i7-6700HQ going under base clock

[Stefu__Alecsandru]

I have a laptop with a gtx950m, 8gb ram and a core i7-6700HQ, and lately I have been having problems with the cpu. I noticed that when watching youtube videos, the video would crash, interrupt and even the laptop would restart for no reason. I kept the Intel XTU software open for further monitoring and i noticed that the crashes happened because the cpu was going under the base clock (which normally is 2.6 ghz) and it dips down sometimes even to 0.9ghz which normally leads to a system crash. I really need help because this stared happening for no reason and is really annoying.

Link to a XTU image of the CPU going under it's base clock

[Richard_Nutman]

This is completely normal for cpu's to save power when you have SpeedStep enabled in BIOS and your power profile in Windows is set to anything but High Performance.

You can try switching your power profile to High Performance in Control Panel -> Power Options, to see if it stops crashing, but your battery life will take a significant hit.

Probably a power supply issue, or fault with motherboard. I would return to vendor to fix or replace.

[McCalpinJohn]

Intel processors are typically configured to throttle down to low frequencies (0.8-1.2 GHz, depending on model) when high performance is not required.  Your snapshot shows 1.3-1.7 GHz, which is entirely consistent with expected behavior.  My Core i7-8850H generally shows the same sort of frequency range when mostly idle.

If you were running a CPU-dominated workload, then I would expect the core frequency to stay high while the workload was executing. 

The expected behavior for a streaming video workload is not so obvious... Much of the work will be offloaded to the GPU and some to the network interface, and the system should reduce power consumption to the lowest level possible while meeting the video frame rate requirements. 

Can you get a snapshot from the XTU utility while you are streaming a video?  Seeing the temperature and throttling indicators may be helpful....

[Stefu__Alecsandru]

This screenshot shows the version of the xtu program

Under heavy loads the cpu goes to around 3.2ghz and under normal loads the cpu goes between 2.1-2.8ghz, but when browsing or watching videos the cpu is going to sub 2ghz speeds which is causing the crashes/interruptions.

Under constant heavy loads it doesnt throttle due to the -0.125v undervolt to lower the temperature a bit.

[McCalpinJohn]

Nothing looks odd here.   The screenshot shows fairly low CPU utilization, so it does not look like there is a need to run at a higher frequency...

What makes you think that the frequency reduction causes the crashes?  

[Richard_Nutman]

Stefu, Alecsandru wrote:

Under constant heavy loads it doesnt throttle due to the -0.125v undervolt to lower the temperature a bit.

You're undervolting the cpu ? I would revert back to defaults 1st and see if that fixes the issue.