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ROG FLOW X16: A.C Turbo mode still allows CPU throttling! How best to disable throttling?

Skip198
Level 8

I'm doing real time audio work in a DAW, and need low latency.   I would have expected the Turbo profile in A.C to give me this, but unfortunately, I get intermittent clicks & pops.  
Running LatencyMon often yields reasonably good results (despite the throttling), HOWEVER, if I change the following two power profile settings, it get considerably better results:
Processor Idle Demote Threshold: set to 100%
Processor Idle Promote Threshold: set to 100%
Alternatively, simply generating background CPU activity also improves the LatencyMon results - this is further evidence that the problem is due to throttling.

Unfortunately, applying those two settings doesn't COMPLETELY fix the problem - clicks/pops still occur roughly every 30 to 60 minutes.  

Should we be expected to have to make these kinds of edits to the power profile when using A.C? I wouldn't have thought so. 
Are there any other settings that might get me the final 1% of performance?

Note that I have also tried a clean install of Windows 11, without having ever installed A.C. The result seems about the same. (I ensured that "Best Performance" was selected in Settings > System > Power & Battery )

By way of comparison, Windows 11 is working absolutely fine on a rather old Dell XPS 15 9560. I set CPU min & max to 100%, disable a few background services like I always do, and it just works beautifully. 

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3 REPLIES 3

Skip198
Level 8

I've attached a screen grab from the Windows Performance Analyzer, showing the typical pause in system activity for approximately 14ms, when the CPU throttling occurs.  I have a Powershell script that loops indefinitely, simply checking the high resolution timer each time, and comparing it with the value from the previous loop iteration. If this ever exceeds 10ms, the script terminates the Windows Performance Recorder session.  
At the same time as this script was executing, I had the VB-Audio ASIO Driver test utility running. For this particular failure mode (CPU throttling causing a 14ms pause in system processing), this utility will report a "callback error" percentage of 100%.  This is a consistent - I've run this setup multiple times - each time the Powershell script detects the > 10ms glitch, the driver test utility will report a 100% callback error. (which I presume is akin to a buffer underrun)
Note: it took a whopping 5.4 *HOURS* for this event to occur!  
wpa_screen_grab.png

I forgot to mention that in the test in my previous reply, I had set the aforementioned Processor Idle Demote & Promote to 100%. Again - that *almost* fixes the problem.

Skip198
Level 8

Same problem with Windows 10 on the same machine.
If anyone has a ROG FLOW X16 (or similar) and is willing to try to reproduce this problem, I'd really appreciate it. I've created a Powershell script that can detect the 14ms of  idle time, and then stop the Windows Performance Recorder. The event will be right near the end of the recording.
ASUS have asked me to do some very basic things, none of which have helped. The next step with them would be to leave my laptop with them - I'm not at all confident that will achieve anything.