Surface Pro 3 throttling

With all do respect please stop posting your horrible posts.  

Listen stop making excuses.  The way the Surface Pro 3 is throttling is NOT how it should be throttling.  

It needs to Throttle prior and after to keep a steady speed first of all and second of all why have an i7 if you can't even use it to its full potential.  Watch some YouTube videos on people doing tests.

This isn't something people should need to worry about EVER!

This product is beautiful and is exactly what I want, but I WILL NOT buy it unless this is fixed.

Currently the Surface Pro 3 will Turbo Boost to its spec top speed which is fine with in all reason at 2.6 GHZ and then once the secondary sensor not the CPU sensor reaches a certain temperature it throttles all the way down to 800mhz.

Proof https://www.youtube.com/results?search\_query=surface+pro+3+gaming+i7+throttling

Watch the first 4 videos.

If I am going to spend 1500 to 2000 dollars + 130 dollars for the keyboard I really think this is garbage.  There is basically no difference between the 800 dollar model and the 2000 dollar model other then storage space.

I am not trying to be a jerk here I am just being honest.

I hadn't seen your and Eric's posts here until today.  I've been trying to see how I can reduce throttling any way I can.  Currently I'm working on a custom fan that will be 3d printed but it will be quite a bit more than the USB one you have pictured.  Either way it would be great to collaborate with others that would like to get the most out of their sp3.

Could you post a GPU test from XTU (Intel Extreme Tuning Utility) after running for 10+ min with the fan on it?

Here is one I've done with the fan I designed:

The interesting thing here is how spikey the gpu clock is.  It would be great to see MS try to smooth that out when using a fan... I know, a long shot.

Also, here are some links to where I posted about the custom fan:

http://www.surfaceforums.net/threads/custom-fan-to-reduce-throttling.10996/

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro3-surfhardware/custom-fan-to-reduce-throttling/9983aa15-64d6-4653-a732-388e3c7e7e5d

HI,

there has been some change with the firmware update in September?

Yeah, the chart looks very similar to what I see in my tests, although my intel power gadget has never shown my i7 using any more than 17.1W TDP. However, the slow drop over sustained use and the TDP drops with throttling are identical.

By 3dmark do you mean just the normal cloud gate/fire strike type tests that come with the demo? I couldn't get halfway into any of those before throttling hits. With external cooling though I was able to get some decent scores: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/3886434. The scores seem to be about in line with the average. The main other device that uses the i7-4650U is the Macbook Air; the SP3 benchmarks a bit lower but not by too much.

Its too bad that the SP3 can't cool itself effectively enough to prevent throttling, but at least we can take it into our own hands and stop the throttling with a portable/cheap cooler.

Fan running off of a USB extension plugged into the 1A USB port on the Surface power brick to keep the Surface's USB port open.

Alternative with fan running straight off of the Surface. Nice because it doesn't need to be adjusted when moving the Surface around.

I'm currently content with this workaround. The fan/extension easily fits in my bag and costed under $10 and lets me get slightly better performance than my Surface Pro 2 for graphics.

Edit: So Furmark isn't a typo for future mark. With the same test as you I got a peak TDP of 25W. I have a peak GPU power of about 19W which drops very quickly to 14W. After 75s proper throttling takes over and this drops to 11W where it stays until the computer starts slowing everything down until the GPU takes a minimum of 3W. For a graphical version of what I just said see the plot below.

I used 3dmark to check unthrottled power usage. I am using the RT version so I can't get it to run until the computer gets hot. I can just try restarting tests over and over again.

The CPU+GPU limit is just about 25W. I had sustained GPU power usage at 13W+/-2 before various tests ended. I had a peak GPU power of 14.5W9