'Gaming' Laptop with i7 7700HQ and GTX1050 Lags in GTA V

[AMDGrill]

Hello everyone

About a week ago I bought a Monster gaming notebook, the full specs are as follows:

Intel Core i7 7700HQ 2.8-3.8 Ghz 6MB
Nvdia GTX1050 4Gb 128B DX12
8 Gb DDR4 2133mhz SODIMM 
with a 1TB Seagate ST1000LM048 HDD SATA-3 7mm 128MB currently and an SSD to come;
17.3" IPS Matte LED Screen
Backlit keyboard, numerious pheripherals etc.
Runs on Windows 10 Pro.

As exciting as this was for me given that I now have a way to have fun in my free time during college, I am getting highly noticeable stuttering in GTA Online, which leads to major dissapointment.

In my attempt to pinpoint the issue i've tried various things, before I talk about them here are the settings.

 

As you can see I've lowered most of the settings below Nvidia's recommendations, apart from 1 setting, Ambint Occlusion, but here is when it gets interesting. It doesnt matter which settings I use, NVidia's optimized settings, my prefered settings or the lowest possible I can set. I still get stuttering whatsoever.

Any help would be appreciated at this point hence I'm extremely new to any sort of new hardware (My old and faithful rig is a M5A97 - Phenom II X4 - GT630 combination - lol! )

At first I thought It could be thermal throttling given that it is a notebook after all, but the laptop runs on a high performance cooler, the temperatures roam around 70-80 degrees under load, and the fan control doesnt even go up to 100% when I'm getting the stuttering ( I run the fans at 100% when I'm gaming, tried automatic to see what happens during stuttering) neither does the CPU cores reach their max speed or clock down (the CPU clocks up to 3.8Ghz under load, sits around 3.4 during GTA)

As I said above, any help is appreciated. 

[Guest lilbman]

A) Don't expect that laptop to run everything at high-max settings.  A 1050 is a mid-low range option and should be expected to perform as so.

 B) Buy more and better RAM.  I recommend at least 16 gigs of RAM for performance notebooks.

C) It could be your internet. 

D) Make sure your power mode is set to high performance and make sure your GPU is set to high performance.

[Shiv78]

14 minutes ago, AMDGrill said:

I bought a Monster gaming notebook

Relax your designation of 'monster' I think that is reserved for the MSI GT83VR 6RF Titan SLI (lots of letters !) and the Acer Predator 21X

 

 

However, check your advanced settings and also see if GTA offline doesn't stutter

[AMDGrill]

A- Most of the settings are lowered below recommendations, I have experimented with various settings and I see no difference if I decrease them or not

B- Planning on buying another stick of 8Gb ram in the future

C- Tried in Single Player aswell, getting same results sadly

D- Changed every setting I could find into High Performance preferred 

Even tho, GTA isnt that bound to the GPU, given that the graphics look meh even with people running 2x Titan X's. My settings are not really that demanding, are they?

[AMDGrill]

2 minutes ago, Shiv78 said:

Relax your designation of 'monster' I think that is reserved for the MSI GT83VR 6RF Titan SLI (lots of letters !) and the Acer Predator 21X

 

 

However, check your advanced settings and also see if GTA offline doesn't stutter

Actually, Monster is the brand- *smiles* and all my Advanced settings are turned Off

[Princess Luna]

Just now, AMDGrill said:

 

You don't really thought a laptop was going to run GTA V like a high end desktop did you? The 7700hq is more than 20 percent slower than the locked normal 7700 and the GTX 1050 is the weakest Pascal card.

 

I will be honest, I do not think that extra memory will increase your Frames per second noticeably, although GTA V does have memory leaking issues, try increasing your virtual memory.

[AMDGrill]

1 minute ago, Princess Cadence said:

You don't really thought a laptop was going to run GTA V like a high end desktop did you? The 7700hq is more than 20 percent slower than the locked normal 7700 and the GTX 1050 is the weakest Pascal card.

 

I will be honest, I do not think that extra memory will increase your Frames per second noticeably, although GTA V does have memory leaking issues, try increasing your virtual memory.

I had my Virtual memory set to 8192-8192, Doubled that to 16384 now, gonna restart, and lower some more settings and try again.

About that performance thing, I would expect a 7th gen Intel to run games smoother than my age old Phenom II, My desktop cant get frames that are this high- but at least it runs stable at 40~ frames.

