unclewebb

I just wanted to warn anyone that is considering buying a HP Envy 17 with a Sandy Bridge CPU. Some of these new laptops are using multiplier throttling which seems to be triggered by power consumption long before temperature becomes an issue. If you are using the CPU and GPU at the same time such as when gaming, they can instantly throttle down to 800 MHz which kills performance. Anyone thinking of buying one of these should do some thorough testing before reaching for their wallet and make sure that you can take it back for a full refund if you are not 100% satisfied. If you already bought one of these and want to test for this problem, run any demanding game and at the same time run RealTemp with the Log File option selected to make sure that your CPU is running at its rated speed. RealTemp 3.67 http://www.mediafire.com/?n99nq4kn95u6i6a When loaded or gaming it should not be dipping down to 798 MHz. If you have this problem, run ThrottleStop and it will take care of it and get you back up to full speed. Edit: May 27, Throttling problem solved. See my next post for a bios update.

It looks like your fix sacrifices some CPU performance which reduces power consumption and probably helps prevent the throttling that most users are seeing while trying to game on battery power. Nice work Steven. Not sure why NBR doesn't want knowledgeable people like yourself posting on their forum. After you left they decided to harass Martin, the brains behind HWiNFO. In typical communist fashion, they deleted any posts supporting Martin and his contributions to the community and then locked the thread to prevent further discussion. Great. You won't see that kind of asinine behavior over here on Tech | Inferno.

Many review sites have "accidentally" ended up with a M11x-R3 model that has a CPU that isn't available for purchase yet or a Core i7-2630UM ES which is not likely to ever be sold at the retail level. Sure they run faster out of the box compared to an R2 out of the box but that doesn't tell the whole story. The UM CPUs in the R2 can be overclocked like crazy while the CPUs in the R3 have very limited overclocking abilities. Early benchmarks show that the M11x-R3 with a Core i7-2617M performs very similar to an overclocked Core i7-640UM that is in the R2. I'm sure there are some benchmarks where the R3 is a little quicker compared to an overclocked R2 but there are also longer benchmarks like wPrime 1024M where turbo boost automatically throttles back in the R3 so an overclocked R2 + ThrottleStop can finish this calculation over 100 seconds faster than the R3. If you can find a good deal at the outlet for an R2 you might want to save some money and go for that.