More ram and overheating

Bratensos · February 12, 2019

Hi all,

I have an acer aspire v15 with a gtx 1060 6gb, I7 7700HQ and 8GB ram. As far as I know it is extremely prone to overheating. I undervolted the CPU, repasted it, and it got a little better but I think it still throttles sometimes.

I recently started playing AC Odyssey and the performance really isn't great. With altering settings I managed to get to 40fps. I moved the game from my hdd to my sdd and I think it really makes a difference in the amount of stuttering I experience. The frames seem to not drop but there was some definite stuttering going on.
I am a little confused because I thought the SSD shouldn't make a difference. Or should it?

That made me think of my memory usage...

I was now thinking if I have a ram problem and if it could be worthwhile to upgrade to 16gb.

What is the best way to find out? According to msi afterburn my ram seems to be used 80%ish. Is that fine or do I need to look into it further?

PS: Would you recommend a cooling pad? I am out of ideas to reduce the overheating.

Thanks in advance!

Eastman51 · February 12, 2019

If you prop up the back of the laptop is would help with airflow and could reduce temps a bit.

As for the stuttering, AC Odyessy is very difficult to run; even my desktop struggles with it at 1080p. However, it is an open world game, this means that its constantly loading new textures and data from storage to load new areas that you go to; this is where moving yo your SSD helped you.

80% RAM usage shouldn't be causing problems, its really only when you reach 90% or above that you start to see problems.

tarfeef101 · February 12, 2019

If you want to find your bottleneck point, open up MSI afterburner, and play the game. Note down when you experienced issues (like in time), and then check what what being hammered at the time. You may also want to use something that can track disk usage. Whatever is being maxed out is a potential bottleneck point. Whatever isn't, probably is not the issue. Also remember to look at CPU usage by core.
I personally have not seem much benefit to cooling pads in the past, but that could be because I tried them on very small systems. I'd look for more feedback there. But generally propping up the laptop so the fans have more room to breathe is good.