 

[Princess Luna]

4 minutes ago, AMDGrill said:

I had my Virtual memory set to 8192-8192, Doubled that to 16384 now, gonna restart, and lower some more settings and try again.

About that performance thing, I would expect a 7th gen Intel to run games smoother than my age old Phenom II, My desktop cant get frames that are this high- but at least it runs stable at 40~ frames.

 

I know, it sucks really, Laptops have gotten so much better though they are still not there yet, if you want the best gaming experience you are still locked down to the good and old desktop, although the future of cloud gaming might change this reality.

[AMDGrill]

Just now, Princess Cadence said:

I know, it sucks really, Laptops have gotten so much better though they are still not there yet, if you want the best gaming experience you are still locked down to the good and old desktop, although the future of cloud gaming might change this reality.

Welp, What can I say, I'm sad, Tried bringing my good old desktop, but sadly they aren't allowed in dorms (College sucks)

I guess I'll just play around with the settings until I can find something that works properly, oh well

[Shiv78]

Just now, Princess Cadence said:

if you want the best gaming experience

Yeah... even the 21X has a fricking 2560x1080p at 120Hz... with 2 1080s 1440p144Hz should be the standard 

[AMDGrill]

7 minutes ago, Shiv78 said:

Yeah... even the 21X has a fricking 2560x1080p at 120Hz... with 2 1080s 1440p144Hz should be the standard 

If that's the case I really dislike mobile platforms more and more now *sigh* 

Never should have wasted my money on 'high end' stuff I guess, should have salvaged an old HP laptop and kept on playing Warcraft III 

[ramo55]

1 hour ago, Princess Cadence said:

I know, it sucks really, Laptops have gotten so much better though they are still not there yet, if you want the best gaming experience you are still locked down to the good and old desktop, although the future of cloud gaming might change this reality.

 

Reading comments like this make me depressed about buying my new gaming laptop. And before you say why don't you get a gaming desktop pc, I can't, I travel 5 days a week.

[Pendragon]

LOL this thread. Mucho unhelpful.

 

@AMDGrill

Are you plugged in? 

Do you have the latest drivers?

Do you have a SHIT ton of bloatware from the laptop pre installed?
Is this a fresh Windows install?

Give me a link to your laptop. 

 

Get everything updated with a fresh install and do the following steps. In reality, nobody knows wtf is going on because you haven't posted any stats. A 1050 should be fine playing GTA 5 on 1080p.

 

Download OCCT and Unigine.

Download HWinfo and MSI Afterburner.

 

Run Unigine on loop for 10 minutes + and screenshot hwinfo and MSI afterburner reports (put them here)

Run OCCT + Unigine for 10 minutes + ^ same thing as above

 

Test another game. Post info (hwinfo + msi ab)

[AMDGrill]

On 01.03.2017 at 3:29 AM, Pendragon said:

LOL this thread. Mucho unhelpful.

 

@AMDGrill

Are you plugged in? 

Do you have the latest drivers?

Do you have a SHIT ton of bloatware from the laptop pre installed?
Is this a fresh Windows install?

Give me a link to your laptop. 

 

Get everything updated with a fresh install and do the following steps. In reality, nobody knows wtf is going on because you haven't posted any stats. A 1050 should be fine playing GTA 5 on 1080p.

 

Download OCCT and Unigine.

Download HWinfo and MSI Afterburner.

 

Run Unigine on loop for 10 minutes + and screenshot hwinfo and MSI afterburner reports (put them here)

Run OCCT + Unigine for 10 minutes + ^ same thing as above

 

Test another game. Post info (hwinfo + msi ab)

Thank you for your interest, and my apologies for the late answer, been busy with classes a lot.

Here is a link to my Laptop

 

I am plugged in, my power settings are set to High Performance

I have latest drivers and Chipset drivers installed.

I have next to no software installed at this point, only essentials (Skype, TeamViewer, AIMP, Media Player Classic, Steam and Origin) 
-- The only software that was required for the laptop was the peripherals- WLAN, Ethernet, Fingerprint scanner, Sound card. Other optional installs include Intel Rapid Storage Technology, Sound Blaster Cinema 3, Control Center and my mouse driver.

It is a fresh Install of Windows 10, from an image made directly through Microsoft Media Creator, activated with a key after the install, all Windows updates are installed.

I will download the tools you have named and post the results after I get back from my classes today, Cheers!

[AMDGrill]

@Pendragon

Here are the results of the 10-min Valley Benchmark runs, I never stopped the benchmark, just took screenshots of the monitoring software every 10 minutes.

