u/Brilliant_War9548

I've been struggling with a stupid issue where clock would randomly go down to 800mhz/base clock and whole screen run at an extremely sluggish refresh rate for a bit. That would happen on games (Titanfall 2), benchmarks (timespy) and haven't done anything heavy work related on it but you'd probably get the same on a cpu heavy task. Checking in throttlestop it was PL1 throttling so cpu somehow managed to reach over the what i thought was the real pl1, 85w reported by hwinfo. Turns out no it's 70w pl1 and 106w pl2 which is enforced by some EC, and the msr and mmio power limits you can set do absolutely nothing. Sounds fine and is fine when tested with an 11850h on timespy, but once you get to the i9s and the only one ive tested being my 11950h it can reach 70w easily on cpu tasks. And what does it do when it reaches 70w ? Instead of just reducing the clock by a little it instantly throttles to 800mhz/the base clock if youre lucky for a bit which will make any benchmark score you were running false and just be annoying.

To stop that the biggest reliable clock ive found you can limit your cpu to (you can do that in windows power plans) is 4GHz. More than that and it can randomly throttle. Hopefully this post saves someone headaches.

dont mind the no data, airplane mode was on

that's a whole ass crater

4ghz cap active - clock goes down on the cpu test because from what ive understood max sustained all core clock is 3.5ghz which it settles around that

If you're wondering why the score is low behind average, thank HP for limiting your gpu that can do 90w perfectly fine and pull 91 fps instead of 76 at that wattage on furmark 1080p if you revert to 529.19 and set the power limit through nvidia-smi -pl and disable the dynamic boost driver, cooling is also perfectly capable (2C increase at 90W) so it's kind of a mystery on why the wattage on zbooks is so low, also all forms of dynamic boost despite being reported as enabled just never work i've limited the cpu to 15w on purpose and ran all kinds of gpu benchmarks and it never boosted despite dynamic boost being known for its alternate name dynamic artificial benchmark score booster 2.0

also raise your laptop, just 3cm the intake massively benefits and you can actually get 5ghz like that on some stuff

end of my cpu clock rant