i5 4200U running constantly at minimum speed

[Jiia]

Hey! I bought this Samsung 900X3G ultrabook about 6 months ago. The laptop didn't really meet my expectations since the performance was quite low compared to my work laptop that has the exact same CPU but is running OS X.

Now after six months I started doing some research and found out that my CPU is running constantly at 800MHz. The rated speed for this CPU is 1.6GHz with 2.3-2.6GHz turboboost. I ran PerformanceTest and it gave me CPUMark of ~1200 even though the CPU has an average rating of ~3300.

The thermals are okay. The CPU is not limited in power settings. What might be the cause? There are practically no BIOS options on this laptop, just some boot settings and such. Or is this just a faulty device?

 

[KKAW]

Hey! I bought this Samsung 900X3G ultrabook about 6 months ago. The laptop didn't really meet my expectations since the performance was quite low compared to my work laptop that has the exact same CPU but is running OS X.

Now after six months I started doing some research and found out that my CPU is running constantly at 800MHz. The rated speed for this CPU is 1.6GHz with 2.3-2.6GHz turboboost. I ran PerformanceTest and it gave me CPUMark of ~1200 even though the CPU has an average rating of ~3300.

The thermals are okay. The CPU is not limited in power settings. What might be the cause? There are practically no BIOS options on this laptop, just some boot settings and such. Or is this just a faulty device?

It is common as far as i'm concerned for laptops to downclock themselves. There are various different energy saving shenanigans that laptop manufacturer's have put in so that their maximum battery life is increased.

Try using Process Lasso to make sure your cores are unparked and the performance in specific games or tasks are set to maximum usage. Also those CPU Mark scores are to be expected in a laptop CPU like that.

Use Aida64 to really make sure you are not thermal throttling. Laptops are prone to high thermals.

 

[Jiia]

It is common as far as i'm concerned for laptops to downclock themselves. There are various different energy saving shenanigans that laptop manufacturer's have put in so that their maximum battery life is increased.

You were completely right. I went ahead and tried to turn off every power saving option I could. I eventually found the culpirt in the Samsung Settings application. I had never noticed this setting before until now. It's the "Silent Mode" tab in the General settings. That setting was set to "Low" by default. I turned it off, rebooted and now the CPU accelerated properly. I tested setting it to "Low" again and the CPU immediately locks down to 800MHz so that seems to be causing it. What a stupid feature.