W530 on dock, BD PROCHOT, does not charge/discharges battery

[Colonel O'Neill]

I have a new-to-me W530 that seems to work perfectly fine except for one phenomenon that only happens while docked:
1) Throttles to 1.2GHz and continuously throws BD PROCHOT when docked even though all temperatures that are visible to HWMonitor are very low.
2) Will not charge the battery and, if Hybrid Power Boost is enabled in Power Manager, will slowly quickly drain the battery.
3) System is otherwise normal (no BD PROCHOT, normal charging) when undocked, on AC or on battery.

Disabling Hybrid Power Boost stems the battery hemorrhage but it also won't charge either. Unchecking BD PROCHOT in ThrottleStop returns CPU clocks to normal. Running a GPU benchmark and Prime95 simultaneously still shows good temperatures, and is stable. Multiple combinations of Mini Dock 3's and 170W chargers have been tried; these work normally on a different W530 and T430.

I have no clue what could be happening here... Any thoughts?

EDIT: Some basic number crunching shows that if I enable Hybrid Power Boost, the system will drain the battery at 20-30 watts, which seems to be on-par with the expected total power draw of the system in the power profile I'm using. What I gather from this is that when allowed to hybrid-drain from AC and battery, it's choosing to draw all of the current from the battery even though the AC adapter is clearly able to provide when hybrid boost is disabled.

EDIT 2: Enabling Hybrid Power Boost also seems to make the fan spin at a much higher RPM in TPFC BIOS mode, even though visible temperature sensors in HWMonitor are still in the same ballpark...

EDIT 3: With Hybrid Power Boost off, the improper configuration of 170W adapter attached to the laptop and docked to an unpowered docking station results in the battery draining at the aforementioned 20-30W. I'm suspecting there's some sort of sense pin laptop-side that's faulty (BD PROCHOT?), given that other machines work normally on the same docks.

EDIT 4: Guess the problem goes beyond the dock; the system will not charge with 65W or 90W adapter in standby, but will with the 135W or 170W adapter plugged into the machine.

[bhendin]

Don't necessarily have any answers for you - but maybe some suggestions and questions on my own as I am trying to battle (or at least understand) what should be expected behavior.

Do you have this issue with your battery uninstalled? Some strange issues like this may be due to a bad battery (even a new one if it is a bad 3rd party one).

Also could you give me what your CPU/RAM/GPU is as well as what temperatures you are seeing when running both idle and the Prime95 tests?
What power plan are you on and what is your measured CPU speeds with Prime95 running?

[RealBlackStuff]

Does this also happen when on 135/170 W charger?

[Colonel O'Neill]

Do you have this issue with your battery uninstalled? Some strange issues like this may be due to a bad battery (even a new one if it is a bad 3rd party one).

It seems to run normally without the battery on or off the dock, though it doesn't like to boot on AC only without the battery. This happens across multiple batteries new/old/genuine/non-genuine that all work in a different W530 and T430.

Also could you give me what your CPU/RAM/GPU is as well as what temperatures you are seeing when running both idle and the Prime95 tests?
What power plan are you on and what is your measured CPU speeds with Prime95 running?

I have the i7-3840XM with the K2000M, which are both pretty power-hungry. Idle temps are normal at 40-50 and full load will often touch 100C on the dock. These values are consistent with the other W530 I have (similar CPU, same GPU). If I don't disable BD PROCHOT in ThrottleStop, I get 1.2GHz on the dock regardless of power plan.

Does this also happen when on 135/170 W charger?

On the AC adapter alone (no dock), my 135W and three 170W chargers all work normally including charging the battery.

My best guess so far is that the power management chip or the signals to/from it are jumbled up and incorrectly requesting all power draw from the battery on the dock.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Well the problem gets even weirder; if I keep the system extremely idle then the battery will charge on the dock and BD PROCHOT goes away. By extremely, I mean staring at the wallpaper levels of idle. Under a very mild load (e.g. light web browsing/document editing, putting less than 20% load on the CPU even with turbo disabled), BD PROCHOT and no-charge returns. This is with a 170W adapter attached to the dock.

