[SOLVED] 12900k power throttling

[Britcanting]

Hello

I've had my 12900k since launch(November 2021) and has been running fine since then but lately been getting annoying audio stutters when the CPU is stressed, like playing games. I ran LatencyMon and said the problem could be with CPU power throttling and suggests disabling this.

Motherboard is a Gigabyte Gaming x DDR4 but have no idea what to change, I'm guessing I need to set a voltage so it doesn't go up and down depending on load? Are C states still a thing?

Thanks

 

[uWebb429]

Use HWiNFO to monitor for any throttling. It will also report what your turbo power limits are set to. For max performance, it is best to increase the PL1 and PL2 turbo power limits in the bios as long as your cooling is adequate.

 

[Britcanting]

Thanks I will try that. I have a Arctic freezer II 360mm.

 

[Britcanting]

This is what LatencyMon says.



The voltage goes up and down and so do the CPU clocks, how do I set it so they don't and are consistant?

 

[uWebb429]

LatencyMon says your Nvidia driver is a problem. Have you tried updating this driver?

Do you have the RealTek audio driver from the Gigabyte website installed?

How about updating the BIOS? You are using F4 when version F8a is the latest version on the Gigabyte website.

The voltage goes up and down and so do the CPU clocks, how do I set it so they don't and are consistent?

Are you using the Windows High Performance power plan? That plan is used to keep your CPU at maximum speed even when it is idle or lightly loaded. Intel CPUs use turbo boost so at default settings, the maximum CPU speed will vary based on how many cores are active. You can go into the BIOS and set all of the turbo ratios to the same value so all of the Performance cores will run at the same speed no matter how many cores are active.

Are you using Windows 11 or is HWiNFO correctly reporting that you are using Windows 10 Home? Your 12th Gen CPU has Performance and Efficiency cores that run at different maximum speeds. Not sure how good a job Windows 10 does scheduling tasks on the faster performance cores. Some people use apps like Process Lasso to force tasks to run on the Performance cores.

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Seriously consider using Windows 11 for Intel 12th Gen CPUs that have P and E cores.

Your main problem is likely a poorly written driver or two.

 

[jasonf2]

Yea, Microsoft completely redesigned the scheduler for windows 11 knowing that big/little was coming. On anything running big/little configurations you will get a performance boost by going windows 11. Also voltage variation and clocks moving around are intrinsic to modern processor designs. Unlike the old single core stuff where you had a base block and a multiplier that set a constant clock, modern processors detect load needs and turn themselves up and down. Alderlake takes that to another level by having high power and low power cores that allow the high power cores to clock really high and boost with the low power cores running low priority tasks. That is why the scheduler is so important because making sure that the right cores are used for the right task is now important, whereas before there was maybe some binning difference in cores, but for the most part it didn't matter which core you were running a particular task on as long as the loading was well balanced.

 

[Britcanting]

Ah I see. So I cannot stop this from happening in BIOS? Maybe i can try to undervolt? I updated BIOS to F6 and was fine for a few days but came back today, no idea why.

 

[KyaraM]

Ah I see. So I cannot stop this from happening in BIOS? Maybe i can try to undervolt? I updated BIOS to F6 and was fine for a few days but came back today, no idea why.

You could deactivate the e-cores to prefent Windows from scheduling tasks to the wrong cores. I never had that particular issue under Windows 10 on my 12700k, though, at least not that I noticed. It's true that 11 is doing a far better job than 10 in that regard, however, clocks are far more stable for me now and temps actually seem to have decreased, too. I highly recommend upgrading. I mean, it's free anyways.