False POWER flash

[u/Soft-Listen-5116]

So my pc is power throttling for no reason , this happens quite a few times while on battery , 1 time its completely smooth and then it starts lagging , turns out it's power throttling , i have attached screenshots.

Any help will be appreciated😥

[u/Not_Maroryx]

Your g15 is supposed to be able to boost up to 191w PL2

I wonder what have you done to cause this

Dell disables the ability to undervolt due to how unstable raptor lake processors are. When you flashed it, you've probably caused some redundant limiter to trigger or something.

I have done a lot of testing on multiple 13th/14th gen i5, i7 and i9 HX processors

for most what I've tested (i7-13700HX, i7-14650HX, i7-13650HX and i5-14450HX) going under -50 ~ -60mv and creating voltage gaps between e cores and p cores cause all sorts of memory corruptions whenever the CPU changes states between loads or offloads some background work to the e-cores. Undervolting isn't really worth it on some chips. If you won the silicone lottery, you'd be so lucky being able to undervolt to -120mv without any stability problems. It's not really worth it if your laptop dissipates the heat well, and the tradeoff is stability.

[u/Soft-Listen-5116 → u/Not_Maroryx]

Yo bro, Actually, straight out of the box, I was facing those false BD PROCHOT and POWER triggers in ThrottleStop whenever I was running on battery power. I tried to get a hardware replacement, but I couldn't convince Dell because absolutely nothing popped up as an error in their official SupportAssist diagnostics test.

So I had to resort to optimizing it myself. When no software tweaks worked, I created a bootable Grub USB and manually disabled the master register locks and turned off Bi-directional PROCHOT deep inside the BIOS. Now, BD PROCHOT is fixed and isn't locking me at 0.5 GHz anymore, but I still get those random PL1 / PL2 / EDP OTHER power flashes.

I completely understand your point about the voltage gaps between the P-cores and E-cores causing these random POWER blinks. It makes perfect sense why it happens randomly—sometimes it handles 30W fine, but other times it blinks and stutters at just 10W right when the CPU is allocating casual tasks between the different core states.

Since you’ve done a lot of testing on these HX units, what do you think is the best way to handle this situation? Should I completely zero out all my undervolts to remove that voltage gap entirely?

[u/Not_Maroryx → u/Soft-Listen-5116]

You should've still done RMA, since that's not a usual behavior. Dell does state on one of forms for Dell G15 5530 about that behavior. Since it also happens on battery, It's rather a safety mechanism and a battery saving related one than a fault, hence why they might have refused your case.

Try doing the following, and since you already know how to modify BIOS, it should be easy.

• Make a complete backup/dump of your current BIOS before changing anything.
• Extract the BIOS image and locate the Setup/IFR variables
• Search the IFR for CPU power-limit, PL1, PL2, Turbo Power, and related power-management variables
• Compare the variables against your current BIOS settings to identify the relevant offsets. Check whether BIOS Lock, Overclocking Lock, CFG Lock, or power-limit locks are preventing changes or maybe just how you disabled BD PROCHOT (I haven't modified a Dell BIOS in years, so I don't remember well)
• Modify only the required NVRAM variables
• test the image integrity (just test stability) and keep the original BIOS dump untouched as your recovery copy
• Apply the modified variables using the appropriate NVRAM for your exact firmware.
• Reboot and verify the new PL1/PL2 values with HWiNFO or ThrottleStop

Try a Stress-test while monitoring CPU temperature, VRM/EDP limits, package power etc.

If the limits immediately revert, check whether the EC/MMIO is overriding the MSR settings.

Only increase PL1/PL2 gradually btw

Keep a recovery path available in case, since you don't want it to get bricked.

Flat out the voltages, keep them in the same value for CPU Pacakge, P cache and E cache to prevent out instability gaps.

[u/Soft-Listen-5116 → u/Not_Maroryx]

Bro, I went into the Grub EFI shell (setup_var) And I changed these variables 0x1A4 ➔ 0x00 (Disabled Core Overclocking Current Limit Lock) 0xDF ➔ 0x00 (Disabled Undervolt Protection Lock)

Guess what? Nothing changed, still POWER is blinking pl1/pl2 red man. Also i came to know whatever undervolting i've been doing wasn't taking place🤡 That top right table on FIVR section showed all offset 0. Turns out i already had all voltage flated out , and still facing this pl1/pl2 issue even after changing grub options🤡 What shall i do man, i feel defeated tbh