[bhendin]

I have the i7-3840XM with the K2000M, which are both pretty power-hungry. Idle temps are normal at 40-50 and full load will often touch 100C on the dock. These values are consistent with the other W530 I have (similar CPU, same GPU). If I don't disable BD PROCHOT in ThrottleStop, I get 1.2GHz on the dock regardless of power plan.

Still not much I can add, I'm afraid. I have the i7-3820QM with the K2000M and my temps are about the same as yours at idle and when running a full P95 stress test (after I just applied new paste...was getting much higher temps prior).
You say you have another W530, and I assume that you do not have the issue with it?
Is it also one of the highest end XM procs, or one of the standard QM?

My guess is that either something is wrong with your dock and it can't deliver enough power to the machine to keep it at plugged-in levels, so it thinks it is on battery power.
As far as the adapter type. I only have the 170W adapters, and I was always under the impression that the W530s couldn't run with anything less than the 135W. I don't remember all the specifics, but it looks like here is one post that references some others:

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-T ... d-p/841161

If it were me, I wouldn't assume that anything less than the 135W would behave as expected.

I'm sure you are aware...as you seem to have intimated at it, though not called it out directly, which is that the W530 throttles to 1.2 GHz when running on battery power and there is nothing you can do about it (natively) in terms of tweaking power plans, BIOS settings, etc. The only way to get around it is Throttlestop, or something similar.

I'm not sure why you would need to disable BDPROCHOT though to get past 1.2. You should be able to set the multiplier. I recently started a thread at the TS forums here:
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/thre ... st-5027349

I was also having this throttling and some other transient BDPROCHOT showing up. Nothing has been solved yet but maybe if you read through it could give you some ideas?

[Colonel O'Neill]

Yeah I have another W530 that doesn't show the same issue, but has another issue entirely.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the dock since other machines work on it, and the W530 in question has the same behaviour with multiple docks. It's also definitely able to pull a lot of power through the docking port with Hybrid Power Boost disabled when running heavy CPU/GPU loads. All of these issues are present with 170W and 135W adapters, that again all work on the other machines.

I don't have the issue of throttling to 1.2 GHz on battery power, though there may be a connection:
a) Throttling to 1.2 GHz on battery power happens if the discrete GPU becomes active
b) Docking the W530 causes the discrete GPU to become active
I do need to test whether having an AC-powered laptop connected to an unpowered dock causes the discrete GPU to come active as well.

AFAIK, BD PROCHOT overrides any multipliers you request since it's more important to lower temperatures below critical than try to hit a performance target. I think your issue is that it is not possible to run the discrete GPU and the CPU above 1.2 GHz on battery simply due to the physical inability of the battery to deliver the needed current.

[bhendin]

So I'm really interested how you don't have the throttle to 1.2 GHz on battery power.

I actually only started noticing it recently because I am almost always plugged in. But as I was troubleshooting my high temps and re-pasting I began to see this.
There isn't a lot published, but this page specifically states that the quad cores throttle to 1.2 on battery:

https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:W530

I do believe you are correct, that in my research if I disabled the discrete GPU in the BIOS then the throttling didn't occur.
However when running with the standard Optimus drivers, even if I am not running anything on the discrete GPU I still get throttle to 1.2.

I am on Windows 10/11 now (dual booting while acclimating to 11), but I loaded Windows 7 on there last week to test and the behavior is the same.

Could you maybe detail to me a bit about your setup (OS, Video drivers, BIOS settings) that might explain why you don't see the CPU 1.2 throttle on battery, but I might?

thanks.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Could you maybe detail to me a bit about your setup (OS, Video drivers, BIOS settings) that might explain why you don't see the CPU 1.2 throttle on battery, but I might?

I'm on WIndows 7 with NVIDIA driver 474.11 and Intel driver .5161. I think your best bet is to get the NVIDIA Optimus GPU State Viewer from https://www.overclock.net/threads/is-my ... r.1109790/ and see if it's reading as OFF when you're on battery. If it says IDLE or ON then you're definitely going to throttle to 1.2 GHz.

[bhendin]

Could you maybe detail to me a bit about your setup (OS, Video drivers, BIOS settings) that might explain why you don't see the CPU 1.2 throttle on battery, but I might?

