Intel Speed Step in the BIOS?

[Russ Smith]

M6800 at work was incredibly slow. We found a bunch of issues, his restore was set up wrong so he had nearly 500GB of restore points on his 1TB drive, his backup was wrong, etc. But fixing all that only slightly sped it up. Turning off Optimus so we were sure it was using the right graphics card did nothing.

Then our Solidworks expert found in the BIOS this Intel Speed Step, which was enabled, he disabled it and voila, drawings that took 4 minutes to load now load in 30 seconds.

The question is, do we void the warranty and is this the program that causes the CPU to throttle down when it gets too hot, or is that built into the chip itself? With Optiumus, Dell actually is telling us to disable it because they know it doesn't play well with Solidworks so it doesn't use the correct video card it doesn't recognize the need for higher speed graphics and switches to the add on card.

Disabling speed step on other systems speeds them up, but none of them were nearly as slow. I suspect the motherboard is bad and that if Dell replaces that, we won't have to have Speed Step off.

Just curious are we taking a big risk in having it off, the system runs great, I have Speed Fan installed so he can monitor his temps, but I know this user he will not do that he'll just keep using it until it melts down, he doesn't pay attention to stuff like that.

We're waiting to hear back from Dell on if they agree we should have Speed Step off, or if that's proof the motherboard is faulty.

 

[Russ Smith]

Dell essentially said it was ok to turn it off and sent me links to information on Speed Step but it's clearly not working right which leads me to suspect the motherboard.

When the user gets in I have to check his power settings, apparently if you set it to "power saving" that tells Speed Step to always throttle it down. You want to select high performance or always on or whatever the highest performance option is. That doesn't seem to be any different than just disabling it in the BIOS though.

 

[dreamcastrocks]

From what it sounds like, I doubt a new motherboard fixes it. I think it is just a program that they found doesn't work well with that chipset.

 

[Russ Smith]

From what it sounds like, I doubt a new motherboard fixes it. I think it is just a program that they found doesn't work well with that chipset.

Well except that even just booting the machine up was running slow. It definitely performed horribly with Solid Works, but then we have about 40 SolidWorks users and almost all of them apparently have Speed Step enabled.

His is such an outlier even after fixing all the obvious stuff that it really seems like a hardware issue.

But Dell is clearly not interested in replacing the motherboard.

 

[dreamcastrocks]

Well except that even just booting the machine up was running slow. It definitely performed horribly with Solid Works, but then we have about 40 SolidWorks users and almost all of them apparently have Speed Step enabled.

His is such an outlier even after fixing all the obvious stuff that it really seems like a hardware issue.

But Dell is clearly not interested in replacing the motherboard.

Ah. Makes more sense. Is there a bios update you can apply?

 

[Chaz]

Dell essentially said it was ok to turn it off and sent me links to information on Speed Step but it's clearly not working right which leads me to suspect the motherboard.

When the user gets in I have to check his power settings, apparently if you set it to "power saving" that tells Speed Step to always throttle it down. You want to select high performance or always on or whatever the highest performance option is. That doesn't seem to be any different than just disabling it in the BIOS though.

You should just be able to set it so that it is always on high performance while plugged in.

As I understand it speed step is mostly there to save battery. As long as the fan/exhaust system is working properly and the computer is not placed in way that restricts airflow then running at full CPU speed shouldn't cause it to over heat even when running CPU intensive applications.
If it is over heating then there is likely a problem with the fan slowing down (loose bearings) or the heat sink is not making proper contact with the cpu.

 

[Russ Smith]

Ah. Makes more sense. Is there a bios update you can apply?

Did that, it was at A04, now at A13 so 2 years behind on BIOS.

 

[Russ Smith]

You should just be able to set it so that it is always on high performance while plugged in.

As I understand it speed step is mostly there to save battery. As long as the fan/exhaust system is working properly and the computer is not placed in way that restricts airflow then running at full CPU speed shouldn't cause it to over heat even when running CPU intensive applications.
If it is over heating then there is likely a problem with the fan slowing down (loose bearings) or the heat sink is not making proper contact with the cpu.

That's what we wound up doing. We reset Speed Step to enabled in the BIOS, rebooted and set the power settings as you said and it's at full speed. Changed out the AC adapter and the battery and I have new memory coming next week so the guy will have everything new except MOBO and HD. We're guessing that because he had his hard drive so full, the CPU throttled down and somehow it got "stuck" and the only way to unstick it was turning off Speed Step.

Back on now.

Users are sure fun, had another guy with a slow machine. He had his windows backup set to backup to his C drive, and just to make sure he really screwed it up, he also had his waste basket set to backup, and he never emptied it . So his hard drive was full, less than 1 gb.