HP ZBook G9 (Studio or Fury) have thermal throttling ?

[RobyBob]

Has anyone done tests with HWiNFO to see if HP ZBook G9 (Studio or Fury) notebooks are thermal throttling ?
I would like to buy one but I would like to have a notebook / workstation WITHOUT thermal throttling, so with a very good cooling system.

It would be nice for the various computer companies to adopt HWiNFO to verify the correct design of the cooling system ... and to publish the results among the hardware features of the PC.
Because it is useless to buy a high-performance PC (and therefore spend a lot of money) and then realize that the various COREs significantly decrease their performance to decrease the CPU temperature !!!

Thank you
Bob

 

[ewaldc]

I got a ZBook Power G9 with the i7-12700H (14 core - 20 logical processors) last week. Unfortunately I made the wrong decision to upgrade to Windows 11, resulting in a full week's effort only to get to the point of having a workable system . Yesterday (finally) I was able to perform a few performance tests.
Out of the box, with Intel Dynamic Tuning enabled in the BIOS, the ZBook Power G9 is not doing any thermal throttling. HWinfo64 reports the PL1 power limit at 75W and the PL2 at 107W and a PROCHOT of 98C. These limits look reasonably high but as I ran Throttlestop CPU test, Heavyload, SuperPi etc. and I was not able to get it over 85 degrees and a CPU package of 61W.
I suspect that the Intel Dynamic Tuning utility, as you suggested, is limiting the multiplier between 26.50 and 30 on the power cores, hence reducing power and thus preventing thermal throttling. It's essentially disabling turboboost. In addtion, with HeavyLoad, it will during execution change the PL1 limit to 35W when the GPU is heavily loaded.
I have not yet tried to play with the BIOS option and e.g. turn Intel Dynamic tuning off. As I get the chance to do this, I will report on it.

As a HW/chip designer and software developer the system remains pretty fast though. Compiling a kernel with 20 threads is very fast and it would require a second NVME drive to further improve the performance as IO wait is the main bottleneck.

 

[RobyBob]

Hi @ewaldc, many thanks !!
The info on your HP G9 Power (with 12th generation i7) regarding Thermal Trottling is very interesting.
Could you tell me what is the HP code of your ZBook G9?
On the HP site for my country I can't find a decent ZBook G9 regarding the graphics card .... I was hoping to find an I7 or I9 (12th gen) with at least NVIDIA RTX 3060 ... 3070 ... instead all available notebooks mount A1000, A2000 etc. which, in my opinion, are too low in performance when compared to the overall performance of the notebook. While HP Gaming notebooks (Omen) told me they only have 1 slot HD NVMe PCIe and that's too little for me ....
I just returned to DELL a Precision that had 3 slots for HD NVMe PCIe (from this point of view it was fabulous!) Unfortunately it was suffering from strong Thermal Trottling
This is the measure with only HWiNFO64 Portable and without other APP:
https: //postimg.cc/vx6dp5nB] https://i.postimg.cc/vx6dp5nB/Temperatura-CPU-2022-07-11-153851.png [/ img]

Can you post here (screenshot) the HWiNFO measurement of your ZBook G9?
Just use HWiNFO Portable and wait a few minutes before taking the screenshot
Thank you
Bob

 

[ewaldc]

I've got the 6B8B2EA with the RTX A1000 and 32GB of memory for 1500 Euro's without tax. HWInfo screenshot below just after running a series of tests with Intel Dynamic Tuning disabled.
There is just one PCIe 4.0 NVME slot though. Just did a test with a (low cost) USB 3.2 NVME enclosure that has PCIe 3.0 like performance in reading and writing, and when using it as temp space on windows it has eliminated almost all IO waits on the 20 threads and improved compilation time with "just" another 4%. I guess a single PCIe 4.0 NVME slot/disk is probably an OK compromise for this system. On Linux with memory based tmp file system, I am not expecting many IO waits during compilation.

When the system boots with Intel Dynamic Tuning disabled, the PL1 power limit is set to 25W and PL2 to 107W (as before). Started Intel XTU, which told me I have to disable Windows CPU core isolation first (seemed to be turned on by default). Once disabled, I could set the PL1 back to 75W. When redoing my tests while running throttlestop, I now notice that the performance cores were running at 3.4GHz and my kernel compilation was 20% faster and so were the TS Bench tests. For tests that only use 4 to 6 cores, I see the preformance cores go into turbo boost mode. Interestingly HWInfo shows 4.690GHz (4.7GHz as per the CPU spec), but throttlestop only shows an FID of 44.16. Not sure what that exactly means, but I am not an expert in these tools at all... TS Bench 960M I get to around 56 seconds, 92C and 68W CPU package for 20 threads.
Interestingly with one of the benchmarks all performance cores were around 3,4GHz resulting in a similar 20% performance gain, I managed to reach a core max of 100C according to HWInfo on 4 CPU cores for just a tiny fraction (resulting in a thermal throttle according to HWInfo), but coretemp and throttlestop did report "only" a max of 97C on just 3 cores and no thermal throttling... Anyhow, no way to get the CPU package above 72W.

