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I've been trying to limit the maximum allowed CPU frequency on a 2nd gen Intel i7 CPU.

To do that, I tried:

  1. sudo cpupower -c all frequency-set --max;
  2. TLP, setting both the percentage and frequency (KHz) based limits;
  3. Changing intel_pstate with echo 50 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/max_perf_pct
  4. each of the above with ondemand.service enabled and disabled

While monitoring the frequencies with conky, the imposed limitations seemed to work as they should.

However, when running more demanding applications (specifically, games on Steam), the limitations would be ignored, and the frequencies would raise as if no restrictions existed.

The command grep . /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/*, suggested in another post, seems to indicate that the intel_pstate driver is being used, as it should be.

I haven't been able find an answer nor solve the issue myself.

Cordially, I thank you for your attention.

Frozenpick
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1 Answers1

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If the goal is to limit the maximum frequency of your CPU, then cpufreq is what you’re looking for. This SuperUser post has a pretty good overview of how it works, but the gist is to:

  1. Install cpufreq from Ubuntu’s repository
  2. Run cpufreq-info to see what governors and limits are in place already
  3. Call cpufreq-set --cpu 0 --max 1.5GHz for each CPU core on your machine, setting the GHz value to your desired limit

Hope this gives you what you’re looking for.