Surface Pro 3 Throttling Solution?

Another update after a few workdays with my i7 SP3.

I am now 99% sure that the thermal throttling has nothing to do with the hardware or the airflow and is all in the drivers with the graphics chip. Today I compressed a 30GB virtual machine using 7zip and using all 4 logical cores. It took over an hour with the processor pegged between 93 and 100% load. Throughout the whole hour, not once did the surface drop below 2.1GHz, mostly sitting around 2.2GHz at 80 degrees Celsius. The surface pro 3 is perfectly capable of maintaining high speeds and acceptable temperatures for long periods of time, I have only observed throttling when something graphical (aka a video game) is also in play, using the Intel graphics 5000 as well. I will try to run some sort of graphical stress test to confirm this, but from a compression stress test, purely processor, the surface performs perfectly.

On Mon, 4 Aug 2014 11:57:19 +0000, Cothek wrote:

|The August update may be tomorrow

It's the SEcoND Tuesday of each month... 8/12 is the next one.

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Barb

Windows Entertainment and Connected Home MVP

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Please mark as answered if this answers your question

The August update may be tomorrow but it would still be great to hear something from MS on this. Without a statement I fear they may lose quite a few customers.

Well, for speed, 800MHz definitely will not be enough for most games on the market now.

I would say to wait for the August Update to see what happens there.

For testing, those are prototypes that are built but most likely, they may have only run some games for a few minutes to see if they would do it and what performance.  That may be where they could have encountered a problem and the manufacturing cycle had already begun.

I should be getting the i3 model around mid week and am going to install Age of Empires: Asian Dynasty onto it.  If there is anything that can rip a machine apart for performance (a low end machine at that), that is the game to do it with.

We shall see.  If the August Update doesn't fix anything for the i5/i7 performance, I think Microsoft needs to remove the "gaming" capabilities of the tablets from advertisements.  This could actually backfire big time.

My final conclusion is that unless the game can run at 800MHz, the SP3 can't run it. I logged temperature, CPU and GPU Frequency and usage percentage with some pretty ugly results during a game of StarCraft II (a very very well optimized game). It took about a minute and a half to steadily drop from the smooth 50FPS the game started at (which the hardware, especially my i7 should be able to maintain easily) to 30FPS. Immediately after it started dipping under 30fps to the high 20s, then another 2 and a half minutes after that to dip below 20FPS. About 5 minutes into playing the game, my FPS stabilized around 13, completely unplayable. It took the processor about 30 seconds to drop from 1.7GHz (the rated clock speed of the i7 processor, it should be able to run at that indefinitely) for the CPU to hit around 77 degrees Celsius and the processor being cut to 800 MHz for the first time, and then another 30 seconds until the processor stabilized at 800MHz almost solidly throughout the rest of the game, never returning to those high clocks even after the temperature stabilized at 60 degrees.

Although it may be understandable that airflow is not as good in the SP3 as with the SP2, I agree that the 60 degrees temperature throttle is much to conservative, especially with my old SP2 happily sitting in the low 80s indefinitely and the TJMax of the processor being all the way at 100 degrees C. I have no idea how microsoft is advertising that League of Legends is a featured game on the SP3, given that it does not run in a playable fashion even with the resolution cut down to 1440 x 1050. My only idea for how this happened is that the testing/hardware team has no communication with the advertising team, as anyone who tries to run a game on the SP3 notices this immediately.

I'm bashing the SP3 here not because I hate it, but because I love it and this is a black eye I would love to see fixed, although the most I dare hope for is a slight improvement (70 degrees Microsoft? Please?). For everything else I've use my i7 SP3 for it has run like a dream, but games just don't run at all which really hurts when its a $1600+ machine.

Here is the log file from my test on OneDrive: http://1drv.ms/1uduKv6