HP ZBook Studio x360 G5 with i9-8950HK CPU @ 2.90GHz doesn't allow changing clocks after BIOS update

[Oakwarrior]

Hello!

Hi!

Ever since installing the latest BIOS update of Q71 Ver. 01.09.01 I am unable to use the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility to change my clock speeds (turbo or otherwise) and to change the voltages. The laptop runs quite hot in its default settings due to the beast of a processor and previously I had clocked it to somewhere around 3.6GHz for Turbo so that it wouldn't run too high temperatures under load. Updating the BIOS today to Q71 Ver. 01.09.02 did not help. I am also getting some very strange behaviour in Intel XTU when I do try to change the clock speeds. And when I do, and apply the settings, they actually don't apply and the CPU runs at its highest clock settings anyway. This was not a problem before the aforementioned versions and I could tweak every setting properly in the Intel XTU suite.

Please advise.

Voltage offsets disabled & core settings only change in a locked manner. 

Settings don't influence the clock speeds chosen (and as you can see if I don't disable the Turbo boost entirely, the system runs way too hot for its own good):

System info:

Any help and advice is very much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[QuirkyEpersona]

Uhh....HP? Are we ever going to get an answer to this? It's been over a month now, and it also means we can't use the HP softpaq or Support Assistant (because they automatically try to install the most recent 2 versions of your BIOS, which remain broken  (can't use XTU with either of them, amongst the other issues already raised).

All I can offer by way of advice to other readers of this forum, is that whilst Dell is far from perfect, in decades of use, I've NEVER seen them flat-out ignore an issue like this. Yes, they make you go through that irritating "have you done X,Y,Z" (ignoring that you've already said all that in the original post), but by now, you'd ALWAYS have got a proper answer, and usually a proper solution.

This lack of response is a wakeup-call. It's simply not viable to use a supplier that simply ignores an issue like this for a month after it has been raised.

[Oakwarrior]

I'm also quite saddened by the lack of response to this issue. It's very critical to me because of the way my system is set up, as I have to run different profiles to run different applications, due to the risk of throttling (since this is a beast of a rig). I really have few other complaints with the system, but now I'm basically permanently stuck at the base clock of 2.9GHz which is costing me time (and yes, it's measurable amounts of time).

[Manuura]

Hello,

I have a way to fix that: downgrade you BIOS.

Assuming I am right in saying you have a 1TB-SSD 32GB-RAM zBook x360 Studio i9-8950hk 4GB-P1000, you can safely download and apply this last BIOS version that allows XTU:

     https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp98501-99000/sp98704.exe

It is HP "HP Firmware Pack (Q71)" BIOS version 01.08.01 Rev.A from Aug. 2019.

Hopefully that will help.

Note: I have opened a --professional HP Care Pack "HWM Onsite"-- case to HP myself with no answer on this issue, yet.

But searching The Net, I am assuming the reason behind this feature loss is to prevent an exploit making the processor crash by increasing the clock beyond the processor limits.

{***EDIT***] just called HP Support as I was not able to find trace of my previous feedback on this issue.

Support says that on BIOS 01.09.01 upward, this is a feature, to manage the CPU clock/voltage automatically instead of allowing us to manage it ourselves if we do wish so --i.e: downclocking+undervolting to prevent heat and battery drains when full CPU power is not needed...

I asked this behaviour of the BIOS needs to be user's choice enabled and asked for feedback during the next few weeks. I am not too optimistic, but we'll see what happens.

It is important we, as profesionnal users, are enabled to update to the latest version of the BIOS --at least for security reasons-- without losing features such as this one!

[Oakwarrior]

That's correct, I have that model. And I even have that softpaq still in my downloads from an earlier time, I just didn't know that it would be safe to downgrade to it.

Thanks for reaching out to their support! Also, this is a very strange policy. If I let the automatic adjustments be then it will just simply overheat in some apps and then throttle to 900MHz on all cores every couple of minutes which is completely useless for me. I have specific profiles for specific apps which allows me to get the most performance out of this CPU as possible and this automatic adjustment behaviour is just simply ridiculous - it doesn't work and it goes against all of the reasons I bought this hardware with this UNLOCKED chip (which apparently is not unlocked anymore which goes a little bit into false advertising territory).

I do hope that they unlock this again in future BIOS updates, but as of now I think I simply have no reasons to keep this updated version and revert back to the old August 2019 revision. Very disappointing to see this kind of behaviour on HP's side.

[Manuura]

Right.

From a user prospective using such intel-"K" processors, I tried to make HP understand that when they introduce such "features" disabling clock and voltage management on user's side we should at least have the choice to disable it; in the future. I hope they did get it.

[Oakwarrior]

Downloaded the new BIOS (Q71 Ver. 01.10.00), installed it, still nothing 😞