Laptop at 99% performance, nowhere near 100% performance, why is this?

[Sephiroth]

edit: When I talk about CPU performance % it is not the load but the max usage setting.

I have a laptop with windows vista, AMD turion dual core, 3GB ram, and Nvidea geforce 8200 GPU. I use power plans to limit my laptop CPU to 95% performance. This keeps the temperature down and I never notice much difference in most games or outside of games.

With the minecraft beta update that came today, the game was unplayable. 1-2 FPS, previously it worked great. So I tried setting my performance to 100%, it ran great, 30+ FPS it was just amazing. Set it to 99% and it ran horrible again.

My question is, how does vista's built in processor speed limiting system work. Is it really 99%, or a much less accurate rating, because I cannot believe 99 and 100% could make this much of a difference. I have experienced this with a few other games as well, but usually it seems to make no noticeable difference.

edit: also could I somehow be lowering my GPU performance unwittingly? I took the balanced power plan and just lowered the CPU slider to 95 and 99% everything else was the same.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Look at all the programs you run in the background. It has to reserve some CPU power for other programs. It sounds like the patch made this problem, nothing with the system. You never changed anything? Then it has nothing to do with the load %.

the power management does not touch the GPU. Your GPU and motherboard takes care of the performance.

 

[Sephiroth]

Just to clarify, when I speak of %, I do not mean load percentage. I am talking about the % of performance the CPU is set to use using the power management options in windows vista.

I watched the load percentage just now with the CPU set to not exceed 99% usage, they are fluctuating quite a bit but not staying at 100%.

To simplify I do not understand why setting the CPU to use 99% max usage should make any significant difference in how a game runs as compared to 100%.

I run programs in the background, but closing them does not make any significant difference, the only thing that makes this game run well is letting the CPU go to 100% which makes this laptop get hot which is another issue entirely. Thank you for your answer so far though, I am sorry if I wasn't clear.

edit: Also the problem definitely is caused by the patch, i think the new leaf decay feature has made the game much more CPU intensive, I'm just curious why a CPU can handle it at 100 percent but not 99, unless the limiting feature has some problems with it.