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TornaD-oz · ‎03-03-2018

12.03.18 Temporary solution:
Disabled Turbo - no drops, temps below 70 on GPU and 75 on CPU, fans don't spin more than 3500 RPM on auto. I set up custom profiles in ThrottleStop - Speed Shift at 64 for normal "Charger" usage and "Whisper" profile with Speed Shift set at 255 for nighttime maintenance and stuff. With my "Whisper" profile it's almost deadly silent when idling, fans stop spinning completely and the only thing making noise is the HDD. These are the settings used in ThrottleStop:

The CPU is undervolted to -127.9 mV.

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Original post:
Hello everyone. After installing the latest 307 BIOS and MEUpdate HotFix from GL702VS support page, I noticed FPS drops from 100 to 20 at random and then going back to normal after about 20-30 seconds. I watched the clock speeds and noticed that the CPU was going from 3400 mHz to 700-800 mHz during these drops, then slowly going up again. At first I thought that it's just poor optimization performance (was playing Kingdom Come at the time), but then I installed Dishonored 2 and the same happened. I fiddled with every possible solution I could think of, until I noticed that you can disable Turbo Boost in ThrottleStop. With Turbo disabled, the clock drops are no longer there (FPS is lower now, of course).

My temps stay below 80 C CPU and 70 C GPU, so thermal throttling is out of the question. I need help fixing / reporting this issue, never happened on my machine before 307 BIOS.

I tried to enable Turbo again and ran the fans on max RPM. There were no drops for about 20-30 minutes, then I put the fans on auto and the drop occurred. It leads me to believe there are issues with VRM throttling, even though the CPU itself is relatively cool. I have no experience dealing with VRM issues and there seems to be no way to check its temperatures in this laptop, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

FastM · ‎03-03-2018

Cooling is clearly an issue with these laptops, i’m on 307 with my GL702VS as well but can’t say i’ve noticed what’s happening to you.

I do however keep my fans boosted to 30%. I’ve found it’s a good balance between better cooling and not getting too loud under load. I realize it’s not the answer your looking for but is leaving the fans slightly boosted not an option for you? Is your system on a laptop cooler?Have you done a reparte? I wonder if the component overheating is even part of that heat sink spread or not..

TornaD-oz · ‎03-03-2018

FastM, keeping the fans boosted is always an option, but I am reaching for the most possible performance with everything set on auto, as quiet as I can get. The reason is, I play mostly at night with my wife sleeping couple of meters away from me in the same room. Otherwise I would probably max the fans and never have a second thought about it.

I have this laptop cooler, and I would not recommend it. I've tried it before and after drilling, and it didn't change max load temperatures. I bought it mainly because they advertised it as being able to handle the temps and stay quiet at the same time, and while it is quiet, it is still useless for the most part.

I repasted with Gelid Extreme, but didn't apply the thermal pads that one time. I've ordered several pcs of Grizzly Minus Pad 8 - I've read that when VRM gets overheated, CPU multiplier goes to it's baseline, and that is exactly what I am seeing in ThrottleStop. Going to clean everything and apply it when it arrives.

TornaD-oz · ‎03-03-2018

Did some more testing. I'm at a total loss here, not sure what is going on. I think somewhere along the way I messed up the settings in ThrottleStop or Intel XTU.

In the screenshots below I used the stress test utility to simulate the behavior I noticed during gaming sessions in the short period of time.

ThrottleStop shows PL1 throttling with Turbo on:

Turbo off, no throttling:

Here's a screenshot for reference, how it used to perform before installing ThrottleStop - notice that that the CPU used to hit 3.7 GHz:

So my guess is, I messed something up in ThrottleStop. Can anyone please share their experience and help to set it up correctly?

FastM · ‎03-04-2018

interesting.. for the 3.8 vs 3.4*i believe this is normal turbo boost behaviour. If all 4 cores are active the max frequency is 3391mhz. 2 core or single core will yield higher mhz.

I’ve never run a CPU stress test like that to test for any sort of throttling. I’ll try it to see if i can replicate your results. I’m currentky at -130mV undervolt.

Did you ever mess with the TurboBoost settings? increase its run time or change the voltage boost?

TornaD-oz · ‎03-04-2018

FastM wrote:
Did you ever mess with the TurboBoost settings? increase its run time or change the voltage boost?

No, I didn't touch them in both XTU and ThrottleStop, only did undervolt. However I did two things before the problem appeared - I removed Intel XTU in favor of ThrottleStop and updated to 307 BIOS.

I try to avoid stress testing in general - they tested it during manufacture, didn't they? - but since I started to get these clock drops I'm back at trying to establish the culprit.

Update: from what I can understand, if ThrottleStop reports PL1 limit, it means that CPU has hit it's power maximum. People on other forums with similar hardware unlock this in BIOS settings and run Turbo without issue. So most likely ASUS messed up their BIOS update. If there is a way to downgrade, I would gladly try 306 and see how it performs.

FastM · ‎03-05-2018

shouldn't Speed Shift be enabled In throttle stop?

TornaD-oz · ‎03-05-2018

FastM wrote:
shouldn't Speed Shift be enabled In throttle stop?

It wasn't on when I first launched ThrottleStop in all defaults, but I have it enabled now. Installed the thermal pads, trying to replicate the same behavior.

FastM · ‎03-10-2018

Install XTU again and used its Monitoring. I see that same PL1 code getting thrown within throttlestop and I haven't even done anything stressfull with the laptop.

With XTU you can log Thermal Throttling, Power Limit Throttling, Current Limit Throttling, Motherboard VR thermal throttling as well.. see what comes up?

TornaD-oz · ‎03-11-2018

FastM wrote:
Install XTU again and used its Monitoring. I see that same PL1 code getting thrown within throttlestop and I haven't even done anything stressfull with the laptop.

With XTU you can log Thermal Throttling, Power Limit Throttling, Current Limit Throttling, Motherboard VR thermal throttling as well.. see what comes up?

XTU reports "Power Limit Throttling" on my device, whereas ThrottleStop shows it more specifically as "PL1" during the same occurances. Does your clock drop to 800 MHz during PL1? Also, if you see those before you do any actual gaming or load, you should just clear them away by pressing the buttons at the top of that window:

They don't really help anything because they show what limits were reported during the system boot, and we can't affect anything at boot anyway (unless we could unlock and modify BIOS settings, but I'm still looking for confirmations and success history of this online).

While trying to remove XTU completely, I found out that it's service is installed and used alongside ROG Gaming Center. Somehow I removed too much of Intel software, and that broke the machine completely, locking the games to 1-2 FPS with 10-20 % GPU load. I tried to reinstall every driver, but that didn't help, so I rolled back to one of my stable backups I make once a month with Acronis.

Disabled Turbo, works stable now - no drops, temps below 70 on GPU and 75 on CPU, fans don't spin more than 3500 RPM on auto. My friend told that he can no longer hear my fans through Skype in our PUBG sessions. I did, however, set up the profiles in ThrottleStop - Speed Shift at 64 for normal "Charger" usage and "Whisper" profile with Speed Shift set at 255 for nighttime maintenance and stuff. With my "Whisper" profile it's almost deadly silent when idling, fans stop spinning completely and the only thing making noise is the HDD.

GL702VS Clock Drops when Turbo enabled