Boost clocks of the Octane II Pro (p775DM1G)

[Álvaro]

Hi all,

I had a question regarding the boost clocks as I have seen this issue referenced on a couple reviews. Does the Octane II Pro use the boost clock at all while extended GPU loads? Usually, it is at 65ish degrees when on full load, but it is always stuck at 3.4 GHz, when the boost clock should be of 3.7 with 4 cores active. I have seen other Clevo models with single heatsink have a similar issue where the boost is not used when the GPU is loaded, so I was wondering if this is normal (The machine performs in line with what is expected, around 11K points on Firestrike, but I get lag spikes on quite a few games). Intel XTU reports almost constant Power Limit Throttling, however. I have also noticed that sometimes a single clock will drop down to 800 MHz (not all 4 at once though), and very rarely does the average CPU clock drop (I have all set to High Performance settings on CC and windows settings), I have seen it go down for a couple minutes to 2 GHz and then back up again. All clocks on the system are stock, and BIOS is the one which came with the device (1.05.05).

TL;DR: is this normal for this system (adn thus the stutter is to blame on the games themselves), or should I try to tweak something?

 

[Scott]

On the Octane III I've seen similar happenings but not at the level you are talking about. The power throttling only comes in for me when I overclock the CPU too far. It'll quite happily sit at 4.2 across all 4 cores, 4.3 the power settings need to be spot on, 4.4 & above I see power throttling to 4Ghz when using the GPU. If I go past 4.5Ghz it'll drop much more significantly. The highest drop I've seen was at 4.9, as soon as I did anything (not even using the GPU) it would power throttle down to what you are seeing.

Regarding the boost clock, it should only be across one core rather than all 4.

 

[Álvaro]

Your GPU has a lower TDP than mine though, but by how you word it, it seems that it should not be an issue with mine either (as, even with the 15 less watts to the GPU, your CPU eats a lot more power even on stock). I mailed PCS and they mentioned that I may need a BIOS update, so will see if that fixes it. I also noticed that, for some reason, if I don´t have XTU open the throttling is much less noticeable, so maybe that is messing with some settings (which I am loathe to touch), and I actually see the boost clocks kicking in more often unless I have been gaming for, like, 7 hours. I´m glad I did not get the 6700K on this one, though, as I have seen people having to undervolt it with the 980.
Also, is the heatsink shared between both CPU and GPU? I read some people with systems with that setup having similar problems. Some of them reported using Prema´s bios fixed it, but for now I don´t want to flash it as the system is still on warranty, and anyway, it seems that there is no way to find it for this system.

EDIT: For ****s and giggles, I tried to set the minimum CPU state to 5% - turns out, it performs exactly the same, boost clock included, so that must have been placebo effect. I am seriously starting to suspect XTU for this. Do you have it installed on your system, or do you OC through the BIOS? (i just read your signature, you have the literal big sister to mine )

 

[Scott]

I used the Clevo overclocking program rather than any third party software.

Personally I would uninstall XTU, boot into the BIOS and set all the advanced overclocking settings to default and then see where that puts you.

 

[Álvaro]

I just updated the BIOS and it seems now fully uses the boost clocks, so I guess that changed something (one of the patches has something about CPU microcode, 1.05.06 i think). Also, this BIOS seems PCS-tuned, in contrast to the one I had before