I know when Rob had a 31 Mk1 with the ATI card he didn't have any problem playing games that were a lot newer. (Alice 2 for one) I haven't seen anyone with the integrated graphics version of the I5 toughbook really try any games out. With the hardware you have it should be working fine, even the integrated graphics have made some big jumps in performance from the 28/29 days. I have done a little research and have seen other people have had problems with there I5 processors in laptops with speedstep bouncing up and down a lot. Heat seemed to cause it a lot of the threads I read.
Here are a few things to check out to narrow this down, these aren't toughbooks but use the same CPU and Chipset.
Heat, if you have a cooling pad or a fan just try it out to see what it does.
One thing pointed to a charger problem causing the below. Do you have a second charger to test this out?
CPU or GPU heat can cause this and power consumption can also trigger your CPU to start throttling. Many Dell laptops will throttle as soon as you switch to battery power. One problem is that some power adapters do not make good contact so your laptop can intermittently switch from AC to battery power, your CPU will throttle and then it will switch back to AC without you really noticing what happened.
Run ThrottleStop in monitoring mode and run a log file so you can at least see what is going on. Try checking off GPU monitoring in the Options window so you have a record of your GPU too. When you are finished gaming, exit the game, and then exit ThrottleStop and then Copy and Paste the log file somewhere convenient like
www.pastebin.com so I can have a look. It might be something obvious.
Whatever the problem is, if running ThrottleStop allows your CPU to run at its rated speed then there is no harm using it. ThrottleStop can not bypass the Intel throttling mechanism. If your CPU gets too hot, it will throttle just as Intel intended it to. All ThrottleStop does is it gives a user a way to make sure that the bios isn't doing something dumb for no reason with their CPU. It keeps the CPU running at the speed that Intel intended it to run at.
ThrottleStop can not be used to lock a Core i5 CPU at the maximum multiplier regardless of what CPU-Z might be telling you. ThrottleStop lets your CPU idle down when not loaded. The C3% and C6% data is proof of that. It lets cores go into the sleep states when they are not needed to save power and to keep the heat down.
A lot of the Dells use clock modulation throttling to slow a CPU down internally. A log file will show this if it is happening. I think chipset clock modulation throttling is the usual problem.
Basically, I booted skyrim, loaded a save and just let it sit there. It start up at 30fps. After about a minute it dropped to 8 fps and stayed there. I let it sit at low fps for awhile then I hit escape to exit the game. The second the menu popped up the framerate shot up to 60fps. And if I exited the menu and went back to the game it would go back to 30fps for about 4-5 seconds then drop to single digits again.
I see two things going on in your log
1) BAT_Mw I'm guessing this is a measurement how much power is being drawn from the battery. If I'm right, you either have a problematic connection to your charger, or the charger is undersized for your laptop (or the laptop itself limits the amount of power it can draw from the charger)
2) CKMOD (clock modulation) starts stepping down from 100.0 to 12.5 within two seconds of your GPU temp reaching 77c. It stays at 12.5 until it's back down to 72c where it steps back up to 100.0. This is where your throttling happens. Jumping to the menu screen doesn require much computation power from the GPU, so you get max frame rate, but it's still throttled so going back to the game you'll see the framerate drop again.
Most people conclude that if it is throttling that it must be throttling for a reason but no, sometimes Dell laptops throttle excessively for no reason at all.
If you set ThrottleStop clock modulation to 100.0% and put a check mark in that box, that will help prevent your laptop from throttling like this. Remember to turn ThrottleStop on and take it out of monitoring mode. I also like to put a check mark in the Set Multiplier box and I increase that to the maximum. Read the ThrottleStop docs and make sure your power plan is set up correctly.
This should help make your laptop usable again. Why some laptops throttle and some don't is anyone's guess. Slight differences in power consumption or heat can make the difference. If you are not sure if you have ThrottleStop setup correctly then post a screen shot of it and post another log file while gaming with ThrottleStop working to correct this problem. Most users find that ThrottleStop makes a significant difference and your M6500 is not the first M6500 that I have heard about with throttling problems.
Make sure BD PROCHOT is not checked as well. That stands for bi-directional processor hot. This signal path allows your GPU to send a signal to your CPU telling it that it is overheating. Blocking this signal can help block the throttling. I am not sure if this Dell laptop model uses this method. Many of the Asus gaming laptops do. Your GPU is not that hot and neither is your CPU so no worries.
Thanks for all the help, I've been using throttlestop for awhile now to get it running normally so I guess I'll just continue doing that. I've tried tweaking the bios settings in every way it allows and updated to the latest bios without any luck . There's an option to turn off speedstep in the bios but turning it off runs the pc at the lowest possible stepping (it even says it will do that in the bios description).
Oh well, thanks so much for your time I'm just glad it wasn't something dumb I was doing haha.
The user found using the throttle stop program would help out in his situation.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1385956/inte ... -underloadAnother user on another board started having problems and pulled his mainbattery and cmos for about 10 minutes, cleared all power by cycling the power button and his machine went back to acting like normal.
Here is a start.
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