CPU Clock Throttling on HP Spectre x360 (15-CH004NA) with i7-8705G

[gunningac]

Hi Everyone, 

I bought a HP Spectre x360 (15-CH004NA) mainly for work but also to do some light gaming, due to it's hybrid GPU. I have been finding it absolutely impossible to do any gaming on this machine, which runns smoothly generally, but stops responding completely at regular intevals, around every minute, where it will freeze for 10 seconds with framerates of ~5fps. 

I have installed MSI AFterburner which shows the CPU clock regularly dropping to 799MHz before returning to ~3.6GHz. This is the same on all cores simultaneously. 

This is not related to CPU temperature which is stable at ~70C, even before and during the lag. Systemwide, I have the latest drivers and BIOS installed and have set my power settings (and BIOS settings) to 'MAXIMISE PERFORMENCE' with minimum processor state set to 100% on both battery and plugged-in.

Is anyone else having these issues with this machine, or is mine a dud.

[RTitus]

I replaced my thermal paste with liquid metal and reinstalled windows and all the drivers and I still have this issue, I even underclocked the CPU to 3.0 GHz on all cores using XTU and it still kept happening. I feel like HP has put some kind of software lock to stop this laptop competing with the OMEN line, because it is happy to tank performance than spin up the fans.