Finally Solved Thermal Throttling on MSI GS65 Thin Gaming Laptop

[shahaan]

TLDR: Successfully applied Arctic Silver 5 and Arctic Thermal Pads to eliminate thermal throttling on MSI GS65 8RE gaming laptop.

 

I have an MSI GS65 8RE Stealth Thin gaming laptop (i7-8750H, GTX 1060) which has suffered from thermal throttling ever since it was purchased in 2018. It's an old model and there are plenty of reviews so I won't get into any further details or comments about build quality, difficulty of upgrade and so on.

 

Of course, if anyone reading this has any specific questions, please feel free to ask and I'll be happy to answer.

 

To solve the thermal throttling problem, I first tried the following "non-invasive" measures with varying degrees of success but the problem was not eliminated; nor was I satisfied having paid for a moderately top-tier hardware package only to limit its capabilities in order to use it for its intended purpose.

 

- Turning off Hyper Threading

- Turning off Tubro Boost

- Undervolting

- Turbo Boost frequency limiting

- Package power limiting

 

During heavy gaming (I'm saying "heavy" relative to the performance capacity of this particular hardware) such as Jedi Fallen Order on "Epic" 1080p graphics settings, the CPU would hit 93C with the fans sounding like a 747 during takeoff. HWiNFO showed sustained thermal throttling with the CPU frequency hovering around 2.7Ghz whereas the i7-8750H is rated up to 4.1Ghz boost (2.2Ghz base). Cinebench R20 benchmark scores were hovering around 2250 (average of 3 consecutive runs).

 

Obviously, I did not expect this 17.9mm-thick laptop to be equipped with a cooling solution that can handle the heat dissipation requirements of an i7-8750H processor at its specified 90W, 4.1Ghz boost power limit and frequency, respectively. I would settle for a sustained boost anywhere above 3.0Ghz at its Intel-designated TDP-down power limit of 35W, without thermal throttling being activated. I think that's a fair expectation for hardware at this price point.

 

Having opened the laptop before for SSD and RAM upgrades, I was familiar with its internals. I had also read a lot of users complaining about thermal throttling and claiming they were able to fix it with a re-paste of the heat sink fan rig.

 

So I took the plunge and re-pasted the HSF with Arctic MX-4 thermal compound. Ensuring proper contact upon replacement of the cooling hardware on the motherboard and taking care to not bend or twist any part of it, I closed up the laptop and booted. No improvement. I was disappointed, to say the least, and I began to regret my purchase.

 

That was last year. Fast-forward to the present and I came across a post where a user had not only re-pasted the CPU and GPU but also replaced the thermal pads on the VRAM and other surrounding components. I decided to give it one last shot.

 

I opened it up (this is an achievement by itself, just look up a teardown video), cleaned up the old paste, applied new paste and replaced the thermal pads. This time I used Arctic Silver 5 and Arctic Thermal Pads (1.5mm thick). I also did something that may be frowned upon: I replaced all thermal pads, regardless of stock pad thickness (which varied from 0.5mm to 1mm and 2mm in one area) with 1.5mm and a 1.5+1.5mm thermal pad sandwich for the 2mm.

 

To make sure that the copper parts of the HSF rig were properly making contact with the CPU and GPU, I carefully placed the HSF rig back over the motherboard and held it in place without the screws. Then I meticulously squished each of the thermal pads where they were too thick, causing a gap between the other contact points. Now the HSF was sitting flat on the CPU and GPU. Next I slowly removed the HSF rig ensuring not to let the thermal pads peel off or shift. After applying the thermal compound on the CPU and GPU, I again placed the HSF rig back on and screwed it in place.

 

I had extra thermal pad left over so I placed one on top of what looked like the PCH (maybe?), as well as beneath and above the two NVMe SSDs and on both RAM sticks.

