Surface Pro 3 Throttling Solution?

Anonymous
2014-07-06T03:09:34+00:00

Hi! I received my surface pro 3 about 2 weeks ago and so far my experience has been great while surfing the internet, personalizing it to my needs, watching videos, and writing with the stylus.

 I have seen how the surface one and surface pro 2 can handle games on the lowest settings and was very impressed and encouraged to buy the SP3 for light gaming when I have free time and am not using it for work.  However, I am a little disappointed with how the performance on the SP3 drastically drops to less than 1Ghz about 3-5 minutes after I start playing any game or even a less intensive game like Dota 2, Portal, or the newer version of GTA San Andreas (a 2005 GAME) which I bought this week from the Windows Store.  Most of the games I have tried start at 30-60 frames per second but as the heat starts building up, the frame rates drop to 10-15 frames due to throttling... This DOES NOT happen with the surface pro or pro 2 and most people play high end games at 30 frames per second on low settings for long periods even with throttling. I am not able to do that on my surface pro 3... Why? Why is there so much "power" that you can only use for a short time?... Did I just spend $1400 for much less performance than a Surface pro 2?...

I hope that this can be fixed in some way very soon. I really love the surface pro 3 and don't want to return it. But when I play a 2005 game like GTA San Andreas which was ported for smartphones and tablets and the frames drop below 25 after a while... it really gets me thinking...

Surface | Surface Pro | Performance and maintenance

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-08-04T12:12:41+00:00

    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.

    __________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Barb

    Windows Entertainment and Connected Home MVP

    My Blog - http://digitalmediaphile.com/

    Barb's Connected World Blog Reader Windows 8 App -

    http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/barbs-connected-world-blog/02f35769-52bf-461c-b1d5-06e54a58d298

    Please mark as answered if this answers your question

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-08-05T18:19:48+00:00

    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.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-08-08T21:28:05+00:00

    Hello,

    I have an issue with my Surface Pro. Whenever I play a game or run a benchmark, CPU works well for the first 20 minutes and then drops to 0.8Ghz frequency. Surface is connected to power (not running on battery), and for example, when I was playing a game it didn't get hotter than 75c but after about 20 minutes frequency on CPU dropped to 0.8Ghz and game was not playable after that. This happens both on balanced and high power plan (hyper-v enabled). Is there a work around for this because what is the point of having i7 processor if it is going to be running at 0.8Ghz speed only after 20 minutes of load, which by the way was only about 60% at 2.49Ghz.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-08-10T13:54:33+00:00

    Omg dude... why haven't I found this forum before.... look at my reddit...

    http://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/2d0cme/surface_pro_3_i7_cpu_drops_to_08ghz/

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-08-10T18:06:15+00:00

    So it begins to throttle even at ipad level games? I can edit on my ipad for extended periods of time, would you say the surface pro 3 can do that(are there some simple video editing apps on the window store to decrease the usage of the CPU)? Im on the fence of getting it or not for college and little YouTube projects. But if it throttles even while playing gta (also on the App Store - using an ipad 2 its playable) then i dont think this can really be called a laptop replacement. I really want to buy one because of the not taking capabilities. To hear it throttle just on a game from its store is crazy. Would it throttle on something like clash of clans if it was on there? I also read somewhere that placing a fan close by the ventilation areas improves its performances by a lot.

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