Laptop CPU Heating bottleneck (Question/Help)

[spaghettiknight]

Hello everyone, 

 

I have a Acer Nitro AN515-53 that's equipped with a i5-8300H mobile cpu and a nvidia GTX1050 Ti (non-mobile variant). I am having a heating problem where my CPU temps will get to very near or at 100 C during heavy gaming and the GPU and CPU load will drop to around 10% for about 2-3 seconds causing major FPS drops. The problem seems to be that the i5, which has a base clock of 2.3Ghz will continually turbo to around 3.9Ghz (max turbo is 4) and will cause the CPU to heat up much hotter than it should be getting. I have been able to fix the problem by using something like throttle stop to disable turbo temporarily and this causes the CPU to run at a much more reasonable 60-75 C. My question is, isn't the turbo clock supposed to only be active for limited periods of time to help accelerate programs starting and things like that? shouldn't it turn off or at least lower that turbo speed when a sustained load is applied and the temperature is getting too high? I have not edited anything in windows or Nvidia settings except changing things like power mode to performance when the battery is plugged in. It seems weird to me that Acer would sell a laptop with a CPU that will sit at 90-99 C when gaming but maybe this is standard practice with mobile CPU's? I am pretty new to PC gaming and any input regarding maybe a program that would help regulate temps better or manage turbo clocks better would be greatly appreciated. I will post pictures of the CPU and GPU Load/Temp Graphs when I get home and have a chance to get some screenshots of what is happening. I can also post pictures of my BIOS setup but the settings are very limited.

 

TL;DR 

Is there a program to allow me to change max turbo speed on a mobile CPU or a way to set a target temp for the CPU to throttle for?

[spaghettiknight]

Here is the Photos, This application only gets samples every 5 seconds and this was from a very short Apex Legends match but you can see on two occasions the CPU temps reaching 97-99C and the GPU load throttling down. Also even with the game running in the background while I was taking these screenshots you can see the CPU clocking at 3.89Ghz

[WoodenMarker]

On 9/23/2019 at 2:25 PM, spaghettiknight said:

changing things like power mode to performance when the battery is plugged in

Are you having the same issues when the laptop isn't plugged in?

Have you tried changing the setting back?

[spaghettiknight]

9 hours ago, WoodenMarker said:

Are you having the same issues when the laptop isn't plugged in?

Have you tried changing the setting back?

When the laptop isn't plugged in there are a bunch of power-saving features so that the battery doesn't get damaged. the the performance is dropped way down, but yes the temperatures are much lower. Also I did a factory reset of windows before capturing those pictures so yes that was with completely stock settings

[WoodenMarker]

4 hours ago, spaghettiknight said:

When the laptop isn't plugged in there are a bunch of power-saving features so that the battery doesn't get damaged. the the performance is dropped way down, but yes the temperatures are much lower. Also I did a factory reset of windows before capturing those pictures so yes that was with completely stock settings

Try lowering the Maximum Processor State to 99% in Power Options and see if that makes any difference. 

[unclewebb]

On 9/23/2019 at 3:25 PM, spaghettiknight said:

Is there a program to allow me to change max turbo speed on a mobile CPU

ThrottleStop lets you do this.  Just lower the FIVR - Turbo Ratio Limits.  You should also be using ThrottleStop to under volt your CPU.  This will help lower peak temperatures.  An offset voltage for the CPU Core and CPU Cache of -125 mV is a good place to start testing.

 

As for Intel Turbo Boost, it was designed to run all of the time until the CPU reaches the thermal throttling limit.

 

A Windows Maximum processor state setting of 99% disables all turbo boost.  This is too big a drop in performance for mobile CPUs.

[spaghettiknight]

On 9/25/2019 at 5:21 PM, WoodenMarker said:

Try lowering the Maximum Processor State to 99% in Power Options and see if that makes any difference. 

Ya I had tried that but I missed having turbo when I used the laptop for normal productivity applications

 

On 9/25/2019 at 6:49 PM, unclewebb said:

ThrottleStop lets you do this.  Just lower the FIVR - Turbo Ratio Limits.  You should also be using ThrottleStop to under volt your CPU.  This will help lower peak temperatures.  An offset voltage for the CPU Core and CPU Cache of -125 mV is a good place to start testing.

 

As for Intel Turbo Boost, it was designed to run all of the time until the CPU reaches the thermal throttling limit.

 

A Windows Maximum processor state setting of 99% disables all turbo boost.  This is too big a drop in performance for mobile CPUs.

OK Ill have to do some research into what all these settings do and how to under volt without losing much stability, but thank you for the info!

 

I also decided to repaste the GPU and CPU to see if that had any affect with some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut. I literally finished 30 mins ago and haven't run many tests but I did just run the Dragon Age Inquisition benchmark on 1080p High/Ultra settings. As pictured Max temps are 12C cooler for the CPU! I'm pretty happy with that and we'll see if I see similar temp decreases under more sustained loads and in other games.

 

 

 

[spaghettiknight]

For anyone referencing this later this video is very helpful for under-volting the CPU, specifically for laptops.

with this undervolting technique and the re-pasting my max temp hasn't gone above 80C. Huge impovement from 99C. Thanks to everyone who suggested ideas to try!