 

After closing up carefully ensuring all the cables and screws were securely in place, I booted up and ran Cinebench R20. To my absolute and complete delight, the core temp value reported by  HWiNFO did not exceed 84C. By the way, I had a stable undervolt of -155mV already set, which obviously helped. The machine sustained a boost frequency around 3.3Ghz at 35W power limit and resulted in an average Cinebench score of 2460 over three consecutive runs. Other than undervolt and power limit, there are no other performance/heat limiting settings enabled.

 

For good measure, I also ran Prime95 stress test and Unigine Heaven graphics benchmark to check system stability. All checked out. Temperatures did not exceed 84C. I want to clarify that this was in a non-AC room where the ambient was around 24C which is on the warm side of comfortable. Needless to say, thermal performance would be even better in a cooler environment.

 

The Nvidia GTX 1060 hits 90C running Heaven benchmark on Extreme preset but the CPU caps out at 71C. The fans are loud, which is to be expected, but they run noticeably quieter than before. For reference, the max fan speed set in MSI Dragon Center is 65% for CPU and 75% for GPU.

 

I hope this helps anyone else facing similar problems. And as I said earlier, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask!

[GroundDead]

I really don't "get" something. What sorcery did Lenovo do with at least mine Legion y520 that neither i7-7700hq or 1060maxq temps go over 80°C on heavy use, with CPU being always hotter by few degrees than GPU...

SSD has no cooling whatsoever so I don't expect it not to go over 80 when it's in hvy usage but is that whole other side of a laptop which contains CPU, GPU and bunch of other components sooo well covered by heatsinks and 2 40mm fans that it can keep it reasonably hot.

Temps are consistent on same apps for the last 2 years without thermal paste change, battery wear levels are low, what the hell did Lenovo do so well? I don't even use the cooler for it, why can't all laptops do that well. Why does my old one keep me warm during cold wi ters... Y520 is a thicc with 25mm at the back where almost all but SSD heat sources are so there was room for proper cooling.

[shahaan]

Hmm, that's interesting. Well, let me see if I can break down the differences between the two and that might shed some light on the "sorcery."

 

Model: Lenovo Y520 vs. MSI GS65-8RE

Cores: 4 vs. 6 (+50%)

Size (W): 15in/381mm vs. 14in/357mm (-7%)

Size (D):10.4in/264mm vs. 9.7in/247mm (-7%)

Size (H):1.1in/28mm vs. 0.70in/18mm (-36%)

Weight: 5.29lbs/2.4kg vs. 4.14lbs/1.88kg (-22%)

 

So, the MSI is considerably lighter (22%) and smaller especially on the height/thickness (36%), and has two additional CPU cores doing work which need to be cooled. Without looking further into other factors like the specific design of the heat sink fan assembly, number of pipes, fans, size of fans, etc., I would say that the size differential seems to be the key in explaining why the Lenovo cools so much better.

 

Simply put, the Lenovo has much more space to pack in a cooling solution with a higher heat dissipation capacity.

[GroundDead]

Which is why I always thought "gaming" laptops should've never went into thin, light and so on territories. Not if you want it "working as intended". Those 10mm difference in thickness and half a kg won't make much a difference in looks and portability as much it will impact the performance in what those laptops should be at, which is gaming. If they already gonna use that stupid term, any company, optimise it for the category you are advertising it ffs and not call it "gaming" just because it looks like it all black and red or RGBish with beefy specs inside that will work at 75% performance because hurr durr, it's "THIN AND POWERFUL".
Neither is 3kg heavy nor is 3cm thick for the performance you want on prolonged sessions because gaming is most often a prolonged session.
Sorry for the rant, marketing bullshiting really pushes me off the edge.

[shahaan]

Agreed. Nobody needs marketing--bullshit or otherwise.

