Hi!
I have an ASUS K501UX laptop, with an i7-6500U and a GeForce GTX 950m. For a while, I was having a problem where my laptop's CPU fan (The larger one) was making a grinding noise, so I sent it to a repair shop to be fixed. Ever since I got the laptop back from the repair shop (With a new, perfectly functioning CPU fan) there has been a concrete difference in the FPS I get in games. Before, I was able to achieve around ~80fps with medium/high graphics settings in a game called Smite, and around ~60fps in Rainbow 6 - using 1600x900 resolution and all low settings. Now, I'm getting around ~30fps in Smite with medium graphics settings and ~20fps in Rainbow 6 with the same settings. According to HWINFO64, my NVidia GPU constantly has "Performance Limit: Thermal" reporting as "Yes" when I'm playing any game, and instead of clocking at ~950mhz (And that's without boosting) like it should, my GPU is clocking at exactly 405mhz (Note - it's slightly higher when I start the game, but after a few seconds it underclocks to 405mhz, and stays exactly there: no higher, no lower.) HWINFO says that the highest the GPU temperature got during my gaming session was 74 degrees celsius, and then it stayed at 69/70 degrees for the rest of the session. I took my laptop back to the repair shop, where they re-applied thermal paste to both the CPU and GPU. It didn't help. After this, I got suspicious that the GPU fan was not plugged in properly, as I could not hear it running, and since my PC's air vents are covered by the hinge, it was difficult to confirm that it wasn't running. I took apart my computer, took out the GPU fan, cleaned it, cleaned what I could of the air vent, made sure everything was plugged in properly. After putting my computer back together, I was still experiencing the same low FPS in games.
Unfortunately, I have no HWINFO recordings from before, when my computer's performance was nominal, but I have a few of them now.
Just as a side note, I purchased a laptop cooling pad on Amazon and it definitely makes a difference in my framerate when I use it, but my laptop is still underperforming severely.
Note - Even with the horribly grindy CPU fan (Before my computer was "repaired"), I was still getting consistent high framerates in all of my games.
I have attached two CSV files - recordings from HWINFO while I was gaming. They are named accordingly, one is from when I used the cooling pad, and the other is from when I didn't use the cooling pad.
I'm beginning to wonder if my sensors may be malfunctioning? Or maybe it's a software issue? (I've updated all of my drivers, and everything I can)
Please help
With cooling pad.CSV Without cooling pad.CSV