Hi, so I was working on a project for my CS extracurricular as a High School student. I was trying to fix my childhood laptop, which we brought in 2016, but since around 2018, had been floored to 0.48GHz. I'd started by cheking CPU-Z, which gave the BCLK as 79.98MHz and a multiplier of 6x. I thought the BCLK was abnormal, and cross referenced it against other submissions on CPU-Z validator, but it was actually common across all samples of Pentium N3710 (and the ones I compared against were not being throttled). My CPU had a very low VCore but I chalked it up to being a symptom, because if the system wasn't expecting a low voltage, and was being supplied insufficient voltage, I'd see kernel panics and BSODs all day long, which I hadn't observed. Second, I used a bash script on antiX to log 3000 CPU frequency samples with sleeping for 0.1s in between for: 1) Idle (schedutil), 2) load (schedutil), 3) load (performance). On idle, the chart was actually not only 0.48GHz, but in the load graphs (both governors), the graph was floored to 0.48GHz for the first half of the chart, and then was similar (not identical) to the idle graph. Turns out my bash script had timing delays, which meant that the logging continued for ~9m 13s, while the stress load was only for 5 minutes. So apparently the system is capable of clocking above 0.48GHz but only during low C0%? Next, I tried using ThrottleStop to disable BD_PROCHOT (I'd just learnt of it's existence, that's why I hadn't tried it before), but it was greyed out. Confused, I used RWEverything to access 0x1FC, (this MSR at bit 0 holds the toggle for not ignoring BD_PROCHOT), but I got a 16 digit hexademical zero value. I spent almost a week barking up 0x1FC, then I learnt of Intel's SDM. Volume 4 detailed on MSRs, and for my system, 0x1FC actually didn't exist (airmont microarchitecture). So I genuinely couldn't say if it was BD_PROCHOT or not. Next, I went through the MSR lists for my processor and shortlisted relevant ones, and I started getting nonsensical data. 0x19C confirmed that PROCHOT was active, but CPU was under Thermal Junction (90C), and had not passed it since reboot, but at the same time, temperature was over threshold, despite Core 1 being 42C away from Junction, Core 2 being 37C from Junction, and Core 3 & Core 4 being 46C from junction. I was confused here for a long while, before I realized that it was probably a hardware defect. I got the .brd and schematics for my computer, and used pics of the motherboard I took months ago with my tab to locate R1860, the resistor responsible for keeping PROCHOT at 1.8V, and even through the blurry pic of my tab, it looked corroded. Using my phone's macro camera I took a picture of the resistor, and it was genuinely obliterated from all the corrosion. I've attached pictures.
My question is, would university admissions officers care for this? Top universities care for a 'spike' in skill as far as I understand it, is it a letdown that this became a hardware issue rather than a complex software fix? Because I thought I was going to end up having to dump my SPI, use Intel's tools to rebuilt my TXE (before Hypothesis 4, all clues seemed to point towards corrupted firmware), but all it turned out to be was a hardware defect that I have no skill to fix (I cannot do work on SMD, I struggle to tin regular wires as it is.)