[kck007]

hi...i was also facing really bad thermals on my gs65 8re...after 3 repair requests with msi, i was offered a replace, they are giving me the newer 2019 version of the P65, with the 1660ti, i know it lacks the rgb keyboard but it includes a better graphics card, a improved cooling system and more ssd capacity...this for me looked like a sweet deal given that this laptop still trading for a higher price of what i paid....maybe if you press they up.... they can replace your machine too

[shahaan]

Yeah I thought about RMA but it's honestly not that bad. I get intermittent thermal throttling once in a while but it never lasts for more than a few seconds. It's a good laptop, the hardware is stable which was confirmed with hours and hours of stress tests. The question for me is whether it's worth it to spend the shipping, time and energy to RMA it and the answer for me is no.

[oldmanxavier]

Hi, i have a msi gs65 9sf as well and just like yours mine thermal throttles and i have done repasting with thermal grizzly kryonaut a couple of times and no difference at all still thermal throttling with 95C on load , im confused to what you did with the thermal pads and i am considering liquid metal but I'm not quite sure about it. What are your suggestions?

and yes i have tried undervolting as well i did till -150mv , the only time it goes down is if i limit the clock speed to 3.3ghz which is what I don't want and that too starts reaching 95C after a bit of time.

[Duckson McQuack]

Repasting is quite difficult since the motherboard is inverted in both revisions 2018 and 2019 of the GS65.

I would not reccomend liquid metal. 

[oldmanxavier]

On 9/3/2020 at 10:12 PM, Duckson McQuack said:

Repasting is quite difficult since the motherboard is inverted in both revisions 2018 and 2019 of the GS65.

I would not reccomend liquid metal. 

well as i told i have already repasted a couple of times so i don't have problem getting inside, and why do you think liquid metal is not a good choice? because everything else doesn't seem to be working only under clocking the device to 3.3ghz seems to help , care to explain?

[Duckson McQuack]

It's just risky in general and if you don't do it right you could damage your stuff easily 

THe thermal performance is there to justify it but I'm personally not comfortable

 

If you want to do it I'm not stopping you

[shahaan]

On 9/3/2020 at 6:12 PM, oldmanxavier said:

Hi, i have a msi gs65 9sf as well and just like yours mine thermal throttles and i have done repasting with thermal grizzly kryonaut a couple of times and no difference at all still thermal throttling with 95C on load , im confused to what you did with the thermal pads and i am considering liquid metal but I'm not quite sure about it. What are your suggestions?

and yes i have tried undervolting as well i did till -150mv , the only time it goes down is if i limit the clock speed to 3.3ghz which is what I don't want and that too starts reaching 95C after a bit of time.

 

So from what I can tell, the thermal throttling is not due to insufficient heat transfer from processor to heat sink fan (HSF) assembly. Therefore, no amount of re-pasting is going to solve this problem. The real problem with thermal throttling on this laptop is that the HSF cannot dissipate the amount of heat generated by the CPU under full load.

 

I power limited (45000mW PL1 (short) and  35000mW PL2 (long) in BIOS) my CPU to the TDP advertised by Intel for the i7-8750H which is 45W and 35W (TDP-down). The default setting by MSI was a whopping 90W or something which is absolutely bonkers for the HSF in this laptop. The i7-8750H thermal throttles around 55W (hitting 95-97C) or so and that is with the fans blasting full speed.

 

For comparison, I have a desktop with an i9-9900 (5Ghz boost) and the desktop-sized HSF can dissipate enough heat to allow that CPU to run for an extended time at 125W (unlocked in BIOS up from the Intel advertised 65W TDP) but the fan spins up audibly loud and the CPU reaches 60C.

 

I wouldn't waste my time re-re-repasting, TBH.

 

Unfortunately I've accepted the reality that the HSF in the MSI laptop is insufficient to dissipate the amount of heat generated by the CPU anywhere beyond 45W and sometimes it even thermal throttles at that power limit. In the end, I decided to sell my MSI GS65 8RE. Haven't found a buyer yet but fingers crossed.

 

Wish you better luck, friend.

