan

@rich1974 wait so it should be 25W? Also how many watts is your power supply?

rich1974

in my case, as you can see above, it is 25 w. but my ryzen is 2200u, the first gen. my power supply has 45w. 
in fact, i just made a gpu furmark test and it stays at around 23w and   the temp is capped to 75 degrees. the ambient temp was 27 degrees. as you can see, it is mainly thermal throttling. the power goes down as to keep the temp not go beyond this limit. 

rich1974

this is the explanation of the terms.

1. AMD's boosting mechanism has three parts:

• Fast PPT limit (fPPT) - a short time limit in which the CPU is given quite a higher power budget. fPPT can actually be set higher than a chip might atually need to reach maximum boost on all cores, for example a 4500U won't surpass 40W at any point.

• Slow PPT limit (sPPT) - this is a much longer time limit where the CPU is given a higher power budget from TDP. The official recommended time for sPPT is 275 seconds.

• Sustained power limit (STAPM) - the sustained power limit for extended periods of time. This value is set to TDP, and is the equivalent of PL1 in Intel systems.

  If at any point thermal constraints are met, frequency will drop to meet thermal limits instead.