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I have recently purchased a secondhand/refurbished HP laptop with i7-8550U CPU and MX 150 GPU. The first thing I noticed is that it runs unreasonably slow on games, much slower than my other i7-8550U + 620 (GPU) laptop.
I tried to figure out what is going on. Looking at the CPU-Z chart and performance tab in Task Manager, I see some very strange behaviors. The new secondhand laptop CPU operates in a much higher voltage range (0.9V - 1.35V), compared to the other laptop with the same CPU (0.7V - 0.9V). The secondhand laptop's CPU constantly has its multiplier at 30 to 40, core speed at 2500 MHz to 4000 MHz, while the other one is stable at a 10 to 13 multiplier and a 1000 to 1200 MHz core speed. All of these are idle CPU results (less than 5% usage).
What is going on with this secondhand/refurb laptop? Has it been altered? Why is the CPU constantly running at such high voltages/frequencies yet underperforming? I haven't tried undervolting it, but I don't think it would be a wise move without understanding why the CPU is not running at factory configuration in the first place. All firmware, software is up to date, including BIOS.
Deancue
Posted 2018-07-08T14:32:18.760
Reputation: 101
"Recently purchased"? Return it. If you try to fix something, you're likely to void any warranty, written or implied. – DrMoishe Pippik – 2018-07-08T14:58:06.793
Try resetting the BIOS settings. Sounds like the power management settings have been disabled. – Appleoddity – 2018-07-08T15:02:03.577
@Appleoddity Already tried that... – Deancue – 2018-07-08T15:11:01.630
Can you run some sort of benchmark like Cinebench to get a quantitative confirmation of the differing performance? – JMY1000 – 2018-07-09T16:49:23.200