Intel I5-11400
Malena Bower
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I've recently got an 8940 with an i5-11400 as I heard good things about that CPU and when compared to the i5-10400 the 11th gen. i5 has hardware-based AV1 video decoding, which to me is important as I usually keep my PCs for quite a long time. And I don't game, so I don't even have a dGPU in it.
However, when running a few different CPU benchmarking tests, I couldn't help but notice that the multi-thread/multi-core results in my machine are significantly lower (sometimes WAY lower!) than what I see out there also for the i5-11400.
I know that the stock XPS 8940 design in terms of cooling is not great (to be polite) and that my current stock "pancake" non-K CPU cooler is subpar. I get that. I also get that Dell motherboards and BIOS on the XPS are not gaming/overclock oriented, so I knew from the get-go that I won't be able to extract the very last bit of performance of that CPU. I get that I should not expect to be close to the top numbers I see out there on the internet for that CPU but on custom-built machines, with much better thermal dissipation and throttling tweaking available to them.
According to this source and several others, it should be around 4000 points for my CPU. But that's not all. CPU-Z bench is a short one. With time, it gets worse, which might indicate thermal throttling. Take Cinebench R23, for instance:
Ignore the orange (lower) result. It was just a second attempt, but I made the mistake to open the web browser and something else while the test was running, so if affected one of the passes. But the other one, at 5937, that was uninterrupted by me and barely anything running on the machine. No McAfee (already uninstalled; using only Win10's built-in Defender), no bunch of other things I've either uninstalled or disabled the process.
Could it be something in the BIOS? I've made sure that SpeedStep, SpeedShift, TurboBoost, All Cores and HT are all enabled in the BIOS. And I've already updated it from v2.0.3(?) to v2.1.3. Support Assist is telling me that all drivers are up to date.
Anyone out there with an XPS 8940 equipped with i5's to run some quick tests and share results for comparison? i5-11400 are obviously preferable, but at this point, I'd take any 11xxx or even 10xxx just for the sake of getting some test results to compare.
According to this source and several others : "The link you have shared refers to Intel Core i5 11400 @ 4189.75 MHz : However I think its for F variant of the CPU. Plus those numbers are coming from an Individual with who knows what modifications. the best you can do it use Dell power manager with ultra performance mode.
That CPU-Z result wasn't from someone using the F version of the CPU. When it's an i5-11400F, CPU-Z (and other CPU tools) show them as such. See one examples here, but there are others showing the same too. The example I posted was indeed for the non-F version, i.e. the CPU exactly like mine. Here is another and here too.
The difference in clock that you see is simply when the snapshot was taken, as the CPU varies its "speed step" all the time. You can see that the allowed multipliers go from 8 to 44, i.e. 800 to 4400 MHz, with the nominal for the CPU being 2.6 GHz. Mine does the same too. It coasts at 8x FSB of 100 MHz and with any load it goes up. If the load is light, it doesn't go all the way up to 4.1, 4.3 or 4.4 GHz, but I've seen a few times where it does.
@RoHe, that's a good guess, but I don't think it applies here. CPU-Z is a CPU benchmarking. If I do it with the Task Manager open, the GPU goes from 0-2% to 3-5% with occasional 7 or 9% only. Probably just because the screen is refreshing, etc.
And Cinebench, despite its name, is also a CPU test and almost a pure one at that, as far as I know. It does not stress the GPU at all. It is designed to send work only to the CPU, according to its developer.
Regarding memory, I think I could be affected if I had severe free memory limitations (like 4GB total), but I'm running these with over 10GB free of RAM. The iGPU normally takes only 128 MB of the 16GB total, unless it needs more for whatever 3D or video processing stuff the user might be doing. For instance, when I open a 4K 60fps HDR video on YouTube, then I see about 800 MB taken by the iGPU. Stop the video, it goes back to 128 MB.
@XPS_Man, just a quick follow-up regarding the Dell Power Manager app you pointed me to. I installed it here, but it doesn't offer me any configuration options. All it shows is that I don't have a battery and I can set no alerts. All greyed out. I couldn't see any of the thermal management stuff I saw on screenshots of the software available on the web.
So, continuing on this topic, I have run several more benchmarks while monitoring the system parameters using both HWiNFOx64 as well as Intel XTU. All the while reading around the web about CPU throttling and cooling limitations, as well as Intel's very datasheets for this family of CPUs.
I think I can safely say that there is no thermal limitation going on. Absolutely no indication of temperatures reaching the limits imposed for that parameter. There is, however, serious power and current limitations going on.
Per Intel's datasheet, this CPU has a TDP of 65W. However, that is the long-term average power consumption goal. When TurboBoost is enabled, the clock rate of the CPU can be above the base rate (2.6 GHz for this one) and I do see that happening, as the multiplier goes to 44x, making the clock rate go to 4.4 GHz instantaneously with CPU load being applied.
Having said that, immediately after the the CPU load begins and the power consumption increases, the clock rate begins to decrease as the flag for Current/EDP Limit Throttling appears on Intel XTU and right after the Power Limit Throttling also appears. In HWiNFO, I see similar flags show up as well when running the benchmarks.
It appears to me that Dell's design on this motherboard/BIOS simply does not allow the TDP to ever exceed 65W. Not even for a short period of time, which is what Intel's PL2 threshold is for -- and in their datasheet it is defined as 154W for this CPU. I am suspecting that Dell is enforcing very strictly the 65W as a hard ceiling, not as a moving average as it should, per Intel's definition. And it uses the power/current circuitry to enforce it, throttling the CPU as a PL4/Icc,max limitation even without hitting the thermal limits.
I am not very hopeful that someone from Dell's engineering team will read this (much less respond do it), but there it is. I can say I'm a bit disappointed to have a system that caps the CPU a lot more than that CPU was designed for. And that manifests itself in the benchmarks that I've run to compare this CPU with others like it but in other systems. There's a 25-30% performance loss due to this apparent choice by Dell of never ever exceeding 65W instantaneous, instead of 65W averaged.
Dell uses power limiting software on both the gpu and cpu. A Dell prebuilt will always score well below average because of this. They do this to keep temps down. You have to remove these power limits with ThrottleStop for the CPU and MSI Afterburner for the GPU. Don't bother doing this unless you modify the case for better cooling. Dell designs horrible cases with terrible air flow. This is the very reason they use this limiting software. Your PC is probably being restricted by 30%+. Go on Reddit and search "Dell xps 8940 cooling mod done right". You will find instructions for everything you need to do.
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