Nvidia quiet mode/battery boost issues

[Deuteronomy93]

Hi All

 

I've been having some issues with my laptop where the FPS ingame drops massively.

 

I have an Alienware Area 51M 9700K, RTX 2080, DDR4 16GB RAM (can't remember speeds but I think due to bios limitations its just 2133Mhz), 512GB NVME SSD and everything else in the system is stock. Its always on a laptop cooling pad which sure doesn't pump huge amounts of air in but it is raising it off the desk. I mention this because thermals are always exceedingly good from when gets reported:

• Configured that for lesser demanding games/lesser demanding work apps etc it is running quietly without an overclock etc, temps on CPU+GPU hovering around 45 degrees C.
• Configured that for FPS/demanding games the fans ramp up, overclock on etc and it goes to maybe 70 degrees C max on both CPU and GPU but mostly its 60-65.

Aside from this the only other thing maybe worth mentioning is that I have a thunderbolt dock connected (Caldigit TS3+) with some peripherals plugged in, in case this makes a difference.

 

So the issue I can see is that in games, the CPU is fine but the GPU frequency drops massively but this isn't due to thermals. I took a screenshot and saw that it was running at 585 MHZ, 49 degrees C and 98% usage.

 

I had already selected the highest performance mode with my battery/power settings and done things like turning Link State Power Management off (I believe it did this with it turned on too), Maximum+minimum processor state to 100%, in Nvidia control panel select Prefer maximum performance for the Power Management mode etc but the problem still happened.

 

I contacted Dell and they said asked for HW info (attached), they said that it was Nvidia battery boost/quiet mode (whisper mode now?) being activated. I uninstalled Nvidia using DDU, reinstalled, set the same settings as above but also turned off both of these in Geforce Experience but still have the same issues.

 

Has anybody had similar experiences?

 

Many thanks!

Logging 2019-09-17.CSV

[5x5]

Welcome to the world of overheating when running desktop components in a laptop. 

[samcool55]

22 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

Welcome to the world of overheating when running desktop components in a laptop. 

A GPU running at 49 degrees is nowhere near overheating.

 

Can you check if you are actually using the dGPU? Nvidia has something called optimus that allows low-demanding tasks to use the iGPU and only turn on the dGPU when you are using it in heavy tasks like gaming.

[Deuteronomy93]

@samcool55

 

Thanks for the input, I'll double check but I think Optimus is completely locked down in the bios as I asked about it when buying (so when I travel for work I can get a tiny bit more battery life) but they said it isn't supported.

[Deuteronomy93]

Hi again

 

Yeah it's definitely not enabled for this computer. When checking some system things it definitely only registers the discreet card.

 

@samcool55 and others, any other thoughts on what this could be?

[samcool55]

On 9/22/2019 at 5:48 AM, Deuteronomy93 said:

Hi again

 

Yeah it's definitely not enabled for this computer. When checking some system things it definitely only registers the discreet card.

 

@samcool55 and others, any other thoughts on what this could be?

Might maybe be a far stretch but can you maybe give linux a try and see how that goes? Afaik Pop!_Os is a good one for gaming.