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Questions about CPU thermal throttling mechanism

Kucing

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Mar 11, 2025
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In my situation, I want to have higher performance for lighter tasks and lower performance for heavy tasks. My question is, is there any reason why I shouldn't max out the turbo ratio limits and set the PROCHOT offset to a high value to achieve this?

I guess my question is more about how the PROCHOT mechanism works. Can I rely on PROCHOT to keep my CPU from dying early? If my PROCHOT temperature is say, 80 degrees, and the CPU is at 3.5ghz and 80 degrees, could it repeatedly spike up to higher temperatures and frequencies for fractions of a second that I can't see in ThrottleStop, hence shortening the CPU life?

Does the CPU read the temperature first and THEN decide what frequency to turbo up to, or does it turbo first and then read the temperature and decide to throttle?
 
keep my CPU from dying early
Temperature has very little to do with CPUs dying early. It is more likely too much voltage that slowly kills them.

Intel says that for the vast majority of their CPUs, any temperature under 100°C is a "safe operating temperature". There is no reason to limit an Intel CPU to 80°C. This will usually limit maximum performance and it will not extend CPU life any meaningful amount.

Intel CPUs can adjust their speed and amount of turbo boost available more than a hundred times per second. The CPU may go a couple of degrees beyond whatever temperature PROCHOT is set to but it usually does not go way beyond PROCHOT. Keep in mind that the actual thermal shut down temperature is not until 125°C. This helps protect against any long term temperature related damage.

Trust Intel. Years of real world testing has shown them that their CPUs can run reliably at high temperatures. There is no need to over think this. It is OK to let an Intel CPU run hot.
 
I guess my question is more about how the PROCHOT mechanism works.
The whole point is that you don't need to know unless you are a CPU designer.
 
The prochot default for my CPU is 98, but the tjmax on intel website is 100, should I adjust it to 100 or keep at 98?
 
Some laptop manufacturers thought it would be a good idea to lower the thermal throttling temperature. If you think your laptop manufacturer knows best, leave it as is. If PROCHOT Offset is not locked by the BIOS, you can set this to 0 so your CPU will start thermal throttling at the Intel recommended value of 100°C instead of 98°C. You are probably not going to see a huge difference either way.
 
The prochot default for my CPU is 98, but the tjmax on intel website is 100, should I adjust it to 100 or keep at 98?
I'm pretty sure that undervolting and repasting helps more than that two degree difference.
 
Some laptop manufacturers thought it would be a good idea to lower the thermal throttling temperature. If you think your laptop manufacturer knows best, leave it as is. If PROCHOT Offset is not locked by the BIOS, you can set this to 0 so your CPU will start thermal throttling at the Intel recommended value of 100°C instead of 98°C. You are probably not going to see a huge difference either way.
Thank you! By the way, do you know what does the Dynamic platform tuning framework does behind the scenes ? I searched even this forum a lot and i didnt see a good explanation. It doesnt seem to apply any power limits or temperature limits. But it does seem to lower my temps slightly during some loads, and it lowers my benchmark scores by 5-15%. But i have no idea what its actually doing, and whether I should turn it off.

I'm pretty sure that undervolting and repasting helps more than that two degree difference.
I did repaste a little while ago using MX-6,which i heard mx-4 its bad i dont know about mx6. But I think my temps got worse a few weeks after repasting. Anyways, this is a dell precision laptop, pretty annoying to repaste in my opinion and when I did it I broke the keyboard light somehow, i dont know if its worth it to repaste it with a better paste
 
I did repaste a little while ago using MX-6,which i heard mx-4 its bad i dont know about mx6. But I think my temps got worse a few weeks after repasting. Anyways, this is a dell precision laptop, pretty annoying to repaste in my opinion and when I did it I broke the keyboard light somehow, i dont know if its worth it to repaste it with a better paste
Haven't tried MX-6, but personally never had problems with MX-4 myself. But if you've repasted not that long time ago, I guess it's fine then.
 
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