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How To Fix Speed Of Processor Is Being Limited By System Firmware In Windows

The Event Viewer in Windows records just about everything that happens on your system. If your system is acting up, if you’re getting random prompts or error messages, the Event Viewer is a good place to start investigating. It’s not going to point you to the problem but it will help identify what may be going on. Every event is time-stamped and a brief description usually accompanies it. One particular warning that might be concerning to you is the speed processor is being limited by system firmware warning.

Speed Of Processor Is Being Limited By System Firmware

This warning’s full description looks something like this;

The speed of processor 7 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 203363 seconds since the last report.

The processor number and group number will vary from system to system, as will the time period. Now anything that says a processor is being limited is going to be alarming but the fix is fairly simple.

Set Processor Speed In Power Plan

Your power plan can, among other things, manage how much power goes to your processor. If the value is set  too low, you end up with a slow processor and the ‘Speed Of Processor Is Being Limited By System Firmware’ warning.

Right-click the battery/power icon in the system tray. Select ‘Power Options’ from the context menu. Click ‘Change plan settings’ next to the current power plan. Next, click ‘Change advanced power settings’ at the bottom. On the Power Options window, scroll down and expand the Processor Power Management field. Make sure the minimum processor state on battery and on power isn’t set too low.

SpeedStep Technology

This speed limitation on a particular processor is a feature of Intel processor chips. The feature is called SpeedStep Technology and it allows software to limit how much power the CPU can use. The above fix is basically a simple way to customize it. You can disable it completely if you want but to do that, you have to visit your system’s BIOS.

Access the BIOS and look for advanced power settings, or anything called SpeedStep, and change its state to Disabled. Save the changes and boot to your system.

While you can disable SpeedStep technology from both the BIOS and from Windows, we recommend you stick to using the Windows GUI to do this. It’s easier to reverse, it offers more control, and if you don’t know much about your BIOS there is less of a chance that something will go wrong.

1 Comment

  1. Macbook Pros and other thing laptops do cpu throttling. If you bypass that the motherboard may be burnt due to overheating.