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Windows 11 - 'Best Performance' power mode way slower than 'Balanced' on battery + general excessive CPU throttling on battery

Anonymous
2022-04-12T18:19:21+00:00

Windows 11 is behaving very oddly for me on battery when power mode is 'Best performance'

Problem description

I mostly use my laptop plugged and it works fine, but the other day needed to do some work on the field and it was really slow, to the point of being almost unusable. Applications opened really slowly and everything was jerky, mouse pointer not smooth etc. Just slooow.

I checked task manager and noticed CPU frequency not going beyond 2Ghz, mostly below that.

My laptop is quite high end: i7-11800H with 32Gb of RAM and SSD (HP ZBook Power G8) so this was very frustrating.

I had no such issues on Windows 10 (recently upgraded) so it must be a Windows 11 issue or something went wrong during the upgrade.

A basic test I did is to have no applications open and just open file explorer. When I'm plugged in, it opens up instantly, but on battery and 'Best performance' it takes about 2-3 seconds.

During such tests the odd thing is while CPU frequency is throttled, CPU usage is still very low (20% max). RAM usages also low at about 30-40% and low disk usage too, basically zero.

Discoveries

  1. I then switched power mode to balanced and the problem partially went away. CPU frequency now goes up to 3Ghz but still nowhere near peak performance as when plugged in, where it reaches 4Ghz+.

Again, in Windows 10 no issue.

  1. I then turned off Intel power management in the BIOS and, while in Best Performance power mode, it had the same/similar effect as using Balanced power mode with Intel power management ON in the BIOS, meaning better but still not peak performance.
  2. Changing power plan settings like min processor state had no effect whatsoever.

I suspect this is a power management configuration / CPU throttling issue but I don't have enough deep technical knowledge about how Windows manages these things to find a solution to my problem. Perhaps some of you do :-)

Additional info

All drivers are up to date, latest BIOS installed, all recent Windows 11 updates installed
Everything 'default' in BIOS except for the tests I did explained above.

Full specsHP ZBook Power G8 15"Processor 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz 2.30 GHz

32.0 GB RAM

64-bit Windows 11 Pro

1TB SSD with plenty of space

Disclaimer

While I appreciate people who want to help by giving instructions on how to run trouble shooters, SFC and DISM checks and other such "standard" initial procedures, please refrain as I already know how to do these things having worked in IT admin for many years and, besides that, I've already run all of those without any benefit.

Additionally, I would really like to understand the root cause of the issue rather than hoping some tool will automagically fix it. For one I'm just curious and secondly it will be very valuable knowledge in my line of work.

If anyone has experienced this before or can give me some pointers would appreciate it.

Will be happy to answer any questions or provide additional info.

Thanks for any help

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Performance and system failures

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-04-15T02:10:49+00:00

    Hi

    Welcome to the Microsoft community.

    From your description, your CPU frequency should be affected by some third-party applications and some configuration files have been modified.

    Have you ever tried to uninstall all your security anti-virus software? At the same time, uninstall all overclocking software and disable overclocking. Reset the BIOS to see if there is a problem.

    In order to better judge the problem, you could use the image repair to check whether the problem still exists after the repair. If it still exists, I will continue to judge the problem for you.

    Use the system repair function to repair the system component replacement, this process will not affect your data and files, but can fix your problem with great probability and will not waste your time for a long time.

    Download the iso file to cover and repair the installation:

    (1) Enter the website.

    (2) Click [Download Tool Now] to download [MediaCreationToolW11.exe] tool.

    (3) Open after downloading, and choose to accept after opening.

    (4) Click [Create installation media for another computer].

    (5) Choose the next step after confirming the language, version and architecture.

    (6) Click [iso file], click Next.

    (7) Select the download path and name of the file in the pop-up window.

    (8) After clicking Save again, the Win11 iso file will be automatically downloaded.

    (9) After downloading the iso file, double-click the iso file to open it, click [setup] to open, select [Change the way to download and update Windows installer], select [Not used now], click Next, wait for the completion of the run, and finally select [ Installation], wait for the installation to complete. (Before clicking install, save all the files you are editing)

    Looking forward to your further news.

    You are welcome to reply to this topic at any time, and sincerely thank you for your support of Microsoft products and services.

    Best regards

    Derrick Qian | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

    * If your problem is not solved, you could reply to the post again and we would continue to provide technical support for you.

    * Please check and vote this answer if it helps as it will be beneficial to more community members reading here.

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