Question Laptop Throttles too much when on battery power

[XrRider324]

I have a Dell G5 5587 that runs perfectly fine when plugged in, but as soon as I unplug the power the CPU drops from around 3 Ghz to 0.8 Ghz. I have also noticed that GPU utilization (both integrated and dedicated) rises when on battery while CPU utilization drops, the amount of this change varies so im not sure if its just my imagination. The CPU clock isnt locked to 8 Ghz, it goes as high as 1.3, though it doesn't change depending on what I am doing; it is just goes up for a couple seconds then back down to 0.8. I booted windows into safe mode and didn't have any issues there, the CPU clock stayed at 2.30 Ghz no matter if it was on battery power or not. I also have all the latest drivers so that is not an issue.

I do not have throttlestop or any apps where I have messed with any settings. I have been reading that the CPU gets limited to 15w when on battery but I don't think that can't be the only issue because on safe mode it didn't drop. So you get an idea of the performance impact, I loaded up minecraft when plugged in and got anywhere from 100-200 frames, when on battery power it basically stayed bellow 20 even though the gpu usage went up to like 100% for integrated graphics and from like 20 to 30 for dedicated graphics. Can anyone think of what the issue might be or how I could go about fixing it?

 

[AlHuneke]

Have you looked at your power plan setting (processor state max on battery). You have to drill down thru the advanced settings a couple of levels to find these. Probably not the cause but maybe.....

 

[XrRider324]

Have you looked at your power plan setting (processor state max on battery). You have to drill down thru the advanced settings a couple of levels to find these. Probably not the cause but maybe.....

Yeah I have tried messing with the power plan settings but they dont seem to change anything. I might have to try throttlestop but if its an issue with a hard 15w limit on battery then idk if there is much I can do.

 

[davejoemik]

i have the same notebook, and mine started behaving the exact same a few days ago. have you managed to solve your problem?

 

[Etrius vanRandr]

Pretty sure this is on purpose. My Inspiron 15 7567 does the same thing, even my ZBook 17 G2 does this.

My Inspiron limited CPU to 15W and GPU to 35W, and my ZBook limits CPU to 20W and GPU to 50W respectively, but this is to prevent absolutely destroying the battery with rapid discharge.

Gaming laptops and hipower laptops do this intentionally really not much around it.

You can try throttlestop, but I've noticed that it doesn't really help much especially if the GPU is also limited.

The only notebooks I noticed it actually working on are extremely old, like 2nd gen Sandy Bridge laptops like a Dell Latitude E6420 and my old 2012 MBP which I put BootCamp on.