HP 8540w Core clock and Temp questions

[dew_veil]

Hello,

I have a HP 8540w mobile workstation with a Intel Core i5-520M processor, running Windows 7 Professional 64-bits.

I am experiencing some shut down of the machine (the power simply goes off) out of the blue so I downloaded HWInfo64 v4.19_1950 in order to try and detect the cause(s) of these problems, which I think are due to temperature issues.

Unfortunately, I am not a tech in processors at all, so it's kind of hard to understand all the details provided by HWInfo.

One thing I noticed and found strange is that the line "Core #1 Clock" and "Uncore Clock" of the window "HWInfo sensor status" show values which are way above the capabilities of the i5-520M processor.

I am providing a screenshot of the main windows of the programs, where this can be seen.

Also, what can I do (with HWInfo) in order to log the activity of the computer and trace the cause of the overheating?
If I use the "Logging" function, will the log be saved in case of power shut-off?

I'd appreciate any help in understanding and monitoring my temperature issues. If other details are needed, I'd be glad to provide them.

Thanks!

---

Hello again,

Ok, it looks like the interesting part of the screenshot got cut out, so here is the link to the screenshot :

screenshot_HWInfo

Sorry for the inconvenience!

 

[Martin]

As for the erratic clock values, this is actually a glitch in HWiNFO which happens on a certain family of processors and I don't have a fix for this yet. So you don't need to worry about this.
But if you look at the temperatures reported by HWiNFO, this seems to be the problem. 104 C maximum is pretty high, moreover I can see in the screenshot, that "Thermal Throttling" was activated, which means your CPU run so hot, that it was forced to throttle down. Most probably sometimes even this didn't help to cool down the CPU, or the spike was such high, that the CPU forced a shutdown to prevent thermal damage.
So my conclusion is that there's really a cooling problem. You might want to check some forums about how to improve this (Tech|Inferno for example).
Another alternative is to try to raise the fan speed using HWiNFO, you can find a guide here: http://forum.techinferno.com/hwinfo32-64-discussion/59-hp-notebook-fan-control-hwinfo32.html

 

[dew_veil]

As for the erratic clock values, this is actually a glitch in HWiNFO which happens on a certain family of processors and I don't have a fix for this yet. So you don't need to worry about this.
But if you look at the temperatures reported by HWiNFO, this seems to be the problem. 104 C maximum is pretty high, moreover I can see in the screenshot, that "Thermal Throttling" was activated, which means your CPU run so hot, that it was forced to throttle down. Most probably sometimes even this didn't help to cool down the CPU, or the spike was such high, that the CPU forced a shutdown to prevent thermal damage.
So my conclusion is that there's really a cooling problem. You might want to check some forums about how to improve this (Tech|Inferno for example).
Another alternative is to try to raise the fan speed using HWiNFO, you can find a guide here: http://forum.techinferno.com/hwinfo32-64-discussion/59-hp-notebook-fan-control-hwinfo32.html

Hello Martin,

Thanks for the fast answer!

1) Noted for the erratic values, no problem, thanks! (I was worried)

2) Ahhh. So the line "Core #0 Thermal throttling" with a "Yes" is not a good thing then

I didn't know that, so thank you. Seeing the "ThermMon" "Ok" and green made me think that "whatever" was ok, but it doesn"t seem to be the case!

I'll take a look at the guide you mentionned (cautiously because I wouldn't want to burn the computer) and read the TechInferno forum too.

I'll let you know of my findings, if any!

Re. the question about the "logging" in HWInfo... does it get saved in case of a shut-down? Would a log help at all (for someone who can read it properly, of course)?

Thanks for you help, I really appreciate!

 

[Martin]

Yes, the "Core #0 Thermal throttling = Yes" is not a good sign
Note, that the indicator is not "sticky", it shows the actual status. So since in the Sensors window you can see the Max value (which shows Yes for you and means that during the scan time it was active), in the summary window it shows actual value only (ThermMon). So if you would put high load on the system, you should be able to observe both indicators reporting that Thermal Throttling is engaged for certain moments.

The Logging in sensors is saved to disk during run-time, however since Windows applies file buffering for file writes, so when a system crash would occur, there's no guarantee that the latest information was flushed onto the disk. I could make it force to always write all information straight to disk (without buffering), but that would have a negative impact on the entire sensor monitoring performance.

 

[dew_veil]

Thank you Martin for your very informative answer.

I'll let you know how things turn out with my temperature/cooling issues - with the help of HWInfo !