Broadwell BSOD

[JUnge]

Can anybody explain, why stepping up/down is a problem on i7-5700HQ (Broadwell) ONLY when a special program ist running (RawTherapee), but for month I had no problem running Windows 10.

I found a work around when using RawTherappe: Setting up an extra energy plan with minimum CPU frequency at 100%, It avoids down steps.

Next question: Will a BIOS update disable SpeedStep for ever??? I ask because I am talking about a notebook (HQ). Disabling SpeedStep would reduce runtime on battery.

Thanks in advance,

Jo

[Amy_C_Intel]

Hello, Jo:

Could you please be more specific about the issue that you are having? What do you mean by stepping up/down your processor?

Now, in regard to your next question; "Will a BIOS update disable SpeedStep for ever???" This will depend on your computer manufacturer since they are the ones who develop the BIOS for your computer. The processor itself supports Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology, meaning that you will be able to enable it or disable it depending on the features in your BIOS.

Regards,

[JUnge]

RawTherapee is a program for photo/image processing. I cannot work with this program on my Windows 10 notebook. Every time the CPU is going from 2700MHz to 800Mhz the system freezes. After some seconds a BSOD appears with MCE.

I can use a stress test program like Prime95 to get 100% CPU loading that avoids down stepping to 800MHz. While this program is running, RawTherapee works fine. Another workaround is to use the Windows energy management settings to set the minimum CPU frequency to 100% which means even with no load the frequency is constant at 2700MHz. No BSOD using RawTherapee.

Search in the web leads to the knowledge that other software like MS Office, VMWare, Linux can produce MCE. The description of a solution is to install newest microcode updates for the CPU.

There is an BIOS updates (that includes microcode) for my notebook on the manufacturer's website available, but no information which problems will be fixed and how. It would be much easier to get the microcode update through the Windows OS. But that's not the case.

[FHeik]

It is possible to load CPU microcode via the OS, hence "overwriting" the possibly outdated one that comes with the BIOS.

Although Windows contains a microcode update facility, the microcodes provided through it are updated very infrequently, so you can't expect anything recent there.

There is, however, an alternative that requires some technical expertise to get it up and running, since the process is a bit cumbersome.

Here's how it can be done:

• Download and install the respective driver provided by VMWare https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vmware-cpu-microcode-update-driver here.
• Follow the instructions given on the same site. This includes downloading the respective microcode data file provided by Intel https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25512/ here.
• Problem is, the latest version provided by Intel is pretty much outdated for many CPU's (for example 6th generation CPU's) (Nov. 2015).
• You could get a recent microcode version for your CPU by
  • either extracting it from a mainboard BIOS or BIOS file with a tool like AMI firmware update utility (if you have an AMI BIOS; available on the AMI website) -or-
  • checking out the excellent tool compilation called 'UEFI BIOS Updater', since it comes with up-to-date microcode binary files (do a Google search on that one).

and then convert the binary format of the microcode to the text format expected by the aforementioned driver. This conversion is possibly the most cumbersome part of the process,

since I have yet to find an intuitive utility with a nice GUI to do it. There's a Python script which does the job available https://gist.github.com/EcmaXp/506e6255a654dd6f01a8 here, but that of course requires Python to be installed, and

has to be operated from the command line.

• Once installation of both driver and microcode file (microcode.dat) is completed, reboot. If everything works as expected, you'll now see two protocol entries in the 'Information' category of Windows event log (Event ID's 39 and 41) after every completed boot procedure, referring to the update process:

Also utilities capable of displaying this kind of information (eg HWInfo) should now display the version of the updated microcode.

[JUnge]

Thank You very much! Furthermore, there is a shortcut extracting ucode here: https://github.com/bgw/bdw-ucode-update-tool https://github.com/bgw/bdw-ucode-update-tool . I found it through googeling with keywords from Your reply.

I am awaiting to shoot easter photos to process within RawTherapee that works well now.

Happy Easter!

[Amy_C_Intel]

YseGuy, thank you for your kind input, that was very helpful.

Regards,