Beating the ceiling

Protocol37 · March 27, 2019

Hi all,

I recently purchased Lenovo's IdeaPad 720s 13. It's the Ryzen 5 model. There are two reasons why I bought it, the specs and the price. The specs are unbeatable at the price which was $494 US.

When researching it, I came across people having issues getting it to bench what the hardware suggests it should bench at. There are two theories. One was that the RAM is single channel and therefore causing issues with the CPU/GPU in performance. The other was that it has a hard ceiling at 71 C, which it then begins to throttle and will not stop throttling until rebooted or cooldown.

There's not much I can do about the RAM, but I feel I can definitely look into this temp ceiling. So I'm thinking about tackling the following things.

1. There must be something either on the motherboard or the Bios that's throttling the CPU/GPU at 71 C.

2. I'm going to look at the heatsink performance, fit and probably re-paste it, although I'm not really confident in applying liquid metal to it.

3. I saw on the HP Spectre that they used insulation around the Fans so that the only air it pulled in was through the vents. I'll also look into the make and model of the fans to see if there's anything better out there.

Anyways. I'll put my findings in here and if anyone who happens to read this has any input, that would be great!

Proto.