ThrottleStop didn’t work on my Dell XPS 9343.
Intel XTU said the Power Limits were locked.

Found some tutorials for Dell XPS to unlock this.

Summary

  • Dump UEFI with FPTW64.exe for your Intel ME version.
  • Use UEFITool to search for “CFG Lock”, as text, and extract the PE32 file
  • Use Universal IFR Extractor on the PE32 file.
  • Read the text file and search for “ lock” stuff.
  • When setting with setup_var $varstore $offset $data, pay attention to Offset $offset is: $old_data to doublecheck the old status.

Things I learned

  • modGRUBShell.efi didn’t work for me. This one worked for me.
  • setup_var couldn’t find CpuSetup. Found the name Setup in the IFR as VarStore: VarStoreId: 0x2 Name: Setup
  • Ended up setting the following to 0x0: 
    Overclocking lock: 0x4, VarStore: 0x2
Package power limit lock: 0x9, VarStore: 0x2
Config TDP LOCK 0x23, VarStore: 0x2
CFG lock: 0x37, VarStore: 0x2
Platform power limit lock: 0x46, VarStore: 0x2
  • Throttlestop still didn’t work after this. Changing PL1 showed the MSR got changed, but package power didn’t increase and hwinfo64 still showed the same PL1 limit.
  • But Intel XTU no longer complained the Power Limits were locked. And changing PL1 to 25w took effect. Yay!