The settings were set to Extreme HD

 

10min

 

Spoiler

20min

 

Spoiler

 

30min

 

Spoiler

 

 

[AMDGrill]

@Pendragon

 

A minute into OCCT and this.

 

.. I take it that it is thermal throttling then?

[Pendragon]

Not really, your unigine seems fine. Scroll the right columm down for GPU monitering LOL. You linked me all the CPU stuff. When you scroll down you can see like GPU temp and clock speed and etc. Same thing. Run Unigine for 10. 

 

Also since you have MSI afterburner you can overlay your games with a FPS meter to see if it's actually dropping or if it's massive screen tear. 

[AMDGrill]

@Pendragon
Played around with the Afterburner and RivaTuner to see what exactly is going on while I'm in the game, I will post an In-game screenshot when it starts stuttering that shows GPU & CPU Temperatures and usage, 

Meanwhile here are the results

[AMDGrill]

Also, I kept on trying with the OCCT and I keep getting the same error, CPU heats up, core clock drops and the testing stops

[Pendragon]

OCCT pushes it really hard. And your computer bios has throttling fail at 85C so rip. Your GPU seems to be boosting properly and temps don't seem bad...lemme get another opinion. @D2ultima any advice?

[AMDGrill]

Here are some in-game screenshots, the game was running smooth at the time
 

[AMDGrill]

Alright, apologies if this thread is getting repetitive and flooded with screenshots, Here in the screenshots below, taken during gameplay when it was stuttering literally every 3 seconds.

 

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

 

 

One thing that got me thinking though, during gameplay I kept my eye on the CPU temp more than anything, and realized something, the temperatures are extremely spiky, as in, nearly 10 degree difference in less than a second --which leads to my idea and story, A while ago I got a new CPU cooler for my old desktop and had no thermal paste applied on my CPU for a while, the shipping took longer on the paste so I had to wait on it, during the time I was running my Phenom II without thermal paste and overclocking it still, I was seeing major temperature changes in miliseconds, this behaviour seems a lot like that.. Could it be something wrong with the CPU cooling? I dont know, maybe they forgot to apply thermal paste, who knows.

[Pendragon]

6 minutes ago, AMDGrill said:

Could it be something wrong with the CPU cooling? I dont know, maybe they forgot to apply thermal paste, who knows.

Yes. There could be an issue here. But I'm much more concerned as to why your laptop flags TJMax at 85C. Laptops have been known to ship without thermal paste or tape over the thermal paste. Only way to find out is to repaste it. 

[AMDGrill]

Just now, Pendragon said:

Yes. There could be an issue here. But I'm much more concerned as to why your laptop flags TJMax at 85C. Laptops have been known to ship without thermal paste or tape over the thermal paste. Only way to find out is to repaste it. 

I will call the manufacturer tomorrow and see what can I do, If I can replace it without voiding the warranty, I will, If I cant, probably have to ship it out to them.
About the thermal throttling, I'm a bit confused aswell, I mean, this is my first laptop and basically my first Intel if you exclude the Pentium 4 I've used ages ago, but I know that 7700HQ and K junctions at 100C and should be fine at 85-90 or even 95.. very strange indeed.

[D2ultima]

On 2/28/2017 at 5:19 PM, AMDGrill said:

8 Gb DDR4 2133mhz SODIMM 

As exciting as this was for me given that I now have a way to have fun in my free time during college, I am getting highly noticeable stuttering in GTA Online, which leads to major dissapointment.

At first I thought It could be thermal throttling given that it is a notebook after all, but the laptop runs on a high performance cooler, the temperatures roam around 70-80 degrees under load, and the fan control doesnt even go up to 100% when I'm getting the stuttering ( I run the fans at 100% when I'm gaming, tried automatic to see what happens during stuttering) neither does the CPU cores reach their max speed or clock down (the CPU clocks up to 3.8Ghz under load, sits around 3.4 during GTA)

One or two sticks?

 

Does it happen in offline games at all?

 

3.4GHz is the max turbo for your i7... under 4-core load. 3.8GHz is a single-core load and thus a worthless boost table. Only consider 3.4GHz as what you want from your CPU in the future.

 

On 2/28/2017 at 5:35 PM, Shiv78 said:

Relax your designation of 'monster' I think that is reserved for the MSI GT83VR 6RF Titan SLI (lots of letters !) and the Acer Predator 21X

Why would you recommend those crappy laptops to qualify for the definition of "monster" notebooks?