For the work I do the system is absolutely great. Clean compilation of a large project is done before I can have a good look at what is going on in HWinfo... The 20 threads do make a real difference.
While it is possible to get all the performance cores in max turbo boost without throttling, it is not possible to do this with all 20 cores at 100CPU. 3.4GHz seems to be the max then.

Wil do some more tests with Intel Dynamic Tuning enabled, now that I have disabled the Windows CPU core isolation which seems to make a difference according to this article.

 

[RobyBob]

Very well, thank you @ewaldc
Before making a new screenshot, open the "CPU .... DTS" folder (see my screenshot), so you can see the details of all the thermal throttling COREs with relative minimum, maximum and average temperatures ...
Are you sure you only have one HD slot in your notebook?
In the ZBook Power G9 manual that I found on the internet I read "(Up to 2) m.2 storage (NVMe PCIe Gen4 SSDs"

 

[ewaldc]

Here we go, still a 2 to 3 degree difference between HWinfo and other tools.
I have turned Intel Dynamic Tuning back on (reflected in the attached screenshot) , it is resulting in less heat, lower power consumption and performance wise it's not a huge difference. With dynamic tuning disabled, it seems you lose speed shift (or at least speed shift control).
My conclusions so far:
- no need to worry about thermal throttling: frequency throttling and CPU idling/power disconnect are actively used to avoid thermal throttling, ultimately resulting in better throughput for longer duration heavy workloads IMHO
- (almost no) power throttling. I have seen it only twice for a fraction of a second. The system delivers enough voltage/current within the limits of its cooling system
- the cooling system is the weakest link: to get the max out if the i7-12700H @4.7GHz with 20 threads, it needs desktop class cooling. Even then the benefits will be poor in performance per watt terms. The sweetspot seems to be around 60 to 65W for this CPU package.
- the tuning of speed shift (EPP), for which Intel/HP gives us full control, makes a huge difference to tune the performance per workload. With lower EPP values, TurboBoost is pretty much disabled for longer durations. With values >= 128, it will run all P-cores at max frequencies as long as the cooling can hold it.
- higher frequencies (above 4.2GHz) in Turbo Boost yield a lot of heat, but limited performance gain
- if you can get piece of mind knowing that only ~85% of what this CPU could do at peak is useable, then it's a great system: I can work most of the day with 500 browser tabs open plus Android Studio/VScode/VisualStudio/Atom etc with just 5 to 6 Watts CPU package consumption and still compile a large project or linux kernel in less than two minutes without the fans turning on loud.

I am indeed not sure it has only one m.2 storage slot, as I have not opened the ZBook yet. I just assumed because it was mentioned nowhere. Anyhow, with both PCIe 4.0 and USB 4.0 that is not such a big deal for me.

 

[RobyBob]

Perfect, excellent rating, thanks for the details @ewaldc
The thermal dissipation, looking at the HWiNFO Thermal Trottling results, is much better than the DELL Precision that I have personally tested ....
However, I believe that computer companies still have to work a lot on this issue .... almost always reducing the size and weight of notebooks for marketing reasons penalizes heat dissipation.
Without other APPs (with only HWiNFO), thermal throttling should be totally absent in every medium-high-end notebook, also considering the prices they have ..
Thanks for your tests

 

[teoff13]

Hi, I am looking to buy the hp zbook power g9. I want it for programming, I am not interested for the gpu, only the cpu.
Do you think this a good laptop for this?

How do you compare it with the Dell Inspiron plus 7620, in terms of cpu performance and cooling, not the GPU. They are on the same price on my country.

 

[RobyBob]

Hi @teoff13
as you would have read in my first post I too am considering the purchase of an HP ZBook G9, but I would first like to understand if this notebook has thermal throttling problems ....
For the moment I only have the tests done by @ewaldc (see his posts here).
In my opinion the computer companies that design notebooks today are too busy making notebooks beautiful and light and too little managing thermal dissipation ..... and this creates thermal throttling problems, therefore reduced performance (... .when the CPU exceeds the dangerous temperature of 90, 100 ° C automatically the clock of the various CORE is lowered ...).
If the notebook is used for normal office activities, thermal throttling does not create serious problems ..... different instead if the notebook is used much more (rendering, video editing, photography, heavy processing, etc.)

For the Dell Inspiron plus 7620 I can't tell you anything, I can only say that I recently returned a Precision 7560 to DELL because it was affected by heavy thermal throttling (measurements made with the HWiNFO64 APP only work .... see my post from the last few days) .

Let's see if any Dell Inspiron plus 7620 owner reads this thread and posts a HWiNFO measurement ....

 

[RobyBob]

After returning the DELL Precision 7560 I bought an HP OMEN GAMING 16-k0008nl HP code 6R3Z6EA
(with I9 12900H, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA RTX 3070Ti, QHD 165Hz, 3ms response time, 300 nits, 100% sRGB - Windows 11 Home)
After some research I came to the conclusion that Gaming notebooks are better in regards to thermal throttling problem
I've been using it for a few months and I'm very satisfied.
I don't use it for gaming but I still don't accept having a notebook that gets too hot even with HwINFO

HP OMEN GAMING 16-k0008nl Only with con HwINFO:


HP OMEN GAMING 16-k0008nl With Prime95 Torture Test: