Question i5 2400 Low Power Draw (Dell Vostro 260)

[jamesem]

I recently purchased a Dell Vostro 260 from ebay with the intent of turning it into a cheap HTPC. However, even with all of the high performance settings enabled in windows, the CPU's power draw will never pass 45W. The TDP of the chip is 95W so is it power throttling? The temps have never surpassed 70C. I have watched several benchmarks and the CPU is clearly underperforming in comparison. The specs of the system are listed below:

i5 2400
Dell 0GD8Y
10Gb Dual Channel 1333mhz DDR3 (8+2)
AMD Radeon HD 7870
120GB Crucial SSD
1TB Samsung HDD
CiT FX Pro 600W PSU

 

[jay32267]

What are you using to try and max out the CPU?
I would try....I think it's called CPUID. It allows you to max out all the cores or just some. (I think that function might be in the benchmark tab or something similar)
Then I would look at the cores in Afterburner and see what they are doing as far as usage.

 

[jamesem]

I was using Monster Hunter World's performance in the main hub as a reference. Every video I've watched so far the framerate hovers around the mid 30s to low 40s even on a slower GPU than what I have (a 750ti for example) the game is pretty much always running at 100% CPU Usage and tanks into the low 20s (FPS) a lot of the time. With the CPU-Z stress test that you suggested the temperature remains the same and yet the power draw is still around 45W.

 

[jay32267]

Do you run Afterburner?
Afterburner will let you see each core's usage on a graph versus time.
The i5 2400 has 4 cores.
When you run CPUID on all the cores....you should see all 4 graphs in Afterburner go to 100%.
If they do....I would be leaning on that you have some sort of software issue.

 

[jamesem]

I'm convinced it's a software issue as all 4 cores are running at 100% all the time. What the software issue is; thats what's boggling my mind right now. I've been troubleshooting it for days and I think its some sort of power management system overriding the power usage and not allowing it to run any higher. I'm honestly clueless. I even did a clean install and it solved nothing.