Surface Book 2 throttles excessively, often down to 0.4 GHz

I got exactly the same problem with you. Even the 0.4 Ghz

Before I moved into a room with no air conditioner 2 weeks ago, the throttle wouldn't happen.

And the temperature of my new house always stays at about 30 ℃ (or higher)

And I noticed that while charging, the temperature is higher, and the throttle will more likely happen.

Heya,

I have been having the same problem. I tried to play a few games (different games requiring low and high performances), but the laptop CPU clock drops down to around 0.5 Ghz. Lowering the settings to even the lowest end doesn't change anything. I have the highest available model of surface book 2 15 inch. The laptop was fine till a month ago and then this started happening. I am not sure if it was an update that messed it up. Does a factory reset fix it?

One thing i noticed is that when I am in game, the fans hardly work (or very silent) and when the lagging starts and I go to desktop, then the fans turn on running fast and loud..Going back to the game seems to fix the problem for 20-30 seconds before which I get the problem again. So I am assuming that it is a heating problem where the laptop is not able to turn on adequate cooling process unless I exit the game.

This is a £ 3000 device and its breaking my heart that I cant play any game even with such high end components! 

Please help someone 

Razik

I got exactly the same problem with you. Even the 0.4 Ghz

Before I moved into a room with no air conditioner 2 weeks ago, the throttle wouldn't happen.

And the temperature of my new house always stays at about 30 ℃ (or higher)

And I noticed that while charging, the temperature is higher, and the throttle will more likely happen.

Thanks for the reply,

I tried troubleshooting & safe mode today. There's no problem found by troubleshooting. And unluckily, I can not run any benchmark or heavy load programs on safe mode.

So I do not have any conclusion what the CPU behaves during heavy load on safe mode.

But I noticed 3 details you might take as clues:

1. The throttling issue only happens during the daytime (30-35℃), which is 5 or more Celsius degrees higher than the nighttime(25-28℃). So I think there might be a threshold at 30℃.
2. During throttling, if you change Power Mode (just change it, from Highest to Lowest or from Lowest to Highest doesn't matter), the throttling issue will be gone for a very short period, like 10-20 seconds.
3. Put an ice bag behind the screen, where CPU is will stop throttling.

I believe this is an overheat protection. And I still believe it's too conservative. The engineers might think a comfortable touchscreen cannot go beyond 60℃. However, sometimes I don't use the touchscreen and prefer better performance. You know, an option could go beyond Best Performance mode without a 3rd party overclocking software.

Hi William,

Throttling issues can be caused by several factors. Have you done any troubleshooting steps? You might want to boot the Surface in safe mode with networking, check if the issue persists. Click this link for steps on how to start your Surface in safe mode.

Let us know how it goes.

Regards.

Same problem here.

The SB2 worked fine until recently. I don't know it's the temperature (I bought SB2 in winter and there's no throttle problem encountered by that time) or updates, they said there is battery drain problem because of the poor power supply. Maybe they lowered the frequency in order to solve this.

Setting to Best Performace didn't fix the throttle at all.

Here is a test chart by XTU, it's tested under Best Performace setting, room temperature 30℃.

The valley of the frequency curve is 0.4GHz.

Core temperature never goes beyond 65℃. Actually, if the throttle was caused by heat protection, it's too conservative. Other laptops trigger its' heat protection at 80-90℃ normally.