Poor FPS

[jj3000125]

Is turboboost supposed to happen automatically or is it a setting? Is that what ThrottleStop is for? Without doing anything though Dolphin running puts the processor temps at around 78-81 ish, around there.

[admin89]

Yup , Turbo Boost work automatically without doing anything
In case of overheating , CPU will throttle to reduce the temp -> Clock speed goes down , turbo boost is disabled automatically
"ThrottleStop" = stop throttling temporary , don't care about overheating
So if your CPU has dangerous temp(90C) but you still run throtlestop to keep your CPU at maximum state , your CPU will run hotter and then shutdown ( your laptop life time will be shortened)

My i5 480M @ 2.67GHz turbo to 2.93GHz automatically when Dolphin is running . I don't need Throttlestop to keep my CPU at maximum state . However , I still need Throttlestop to underclock my CPU (2.67 -> 1.2GHz) to save battery life

[jj3000125]

Hmm interesting. Also I was playing around with RealTemp some more, and I think it was frozen last night because the speed wasn't changing, but now normal speed is showing around 2.3-2.4 GHz but when I open and run Dolphin it actually goes down to around 1.4-1.6 GHz does that make any sense?

[admin89]

Well , you get 78-81C with that low clock speed -> Your CPU will reach the maximum temp 100C with higher clock speed
Maybe your laptop prevent overheating or sth

[pauldacheez]

-Make sure the thing's plugged in and has a battery in it. Apple's laptops can't reach their max CPU clockspeed under load without a battery in 'em, for some reason, but AFAIK they don't downclock themselves if they're not plugged in.

-Unless you're 100% sure the fans are spinning at full speed in your MacBook, try manually increasing them with smcFanControl. http://www.eidac.de/?p=243 (Dunno why this would ever be the issue, though – the fan controllers are usually sane enough to figure this out for themselves.)

-If you're crazy/skilled enough, take apart your MacBook, clean all the dust out of the thing (especially the fans), and reapply all the thermal paste (*properly*) on the CPU/GPU/everything else with a heatsink. (I need to do this for mine too.)

FWIW, without any Turbo Boost manipulation (tools for this are currently unavailable for OS X or Linux, AFAIK), the Linux powertop tool shows my MacBook Air's wimpy little i5-2557M going up to 2.6-2.7 GHz perfectly fine when running Dolphin (though it does get to ~93ºC at max fanspeed), and it performs similarly on both OS X and Linux, thus thermals are likely similar. Wind Waker itself runs at 20-30 fps with efb2tex. (GPU's a much-weaker Intel HD 3000, too.)

[jj3000125]

Yeah it's been plugged in this whole time with a battery. I definitely don't trust myself to manually take it apart and clean it either lol

Although the fact that your MacBook Air can run Wind Waker and get 20-30 FPS tells me something is definitely wrong here... I'm going to keep trying different things and messing around, if anyone has any more suggestions I would be glad to try them, and if I figure it out I'll post what the problem was.

[jj3000125]

Thanks again to everyone who helped me, I'm reporting back that I finally fixed the issue and Dolphin is running fine! It turned out that my laptop was just generating too much heat and all it took to get it running normally was a good dusting, I am not getting 50-60 FPS no problem and my temperatures also look better (thanks for telling me about RealTemp by the way, it's a great utility)