Dell G7 7500 & 7700 - Solving the Throttling

Within their first year on the market, Dell’s G7 7500 and 7700 earned themselves a bit of a reputation.

Anyone familiar with these knows about the infamous 300MHz throttling issue which seemed to kick in at random, anywhere from 5 minutes to several hours into a gameplay session, bringing the GPU and CPU down to what are effectively idle clock speeds.

That’s enough to make any game more complex than Solitaire turn into a stuttering, unplayable mess - and completely unacceptable for a several-thousand-dollar “gaming-grade” machine.

The most common answers we’ve seen on the likes of Reddit when people ask about this issue refer to thermal throttling, and tell the owner there’s nothing they can do short of an undervolt to resolve the issue.

You may or may not be surprised to learn that the issue & solution are both significantly more simple - and significantly more stupid - than you’ve been led to believe.

On NuclearNotebook’s own G7 7700, featuring a Core i7-10750H and GeForce RTX 2070, the solution comes in not one but two parts, since this wasn’t just one software stuff-up on Dell’s part.

The Solution

Firstly, head over to Dell’s Support website (www.dell.com/support) and download the latest BIOS for the machine; at least version 1.3.0, where the first of two issues was fixed.

This should prevent the GPU itself from dropping its clock speed to 300MHz - an issue specifically acknowledged by Dell, however it does nothing to stop the CPU throttling.

The CPU is, bizarrely, power throttling based on motion - any motion. Moving the laptop around, bumping it, or even just pressing keys heavily can trigger this.

Here’s a screenshot of the machine running Ghost Recon Wildlands while sitting still on a desk. The temperatures are way up there, but it’s not throttling.

Now look what happens when we give the machine a little nudge.

Yep, a gentle nudge will drop your CPU from 35-40 watts to less than 9. Ridiculous.

This is a leftover from Dell’s various forays into “convertible laptops” - you know, those horrid, fragile laptops that can contort the screen 180* to become the world’s heaviest, most awful-to-use tablet.

In that application, the CPU is throttling on motion in order to prevent overheating when the ventilation on the laptop’s base is covered by the lid.

This motion throttling does not belong on a gaming laptop; however Dell’s software engineers have - inexplicably - included this feature on these machines.

Here’s how to fix this.

Firstly, head into Device Manager in Windows’ Control Panel.

Scroll down to locate System Devices, and open up this sub-category.

Now, locate the entry for Intel Integrated Sensor Solution.

That’s our accelerometer, integrated into the Intel chipset and responsible for sensing when the laptop is moved or bumped.

Right-click on this, and then click Disable.

You’ll be prompted by Windows to confirm this - just click Yes.

Now, restart the machine in order to apply the changes.

That’s it.

Your laptop should now be resistant to both the random heavy GPU throttling & the motion-induced CPU throttling.

It’s completely unacceptable that Dell choose to ship laptops in this state, however it just continutes to happen, unabated.

NuclearNotebook believes that this issue applies to more laptops than just the G7 75/7700 and will update this page once more information is gathered.