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I7 920MX overheat in turbo mode?

idata
Employee
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Hello

I bought a dell m15x laptop with i7 920xm last month, and I found a very srtange problem. When I play a game, the frame rate drops usually, and came back again, it's like a loop.

After a few day's observe, I found that the problem was caused by the turbo mode. The frequency of 920xm is 2Ghz normally, and seems it will increase to 3.2Ghz if I play a game, but like I said, the frame rate of game drops, and I can see the cpu frequency drops to 1.5Ghz(by using cpuz), then came back to 3.2Ghz. If I turn off the turbo mode, the cpu will be ok, and the frequency is 2Ghz all time.

I called dell, and they said this is caused by overheat, so cpu decreased the frequency for self protection, and told me that turbo mode is not good for gaming, suggested me to turnoff the turbo mode. I am very curious, because the cpu temperature was not too high(75 degree max, usually about 65-70), is this going to make the cpu lower it's frequency in order to lower the temperature? And is turbo mode not good for gaming? Thanks

By the way, I am not the only one who has this problem.

m15x user

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idata
Employee
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I'd agree it's likly to be caused by overheating, the thermal spec's are 100C though.

Lowering the frequency will make the chip cooler (both if you do it or the chip does it automatically), you could try turning off hyperthreading too.

I thing Turbo mode is excellent for games as many are single threadded or 2 threads at most, this is where Turbo works best.

I'm shocked that Dell would relase a product with this problem, I'd continue to take it up with them and return it, if you can't get ti to work, you shouldn't have to be dissabling things from factory settings IMHO.

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