Poor performance but very low hardware usage

Before trying all of those links I'll show you what perfrom monitor shows: it seems like the CPU is capped at 21% for somehow reason.



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Okey, I've seen the links and almost every issue is related to laptop-battery things, but since my PC is desktop I'm a little bit confused.

However, I've dived into Event viewer and searched for the event "The speed of processor 7 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware", but I've only found this event (sorry for language, it says something like
"The processor X in group 0 expose the following energy management functions:
Type of inactive state: inactive states (C) of ACPI (states 2)
Type of performance state: Performing control of processor of ACPI collaboration
Nominal frequence (MHz): 3504
% of maximum performance: 728
% of minimum performance 42
% of minimum limitation: 2"):




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By the way, CPU is not locked to that percentage on the energy options

I've been searching for speed step configuration in BIOS but I didn't find it. I'll send pictures for every CPU-related configuration since I'm a bit scared of touching that sensitive config for my own :S

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In the first screenshot, play around with "Intel C-state", "C1E support" and "EIST". They are safe.

eddman said:

In the first screenshot, play around with "Intel C-state", "C1E support" and "EIST". They are safe.

I haven't seen, but EIST was indeed the speedstep option. However, even though I have tried to disable both C-State and EIST, the computer didn't stop the lag. But now, the perform monitor doesn't show the "21% maximum frequency", and now shows "100% maximum frenquency". As you can see in the task manager, the processor is still capped at 0.77GHz.

Chipset drivers are now also updated.

What's your idle temperature, and also max temperature when running something like OCCT?

If it's too high, is the CPU fan working properly? Is it dirty?

First of all, I would like to thank both dalchina and eddman for their quick and helpful aid on this topic, since I wouldn't ever troubleshoot that good this problem. Now, I'm gonna explain what happened tonight since I finally(!) could fix it.

When we came up to the problem of the processor's cap, I searched for similar topics on the web, and specifically with that speed, 0.77-0.80MHz. It was easy to see that all those problems had in common MSI motherboards. However, in much topics the solution to this problem wasn't posted, so I'm gonna link many of those topics (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) in order to try to get this topic more findable. Since this MSI motherboard-related problem seems to be very common, I think it's important that the solution could be also something known.

The main issue is: many MSI motherboards, from series 4XXX to series 6XXX, have a switch that performs a slow mode boot if activated;



However, it seems that is pretty common that this switch misbehaves and the slow mode (CPU Ratio capped at 800MHz) is on, no matter what the position of the switch is. It can be seen because it has a LED that shines when the switch is activated, and in my case the LED shone always, but I've seen people saying that with the switch off the LED flickers. In all of those cases, when the switch misbehaves and the slow mode is on unwantedly, the solution is:

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Update and access MSI BIOS, and disable the option: BIOS > Overclocking > CPU Features Menu > Intel Adaptative Thermal Monitor
Source: MSI

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Finding the solution was a little bit upsetting since its an official post from MSI but it hadn't showed up for me until maybe 15 post visited about this issue. I hope this solution could help anybody to solve this problem, and they don't spend as much as time as me troubleshooting this :)