Recognizing and preventing thermal throttling
Running CPU-intensive software like Ableton Live in a hot environment can force the computer to enter a thermally throttled state. In this state, to prevent overheating, your computer lowers its CPU speed, which can in turn affect performance in applications like Live. It's important to recognize when your laptop is thermally throttled and take steps to prevent or address these conditions, to ensure the best application performance.
How to prevent thermal throttling
- Reduce the temperature in your environment
- Ensure that your laptop has adequate ventilation by ensuring there is enough space around it
- Follow the manufacturer's instructions to remove dust and clean laptop fans and vents.
- Consider using a laptop cooling pad
- Test charging your MacBook from a USB port on the right side instead of the left side
How to tell if your laptop is thermally throttled
Mac: Open the Activity Monitor and search for a task called kernel_task that is consuming a large amount of CPU.
Windows: Open Task Manager -> Details in order to enable the column Power Throttling and see if it indicates Enabled:
Instead of using the Task Manager and in case you are interested in more detailed information, you can download Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU) for supported Intel CPUs that helps displaying and monitoring various throttling of the CPU: