- Joined
- May 8, 2011
- Messages
- 14
- Motherboard
- Acer E5-575-33BM
- CPU
- i3-7100U
- Graphics
- HD 620 @ 1920x1080
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
Picked up an 8470P last week, and while installing Yosemite went smoothly, I've been running into an issue where my laptop slows down severely after a while. When running at normal speed, Geekbench 3 completes in 1m39s with close to 6300 multicore score. After the slowdown hits, it takes nearly 6 minutes to complete. Oddly the score only drops by about a third, but everything else about the system is much slower and stays slow. An app that normally launches in a second will take 5 - 10 seconds instead, and be sluggish once it's loaded.
At first I thought Spotlight was the culprit, since indexing was often running when I checked Activity Monitor, so I disabled indexing with sudo mdutil -a -i off but that didn't fix the problem.
A closer look at Activity Monitor showed that as soon as the slowdown hits, processes suddenly consume 3 - 4 times more CPU, like one of the cores is being shut off and maybe the remaining core is only running 1 thread. I suspected overheating even though the laptop didn't feel warm, and I installed Intel Power Gadget to see if it'd show me anything. Temps were around 42C at idle, and 62C under load, so not too bad as far as I could tell. Under load while running Geekbench, power use would max out at around 18W. When the slowdown hit after a while using my laptop, power suddenly drops to 8W and never goes higher again. No amount of letting the laptop rest resets the limit. Cycling power puts it back to normal for a little while.
On a lark I decided to see what'd happen if I unplugged the A/C after the slowdown started, and much to my surprise the laptop quickly goes back to normal when running on battery alone. Plugging the adapter back in immediately makes it slow down again. It's a 90W HP adapter, so it ought to have plenty of juice. It never gets very warm.
Does this seem like an issue that'd be fixed by replacing my adapter? Or could there be something more serious going on with the laptop internals?
At first I thought Spotlight was the culprit, since indexing was often running when I checked Activity Monitor, so I disabled indexing with sudo mdutil -a -i off but that didn't fix the problem.
A closer look at Activity Monitor showed that as soon as the slowdown hits, processes suddenly consume 3 - 4 times more CPU, like one of the cores is being shut off and maybe the remaining core is only running 1 thread. I suspected overheating even though the laptop didn't feel warm, and I installed Intel Power Gadget to see if it'd show me anything. Temps were around 42C at idle, and 62C under load, so not too bad as far as I could tell. Under load while running Geekbench, power use would max out at around 18W. When the slowdown hit after a while using my laptop, power suddenly drops to 8W and never goes higher again. No amount of letting the laptop rest resets the limit. Cycling power puts it back to normal for a little while.
On a lark I decided to see what'd happen if I unplugged the A/C after the slowdown started, and much to my surprise the laptop quickly goes back to normal when running on battery alone. Plugging the adapter back in immediately makes it slow down again. It's a 90W HP adapter, so it ought to have plenty of juice. It never gets very warm.
Does this seem like an issue that'd be fixed by replacing my adapter? Or could there be something more serious going on with the laptop internals?
