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Dell Latitude E6400 thermal throttling?
Until recently the laptop worked fine, but now it experiences something that resembles thermal throttling.
Initially, everything is OK, but after 10-15 min of heavy use (and by heavy use I mean a 1080p youtube video), it starts to really chunk the responses. You would think is because is overheating, but the temps never gets really high.
[check attachment for higher resolution]
As you can see, the highest temp was presumably 77C, and the current one is 50C, while the On-Demand Clock Modulation is 50%, but it feels way worse. Once the ODCM kicks in it's very slow.
I'll give it a good clean inside and a new thermal compound this weekend, but I doubt that's the issue, it looks clean already.
Any thoughts on why is ODCM kicking in ?
robert p
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December 8th, 2017 04:00
Hi expert vision,
Thanks for posting.
Apologies that your E6400 is not performing as expected. Here is a Dell Knowledge Base article you may find helpful.
Be sure you have your power management set to "portable/laptop or balanced mode" and your NVIDIA power optimizer set to "optimize my battery" mode.
expert_vision
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December 11th, 2017 09:00
I fixed it. Aparantely this is a common problem for this model, and is due to GPU overheating. The CPU was fine and did not cause any thermal throttle when doing a CPU burn test. It was staying at 100% ODCM. However, when doing a GPU burn test, after 10 min it would drop the ODCM to the point the unit would be unusable.
I have to say, that the cooling design for this model is not great, cooling a GPU with a thermal pad, it's not a great idea.
Initially, I cleaned the radiator fins, which were a bit clogged, and replaced thermal paste on CPU. But it had no effect.
Then I replaced the old GPU thermal pad, polished the radiator base (which for some reason had a rough surface, applied some thermal paste between the radiator and the thermal pad, and finally 720p plays indefinitely, however 1080p still throttles after a while.