"Balanced" or "Dell" Power Profiles are Causing Throttling of the Central Processing Unit (CPU)

Power Profiles are Causing Throttling of the CPU

Despite the power profile of balanced stating minimum 5% and maximum 100% CPU; the power profile is limiting performance of rendering and other CPU intensive applications.

Change the Power Profile when Handling Large Amounts of Data

Normally when a large amount of data is queued to be processed; the processor clock speed will rise and stay at that level until the process is complete; in "Balanced" or "Dell"; the CPU returns to default (usually 800 MHz) very quickly (Figure 1).

If the system is placed into High Performance (Figure 2), the CPU is allowed to stay at the clock rate necessary to process the queue of data for it. This is more pronounced when using Google Chrome as it is multi-threaded and uses hardware acceleration.

Balanced:

Figure 1

High Performance

Figure 2

Note: This may cause the battery life to suffer on portable units.

If the system is not doing anything CPU intensive such as CAD, Video, or Audio rendering, the system can be placed back into the Balanced power profile until higher performance is needed again.

Windows 10 has also introduced Power Throttling options that can allow more granular abilities to manage power by specific applications.