CPU Performance Issues - Clock Speed drops off constantly leading to a freeze

[Justin]

'm having a weird issue with my i5 CPU on my Spectre X360, in that I am having on and off CPU issues with relation to performance and throttling which makes little sense and is resulting in some corruption of files at times and various odd things. 

The machine is prone to killing it's own performance on a regular basis where the CPU appears to be running at 100% but the fans are not even coming on and any diagnostic tools I use suggest that the CPU is running somewhere between 1.1ghz and 1.5ghz and bouncing between the two even when the CPU is maxing out.

This happened the last few days regardless if i am on mains power or high performance and the general performance and sluggishness of the machine is truly shocking, using an external monitor with a laptop screen for example is no longer possible because of the fact it exhausts the CPU to say play a game on one and watch a video on the other when it was possible previously.

The CPU is rated at 2.2ghz turbo boost to 2.7ghz and obviously I'm certainly not getting the power that I should be right now and everywhere I look on the machine suggests there is no reason why this should be the case and has only happened in the last few days, I have tried disabling speedstep in the bios, turning fan to always on etc, still no help in performance, besides the CPU is so cold it doesn't need the fan anyway. 

HP seem to think that it's a CPU fault because no matter what I do with the machine, I just can't get the thing to heat up or go above 1.6ghz even if I throw ridiculously demanding tasks at it. Interestingly they mentioned that despite being out of warranty, if it was a fault on Intel's side, they may be able to replace the CPU for free?

In addition I just saved a game in Football manager before quitting and restarted the machine since I got fed up with the performance and guess what? The game was corrupt as was the word file I saved 10 minutes ago and a notepad document also became corrupted that I save which is certainly odd. 

Now I've reinstalled windows and I still have performance issues which begins to point towards hardware. Now an Intel CPU fault is exceptionally rare in my experience, but what else can it possibly be? Note this is intermittent, if I restart the machine and leave it off it performs well for an hour before the issue starts again.

 

This does not appear to be heat related. 

[Circaflex]

Have you tried a BIOS update for the machine?

 

Although you suspect it is not heat related, have you cleaned the vents and fan of any dust/debris?

 

What program as your using to increase CPU Load in order to see if the speed changes? Prime95?