I'm on WIndows 7 with NVIDIA driver 474.11 and Intel driver .5161. I think your best bet is to get the NVIDIA Optimus GPU State Viewer from https://www.overclock.net/threads/is-my ... r.1109790/ and see if it's reading as OFF when you're on battery. If it says IDLE or ON then you're definitely going to throttle to 1.2 GHz.

Well I haven't run Windows 7 since perhaps I've gotten the laptop about 5-6 years ago. I might have run it for a month or so.
However I did load Windows 7 to test this last month and I used all the drivers that were listed on the W530 support page and still had the issue.

The Nvidia GPU State viewer shows that my GPU is on when connected to the dock, but as soon as I unplug it goes to off, but my CPU switches down to 1.2 GHz.

This is really annoying because clearly there is some known issue with this throttling or it wouldn't have been posted at that wiki link for the W530.
I 've seen scattered posts throughout the web inferring that it does indeed throttle as long as the GPU is not just active, but enabled at all in the BIOS and on battery power.

I have an RMA'd ssd coming back to me today. I might try to load Win7 on there one more time and see.

On Win 11 I am using the Intel .5161 driver and the NVIDIA Quadro 25.21.14.2678 (426.78):
https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverR ... 351/en-us/

I'm a bit confused as to what driver 474.11 is? Search for that shows only this:
https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverR ... 672/en-us/

Which is a Geforce driver and doesn't list the K2000M as a product.

According to Lenovo driver's page what they offer for the W530 on Window 7 is an Optimus Driver (23.21.13.9125) whish is 391.25 or a 307.45 Quadro driver.
I've always been a bit confused about exactly what the Optimus drivers are doing other than putting both driver packages together to ensure compatibility.

Can you verify/link me to your drivers and I can try those with 7. It may be a driver issue and I might not be able to resolve it on later OS versions than 7.
Harder to fault Lenovo for that (though there is no reason this shouldn't have been a supported model for 10).

:/

EDIT: The more I think of it, I'm not sure it could just be a driver issue because I'm pretty sure I confirmed this behavior even without any 'NVIDIA driver installed. If no driver is installed then it shouldn't use it? I even just tested with disabling the K2000M in device manager and rebooting and still I am throttled. So...not sure.
Can you also let me know what BIOS ver you are on?

[Colonel O'Neill]

Well here's something unexpected; I swapped the backlit keyboard for a non-backlit keyboard and the situation has improved dramatically. I can now have a decent amount of CPU/GPU load while docked before it starts draining the battery with Hybrid Power Boost enabled.

It's definitely not perfect, but it's much improved since I can actually charge the darn battery on the dock now. Really heavy loads still drain the battery, but at a much more paltry 3-4 watts.

The Nvidia GPU State viewer shows that my GPU is on when connected to the dock, but as soon as I unplug it goes to off, but my CPU switches down to 1.2 GHz.

Usually that's a sign that the CPU should come back to full clocks? Unless maybe your NVIDIA driver isn't actually powering down the GPU when it should.

I'm a bit confused as to what driver 474.11 is? Search for that shows only this:
https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverR ... 672/en-us/

I modded the required GPU strings into the .inf file on a GeForce 690's 474.11 driver. The latest 474.30 doesn't quite work right for me. That said, even the stock Lenovo 391.25 didn't give me 1.2 GHz throttling on battery.

EDIT: The more I think of it, I'm not sure it could just be a driver issue because I'm pretty sure I confirmed this behavior even without any 'NVIDIA driver installed. If no driver is installed then it shouldn't use it? I even just tested with disabling the K2000M in device manager and rebooting and still I am throttled. So...not sure.

I know that the NVIDIA graphics cards gets stuck in a semi-on not-quite-initialized state if you don't have the drivers installed, which would cause it to throttle to 1.2 GHz. I guess try using DDU on your system then install the 391.25 drivers?

[bhendin]

So first - wanted to offer a bit of an apology for hijacking your thread with my own issues. Seems like we had some things interconnected and in 2023 not too many people still posting on the W530s so I figure its good to just know someone else out there who is currently struggling with issues.

