Hi Rick,

You are

The problem is that the CPU is running hot very quickly at this moment and will result in CPU throttling and losing CPU power. 

An option is to undervolt your CPU, with the effect: less power consumption, less heat and less CPU throttling!

There are two very good guides on Notebookcheck.net:

Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) Undervolting Guide

The ThrottleStop Guide 2017

Undervolt my CPU? This is a brand new laptop. I don't mind altering settings but this suggestion sounds like drastic action to me. The 2 links you provided are not for the faint-hearted.

@Baldricky wrote:

Undervolt my CPU? This is a brand new laptop. I don't mind altering settings but this suggestion sounds like drastic action to me. The 2 links you provided are not for the faint-hearted.

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Undervolting your CPU is a much less drastic solution than deliberately disabling a thermal protection mechanism that keeps your hardware from getting damaged....

Very few laptops in this era can run prolonged periods without throttling. The ones that can are bulky in order to accommodate larger cooling solutions and often more expensive, like the Precision 15 models.

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@jphughan wrote:
Undervolting your CPU is a much less drastic solution than deliberately disabling a thermal protection mechanism that keeps your hardware from getting damaged

I'm sure you're right but I have no intention of "disabling a thermal protection mechanism" either - whatever that is.

All I'm looking for is a 'simple' solution to getting a new external sound card to function on a brand new Inspiron. I don't wish to plough through pages of technical instructions (unless, perhaps, they were produced by Dell) but nothing like that should be necessary with modern off the shelf 'plug & play' equipment like this.

Thank you for responding though - and I should have thanked @The Adder too.

Regards

Rick

You're going to need to upgrade to better hardware -- what you have doesn't have the ability to run the CPU flat out at high speed - it's a lower-end consumer-grade notebook.

Most companies selling mobile audio workstations sell what amount to gaming-class or workstation-class systems with the cooling systems required to sustain high CPU throughput.  The other option is to use a desktop system that has good cooling (i.e., NOT a small-footprint or an all-in-one system).

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@ejn63 wrote:

You're going to need to upgrade to better hardware

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Thank you for taking time to make your suggestion but, sorry, it is such an unhelpful and unnecessary suggestion.

As I've already said this is a brand new machine (3 weeks) and I see no need to upgrade it at all. I have borrowed an old Creative Labs Extigy sound card and that is functioning fine (although it shouldn't be). We can always spend more money (if we have it) on better equipment.

But my research into selecting a laptop suitable as a digital audio workstation (DAW) found that the specification for this and other similar Inspirons matched the requirements for what was needed. This laptop replaced my old faithful Dell Dimension XP workhorse.

It may well be I end up putting the iTrack Solo on eBay and purchasing a new Creative Labs sound card but I feel sure there is a simple solution out there. I'm waiting on Focusrite before that decision is made.

Regards

The request from FocusRite was vague, but it sounds like they are talking about Intel SpeedStep. However, if you turn-off SpeedStep on a laptop, it might get hot easy and Sleep/Wake (and other things) might not work so well any more.

By selecting a laptop for DAW work, you are already limiting yourself.

Then, you selected a entry-level consumer laptop to do your DAW work. The only Dell  laptop I would trust to this job is a Dell Precision Mobile Workstation. They go on-sale every year (as the new models are released).

One thought in addition to the above: Since this suggestion came from the results of using a tool called LatencyMon, is it possible that when they said to disable throttling, they meant disabling SpeedStep?  When you use this software, do you hear your fans running at full speed?  If so, then that suggests the temperatures are getting too high and throttling is occurring, in which case my second post immediately above applies -- and I don't know why they would have suggested that you'd find a way to disable that in the BIOS, because that simply isn't offered, and that restriction is not unique to Dell systems by any means.  If on the other hand the system is quiet when you use the software but it still isn't working properly, then try disabling SpeedStep.  That is the mechanism by which the CPU will constantly change its clock speed according to workload.  That CAN be disabled in the BIOS, at least on most systems, and if you disable it, the CPU runs at its maximum clock speed at all times, unless some other factor like throttling prevents that.  If you're seeing latency related to all of these clock speed switches, then disabling SpeedStep may resolve that, but you should expect a battery life reduction.

Ricky you're trying to have it both ways.  You're saying you don't want to disable thermal protection mechanisms but just want to disable throttling.  You're saying you don't want to purchase a better system but want to run this application properly.  Both of those statements are inherently contradictory.  Throttling occurs when the CPU temperature and/or internal ambient system temperature reach a level that the system is programmed to consider "too high".  Throttling performance, i.e. forcing the CPU to run at a lower than normal clock speed, is how the system gets those temperatures to drop, because a slower CPU doesn't generate as much heat.  The system will keep the CPU throttled until temperatures reach a defined safe level, and then allow full performance again until temperatures reach that "too high" threshold again.  These temperature thresholds are defined in the system firmware.  Occasionally a BIOS update will change them, but they are deliberately not user-configurable because otherwise a lot of people would simply disable throttling as you seem to want to do and then wonder why their system got damaged from running at too high a temperature for too long.

So as both I and now ejn63 have told you, you have the wrong system for your intended usage.  The fact that it's 3 weeks old is irrelevant.  I have an XPS 15 that's a higher-end system than yours and it still throttles if I try to play intensive games for too long -- because it simply isn't designed to run maxed out for prolonged periods.  If that's what you need, then you need a better system.  You can keep insisting that you don't want to disable thermal protection mechanisms and don't want to buy a better system, but that you still want your software to work, but you'll be asking for the impossible.