Performance issues with CPU speed dropping
So have a ranom issue going on in any game I play, Currently running Bazzite 40 Nvidia Edition on an Alienware m18 r1 AMD 7945HX and RTX 4090. My issue is that after awhile, my CPU clock will drop from 4.8Ghz plus to 800MHz for a few seconds and then go right back to what speed it was at. I run a TCC offset at bios locking max temp to 90c on the CPU and GPU never goes over 65c. For the life of me I can not figure out what is going on. I have gone as far as just installing the latest version of Bazzite and not installed nothing else other than Steam and a few games to test with. Racking my brain here at this point. Any ideas?
17 Replies
Typically when I see this sort of thing it's a thermal limit being hit and then heavy throttling as a result
Outside of that it can be hardware failure of some kind
So I can say it is not thermal throttling at all and me swapping back to my Win11 install, It works fine
Plus I only engaged its TCC offset to rule that out and have locked it as low as 85c max with same result. In windows I just let it go balls to the wall at 99c and it never does this behavior
That's quite strange, I'm unfortunately very unsure here. We don't customize the CPU scheduler in any way, you should be using standard AMD pstate
Yeah and that is why I am lost on what could be causing it
Actually something I did notice is that if I change it from balanced to performance in the Power and Battery menu on the task tray, it will start doing it instantly
@Kyle Gospo Is there a log I can dump to help figure this out?
Just my two cents, I'm just a bazzite user with a 5600X, but I was experiencing micro stutters until I disabled "Cool n Quiet" in bios, and ran "ujust pstate-force-enable" both of which might be nothing to do with your issue. if you run "rpmostree kargs" in the terminal, what does it read?
As a 5950x user, I also had to run
ujust pstate-force-enable (actually I'm the reason that command exists at all) in order to get the best driver for the 5000 series working: amd-pstate. Run cpupower frequency-info and see what driver you're using just in case. It should say "amd-pstate-epp"@Geechan I will give this a try and report back!
@Geechan Doing what you suggested and give it a whirl. Will report back
Didnt fix it.
if your pic was before the command, you were already on pstate
but pstate will never force a CPU to it's lowest clockspeed
the only time I've ever seen that has been a hardware fault of some kind
Agreed but this is def not an hardware fault as stated above, it works perfectly fine in Windows. Guess i'm just going to put my Win11 drive back in for now and mess with this at some other point.
@Kyle Gospo Figured out the issue, Whatever chip Alienware is using to control the fans will remember what profile windows had loaded regardless of OS. It appears in quiet mode using AWCC, the fan for the VRMs and Memory is locked to a low RPM only while the CPU and GPU can go full bore. I tried using Fan control software in Linux but for whatever reason, it can only read the RPM and not actually control them. I have the same issue using Fan Control in Windows so this is probably something Dell has done to enforce the use of their AWCC software.
That's ridiculous!
I'm a big fan of Cooler Control, maybe that can do it?
Otherwise if you find a driver to fix it ping me and I'll see about including it
I will swap back to the Bazzite NVME tonight and give Cooler Control a shot.
Best of luck
Glad I was half right, definitely a hardware issue, just a shame it's a completely artificial one
Yeah sucks. Only reason I ran across is because while looking into the issue, some other linux users reported same thing with the newer models of Alienware laptops.
@Kyle Gospo So someone said adding this to Grub fixed the issue for them. I am unsure how to add this though as when I tried I got an error saying the line was invalid. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi=!Windows 2020"
rpm-ostree kargs --append=acpi_osi=!Windows 2020Gotcha, Thank you and i will give this a shot and report back.
Solution for anyone who runs across this issue with an Alienware laptop that is using AMD cpus, ensure your AWCC profile is set to performance before switching to Bazzite. Otherwise cooling becomes hindered due to not being able to control the fans within Bazzite at this time.