Your backlit keyboard issue is weird. Especially because I can't believe the backlit keyboard (especially when off) makes any significant power draw differences to effect this.
I wonder if there is just an overall power/wiring issue with it - but glad you have made progress, not sure I would want to give up my backlit board

On my front - also something really weird. So a few weeks ago I put in a second drive to install Win 11 and was dual booting between that new install and my old 10 while I got comfortable on 11.
I'm almost entirely sure that I first saw the issue on Windows 11, because I was really only in 11 to do testing until I was ready to switch. But, after I noticed the issue in 11, I moved back to using 10 almost exclusively for a couple of week. Both because it was more productive for me, but also because I was troubleshooting the 1.2 issue there (as well as the other things I posted in that ThrottleStop thread). I was clearly having the the throttling on 10 and nothing I did or have done (including fully removing all the drivers, etc) seem to help. I was able to get by it using TS, so I figured that would just be my solution moving forward.

Well, fast forward to end of last week and I switched over to Win 11 now and trying to use it more in earnest and install all apps I need, etc. Well I noticed the other day I was on battery and it didn't appear to be throttling! I did several tests and indeed it doesn't seem to have the issue anymore in 11. In 10 it still throttles even though I have tried to ensure every driver installed (with the exception of the Microsoft ones) are the same version.

It is driving me crazy because I'm at least 95% sure I observed the behavior in 11 after my fresh build with drivers. The only thing I can think of is I believe that I flashed the W530 modified BIOS after testing in 11 when I was trying to resolve the issue in 10. So perhaps the modified BIOS, or a setting I might have changed therein is having some effect. Why only in 11 and not 10 when they are running the same drivers, I'm not sure. At some point I might do a clean 10 install on a second drive just to test it.

So, I'm kind of happy now but still frustrated with not knowing exactly the reasons. As I said clearly I'm not alone since that referenced Wiki page indicated the battery throttling as well (exclusive of using the dedicated GPU).

So we're both getting somewhere...even if the facts are a bit strange!

[Colonel O'Neill]

So first - wanted to offer a bit of an apology for hijacking your thread with my own issues. Seems like we had some things interconnected and in 2023 not too many people still posting on the W530s so I figure its good to just know someone else out there who is currently struggling with issues.

A working W530 is a happy W530!

Your backlit keyboard issue is weird. Especially because I can't believe the backlit keyboard (especially when off) makes any significant power draw differences to effect this.
I wonder if there is just an overall power/wiring issue with it - but glad you have made progress, not sure I would want to give up my backlit board

I honestly wasn't a fan of the backlit keyboard, and have the mild suspicion that it's actually a knockoff keyboard. The backlight isn't quite right, and the switch feels all sorts of mushy. I'm totally happy to use my regular non-backlit keyboard with the ThinkLight.

It is driving me crazy because I'm at least 95% sure I observed the behavior in 11 after my fresh build with drivers. The only thing I can think of is I believe that I flashed the W530 modified BIOS after testing in 11 when I was trying to resolve the issue in 10. So perhaps the modified BIOS, or a setting I might have changed therein is having some effect. Why only in 11 and not 10 when they are running the same drivers, I'm not sure. At some point I might do a clean 10 install on a second drive just to test it.

I used to have this issue if I modded my driver incorrectly, and it was usually fixed by using DDU on both the Intel and NVIDIA drivers, then installing them back (Intel first).

[Colonel O'Neill]

Well the saga continues; this W530 seems to have a propensity for tripping the battery protection while under extended high load on the dock (with hybrid power boost disabled). In two cases, the system hard powered off and the battery reads "failed due to normal wear" even though the capacity remains good. One battery was a knockoff that worked decently, and one was a NOS genuine.

So I guess the BD PROCHOT was a valid indicator after all... If only there was an easy way to clear the battery fault indicator

EDIT: If anyone has had their W530 taken apart down to the motherboard, I'd like to confirm the locations of the thermal pads on the various components. This faulty W530 has the pads in a different layout compared to my other W530.

Doesn't seem to have helped. I guess the solution was to just get another W530 , so now I have two borked ones and one that seems to work AFAICT.