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Precision 3460 SFF CPUs Constantly Thermal Throttling
I own two Precision 3460 SFF units, one with a 12th gen i9, the other shipped with a 13th gen i9 but I'm currently running a i5-13500 in the second unit. Regardless of CPU load or temperature of any of these CPUs, neither the system fan or (more importantly) the CPU fan ever change speeds that I can tell. No utility that I can find from Dell or otherwise can read the fan speed, much less change it.
There are, however, plenty of utilities that can read the temperature of each core and show when each core is thermal throttled to keep from overheating. I'm using them in an air-conditioned room with ambient temperatures around 70F, zero dirt/dust on the heatsinks and fans, and even have removed the sides of the PC chassis to maximize airflow and confirm if the fans are ramping up/down. Occasionally during regular use and constantly under any kind of moderate, one or more of the CPU cores hit 100C and are thermal throttled. When running any kind of program or CPU benchmark that puts a heavy load on the CPU, most if not all of the P cores on the i5-13500 are reaching 100C and being thermally throttled. The i9 CPUs do it way more often, which isn't surprising considering they use way more power and have the exact same heatsink and fan as ships with every other CPU.
Of course this is horrible for the CPU, both in terms of stability and of longevity. Even if you don't care about that at all, as it throttles the CPU, the performance drops as it slows the CPU down to keep it from overheating. Below are the temperatures of the 13th gen i5 after about 60 seconds of benchmarking where the performance dropped about 30% due to the thermal throttling. I stopped it after 60 seconds to keep from biting through my own lip. xD
But seriously; is this how Dell is doing thermal management now? Just let the CPUs cook and let thermal throttling keep it from catching fire? :)
Please let me know if I'm missing something here? Because I'd love to be doing something wrong and have everyone get a good laugh at how dumb I am for overlooking a solution here.
Just an FYI, yes, I cleaned and reapplied thermal paste (Arctic Silver MX6) and confirmed that the CPU heatsinks/fans are installed correctly.