[SOLVED] CPU speed stays at 0.39GHz when opening Valorant

[HorizonSJ]

Recently I put together a new PC, I've played a few different games such as Escape from tarkov and Rust and everything is running well, but whenever i try to play valorant, frames are anywhere from 5-50 and takes 2 mins to open. Sometimes when i restart my pc it runs perfectly normal at 350-450 FPS but its only happened twice.

Specs:
Motherboard: B660M
CPU: i5-12400F 6 cores 2.5GHz
GPU: MSI RTX 3050
RAM: Corsair vengeance 16GB
OS: Windows 11

Task manager:
No Valorant

With valorant

 

[uWebb429]

@HorizonSJ
Try running ThrottleStop 9.4.3

ThrottleStop 9.7.2 Download

ThrottleStop is a small application designed to monitor for and correct the three main types of CPU throttling that are being used on many lapto

www.techpowerup.com

Open the Limit Reasons window and find out why your CPU is throttling. You are likely going to see BD PROCHOT glowing red. If this is the case, try clearing the BD PROCHOT check box on the main screen.

If you need help, post some ThrottleStop screenshots when your CPU is running slow. If it is not BD PROCHOT throttling then post a screenshot of the main window and the TPL window.

What motherboard do you have? I see you are using a MSI GPU. This type of throttling used to be a common problem on many MSI motherboards.

 

[HorizonSJ]

Just gave it a go, I cant do anything with BD PROCHOT but this is what happened.
Valorant open :

Valorant closed:

 

[uWebb429]

A bizarre problem but ThrottleStop makes it completely obvious what is happening. It is not a BD PROCHOT throttling problem like I thought it might be so ignore that info.

Have a look at the MSR turbo power limits. PL1 and PL2 are both being set to 0 watts.

This forces your CPU to full power limit throttling mode. The CPU is literally trying to get power consumption down to zero which means the CPU is slowed down to its minimum speed, 398 MHz.

Are you running any gaming software on your computer? Anything that promises to boost performance?

To prevent these power limits from changing, clear the Disable Control box in the TPL window and check the Power Limit Control Lock option to prevent these power limits from being changed. No software should ever be setting these limits to 0. That is a great way to make Intel CPU performance look terrible.

This problem has been around for a while. Let me know if this fixes it.

What motherboard do you have? Some motherboard manufacturer's software could be the root cause of this problem.

 

[HorizonSJ]

A bizarre problem but ThrottleStop makes it completely obvious what is happening. It is not a BD PROCHOT throttling problem like I thought it might be so ignore that info.

Have a look at the MSR turbo power limits. PL1 and PL2 are both being set to 0 watts.

This forces your CPU to full power limit throttling mode. The CPU is literally trying to get power consumption down to zero which means the CPU is slowed down to its minimum speed, 398 MHz.

Are you running any gaming software on your computer? Anything that promises to boost performance?

To prevent these power limits from changing, clear the Disable Control box in the TPL window and check the Power Limit Control Lock option to prevent these power limits from being changed. No software should ever be setting these limits to 0. That is a great way to make Intel CPU performance look terrible.

This problem has been around for a while. Let me know if this fixes it.

What motherboard do you have? Some motherboard manufacturer's software could be the root cause of this problem.

Sorry Im going out right now so i wont be able to try it just yet, Ill follow up when I get back but I dint have any gaming software other than things like iCue, Masterplus, Geforce experience, Steelseries engine and core temp.

 

[uWebb429]

Some software on your computer detects when Valorant starts and is setting both turbo power limits to zero. After a clean install of Windows and after only installing Valorant, you should never see this happening.

If you want to try to find out why this is happening, start removing some of the software that you listed. Start and stop Valorant and watch the power limits reported by ThrottleStop. It will be easy to see if this problem goes away.

If you do not want to waste your time finding out why, just use ThrottleStop to lock the PL1 and PL2 power limits. This will fix your problem. These power limits cannot be changed by any software after they are locked. You need to reboot the computer to unlock them.

It would be best to use the Task Scheduler to add ThrottleStop to your Windows startup sequence. That way you will never have to worry about your turbo power limits being randomly changed ever again.

Edit - You will see the lock icons when the MSR power limits have been properly locked.

Edit - I found this info on reddit. This was from two years ago so it looks like this bug has still not been fixed.

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/ValorantTechSupport/comments/icg7tl/valorant_limiting_cpu_speed_to_800_mhz/

If you have a MSI GPU or use dragon center disable gaming mode, for some reason it lowers your CPU clock speed when gaming mode is enabled.

 

[HorizonSJ]

Some software on your computer detects when Valorant starts and is setting both turbo power limits to zero. After a clean install of Windows and after only installing Valorant, you should never see this happening.

If you want to try to find out why this is happening, start removing some of the software that you listed. Start and stop Valorant and watch the power limits reported by ThrottleStop. It will be easy to see if this problem goes away.

If you do not want to waste your time finding out why, just use ThrottleStop to lock the PL1 and PL2 power limits. This will fix your problem. These power limits cannot be changed by any software after they are locked. You need to reboot the computer to unlock them.

It would be best to use the Task Scheduler to add ThrottleStop to your Windows startup sequence. That way you will never have to worry about your turbo power limits being randomly changed ever again.

Edit - You will see the lock icons when the MSR power limits have been properly locked.

Edit - I found this info on reddit. This was from two years ago so it looks like this bug has still not been fixed.

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/ValorantTechSupport/comments/icg7tl/valorant_limiting_cpu_speed_to_800_mhz/

Thank you so much, I've just tried uninstalling everything that I've installed so far one by one, none of it was the reason, but using ThrottleStop seems to work just fine so I'll be using that.