Pavilion 15 (bc516ns) underpowered GPU

[D344]

Hello all,

I have a Pavilion 15, model bc516ns. Today I wanted to play a game I've been playing for the last month with no issues. I had a graphics settings that allowed me to play at 60fps, but today, same settings, the fps dropped to 15-20.

At first I thought this was a game update issue, but there weren't any recent updates. Next, I aimed to some windows updates delivered 2 days ago. I uninstalled them but the fps was still awful.

I also found that all other programs weren't running smooth, like they always did. I checked the sensors with HWInfo, and here I found 3 things: First, CPU frequency was capped to 800mhz, and stayed there no matter what I did. Second, CPU temps while performing tasks were around 40°C (104 °F), which is unusually low in my experience with this laptop. Third, and related to "performance limit reasons", I saw the flag "PROCHOT" with value "yes", which always has been a "no", despite how much I play games or do stress tests.

Rebooting didn't reset the PROCHOT flag, and after some research, people sugested to reset the CMOS in order to get rid of that frozen "yes" value. So, I shut down the laptop, pressed and holded win+v, pressed the power on button for 2 seconds and released it, and after 10 seconds of keep pressing win+v a windows showed up, saying something about a CMOS checksum failed, and that a reset of the CMOS will be done. Some seconds later, the laptop rebooted, the PROCHOT flag was now a "no", the CPU frequencies were climbing up to 4200MHz as they always did, and the programs ran smoothly again.

But, when trying to play, the fps didn't improve to previous values. This is where I found that the GPU frequencies were at the base of 1395MHz, were normally they rise to around 1900, and the power draw was around 22,5w, which is less than half of the 46-47w normally drawn when playing. I tried changing some power settings both in windows and in Nvidia control panel, but no luck. I tried uninstalling the drivers with DDU (from guru3d) and reinstalling them, but also no luck.

Now I'm asking here if there is a PROCHOT like flag but for the GPU that's capping the power, or if the CMOS reset changed some advanced bios parameters, and how should it be fixed. I also want to do this by myself, this laptop has been already send to technical support TWICE, for a GPU related problem, and I don't want to go through all that annoying process again.

Thanks in advance,

[D344 · Accepted solution]

SOLVED:

Tried reseting CMOS again, no success
Tried clean reinstall of Windows, no success
Took off the back cover, unplugged the battery, pressed the power button for 15 seconds. After 1 hour plugged the battery, placed again the back cover. SUCCESS.