Very spikey throttling while temperatures seem very safe.

[foo027]

I have an Alienware Aurora R13 with a 3080ti and an i9-12900F. The company, and specifically this rig, is notorious for shipping with absolute cheeks temperature hardware. For the first ~6 months I owned it, it worked like a dream and I never noticed any issues running Cyberpunk on ultra and staying above 90 fps the whole time. I started to notice some issues earlier this year, and I went in and made some hardware fixes. I put in a 120mm AIO and slapped two fans on it for push/pull so that it would fit in the case and not overheat the rest of the components, and added another exhaust fan on top. The only taxing games that I've played since were Farcry 6 and Starfield, both of which I played maxed out and experienced no issues. Today, I loaded up Cyberpunk for it's new patch, and I'm experiencing temperature throttling again - although, to me, the temperatures look fine.

Below are the settings I have set in Throttlestop, as well as a log of running the game. Basically it will run fine for about 60-120s, and then it will cycle hard throttling down to 10 fps from 100+ for 6 seconds every 8 seconds or so. I'm not super PC savvy, so I'm looking for help in diagnosing and fixing this issue.

 

[unclewebb]

The log file shows that your computer has some severe BD PROCHOT throttling problems. This can reduce the CPU speed to 400 MHz which is a far cry compared to the 4500+ MHz that your computer should be running at.

It used to be simple to solve this problem by using ThrottleStop. Clearing the BD PROCHOT box on the main screen can be used to instantly solve this problem.

Starting with Intel 12th Gen CPUs, either Intel or Dell decided it would be a good idea to lock BD PROCHOT. There is no easy way to disable this anymore. Disabling the BD PROCHOT UEFI variable in the BIOS is the only way to unlock this. I only know of one person so far that has done this successfully.

Until you find a way to unlock BD PROCHOT, there is nothing ThrottleStop can do. Some remote sensor, likely somewhere on the motherboard, is sending throttling messages to the CPU using the BD PROCHOT signal path. As these cheap sensors fail, your throttling problems can get a lot worse.

You can try contacting Dell. They will likely tell you to reinstall Windows. To admit to this problem is something that they will not likely ever do.

 

[foo027]

I don't think I can even have Dell come in and pretend to fix it now that I've upgraded the hardware. They sent out a contracted tech to replace the small 60mm fan on the cpu with another 60mm fan when I talked to them before.


Who has successfully done it? And are there any other ways you know of to get around this issue?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Remeca]

Who has successfully done it?

 

[mql]

I don't claim to be the only person who has edited DELL G15 UEFI, but yes, I have disabled BD PROCHOT while editing UEFI.

There are many different ways to edit UEFI, it's up to each individual to decide how to do it. But first, you need to unzip the DELL bios to find "Bi-directional PROCHOT#" and "PROCHOT Lock", this can be quite difficult to do because the only way I know is to use a Python script (found on the internet), however I had to fix the script code to make it work properly.

0x8685D     VarStoreEFI: VarStoreId: 0x3 [B08F97FF-E6E8-4193-A997-5E9E9B0ADB32], Attrubutes: 7, Size: 43C, Name: CpuSetup {26 23 03 00 FF 97 8F B0 E8 E6 93 41 A9 97 5E 9E 9B 0A DB 32 07 00 00 00 3C 04 43 70 75 53 65 74 75 70 00}

0xB0DE0         One Of: Bi-directional PROCHOT#, VarStoreInfo (VarOffset/VarName): 0x7A, VarStore: 0x3, QuestionId: 0xE9E, Size: 1, Min: 0x0, Max 0x1, Step: 0x0 {05 91 BC 12 BD 12 9E 0E 03 00 7A 00 10 10 00 01 00}
0xB0DF1             One Of Option: Disabled, Value (8 bit): 0x0 {09 07 04 00 00 00 00} (ja PROCHOT Lock = 0x0, var izslegt ar ThrottleStop)
0xB0DF8             One Of Option: Enabled, Value (8 bit): 0x1 (default) {09 07 03 00 30 00 01}

0xB0E6E         One Of: PROCHOT Lock , VarStoreInfo (VarOffset/VarName): 0x7D, VarStore: 0x3, QuestionId: 0xEA2, Size: 1, Min: 0x0, Max 0x1, Step: 0x0 {05 91 C0 12 C1 12 A2 0E 03 00 7D 00 10 10 00 01 00}
0xB0E7F             One Of Option: Disabled, Value (8 bit): 0x0 {09 07 04 00 00 00 00} (X)
0xB0E86             One Of Option: Enabled, Value (8 bit): 0x1 (default) {09 07 03 00 30 00 01}

Attention, this is UEFI BIOS DELL G15 5520, other BIOSes may use different VarStoreInfo

 

[foo027]