[oldmanxavier]

10 hours ago, shahaan said:

 

So from what I can tell, the thermal throttling is not due to insufficient heat transfer from processor to heat sink fan (HSF) assembly. Therefore, no amount of re-pasting is going to solve this problem. The real problem with thermal throttling on this laptop is that the HSF cannot dissipate the amount of heat generated by the CPU under full load.

 

I power limited (45000mW PL1 (short) and  35000mW PL2 (long) in BIOS) my CPU to the TDP advertised by Intel for the i7-8750H which is 45W and 35W (TDP-down). The default setting by MSI was a whopping 90W or something which is absolutely bonkers for the HSF in this laptop. The i7-8750H thermal throttles around 55W (hitting 95-97C) or so and that is with the fans blasting full speed.

 

For comparison, I have a desktop with an i9-9900 (5Ghz boost) and the desktop-sized HSF can dissipate enough heat to allow that CPU to run for an extended time at 125W (unlocked in BIOS up from the Intel advertised 65W TDP) but the fan spins up audibly loud and the CPU reaches 60C.

 

I wouldn't waste my time re-re-repasting, TBH.

 

Unfortunately I've accepted the reality that the HSF in the MSI laptop is insufficient to dissipate the amount of heat generated by the CPU anywhere beyond 45W and sometimes it even thermal throttles at that power limit. In the end, I decided to sell my MSI GS65 8RE. Haven't found a buyer yet but fingers crossed.

 

Wish you better luck, friend.

so basically im pretty much stuck with 3.3ghz clock speed..... if i want to play without the i temps *sigh* 

[Nick321987456]

personally, i dont feel much air movement when the system is cooling. i only feel air at the top left next to the power plug-in. if its run without charging it runs nice and cool but everythnig runs like shit.

 

also i have a gs75 stealth, but i still have the same problem.

 

and im new to linustechtips dont know how to delete my comment

Edited October 19, 2021 by Nick321987456
wrong

[lowieCOOL]

On 5/4/2020 at 1:53 PM, shahaan said:

TLDR: Successfully applied Arctic Silver 5 and Arctic Thermal Pads to eliminate thermal throttling on MSI GS65 8RE gaming laptop.

 

I have an MSI GS65 8RE Stealth Thin gaming laptop (i7-8750H, GTX 1060) which has suffered from thermal throttling ever since it was purchased in 2018. It's an old model and there are plenty of reviews so I won't get into any further details or comments about build quality, difficulty of upgrade and so on.

 

Of course, if anyone reading this has any specific questions, please feel free to ask and I'll be happy to answer.

 

To solve the thermal throttling problem, I first tried the following "non-invasive" measures with varying degrees of success but the problem was not eliminated; nor was I satisfied having paid for a moderately top-tier hardware package only to limit its capabilities in order to use it for its intended purpose.

 

- Turning off Hyper Threading

- Turning off Tubro Boost

- Undervolting

- Turbo Boost frequency limiting

- Package power limiting

 

During heavy gaming (I'm saying "heavy" relative to the performance capacity of this particular hardware) such as Jedi Fallen Order on "Epic" 1080p graphics settings, the CPU would hit 93C with the fans sounding like a 747 during takeoff. HWiNFO showed sustained thermal throttling with the CPU frequency hovering around 2.7Ghz whereas the i7-8750H is rated up to 4.1Ghz boost (2.2Ghz base). Cinebench R20 benchmark scores were hovering around 2250 (average of 3 consecutive runs).

 

Obviously, I did not expect this 17.9mm-thick laptop to be equipped with a cooling solution that can handle the heat dissipation requirements of an i7-8750H processor at its specified 90W, 4.1Ghz boost power limit and frequency, respectively. I would settle for a sustained boost anywhere above 3.0Ghz at its Intel-designated TDP-down power limit of 35W, without thermal throttling being activated. I think that's a fair expectation for hardware at this price point.

 

Having opened the laptop before for SSD and RAM upgrades, I was familiar with its internals. I had also read a lot of users complaining about thermal throttling and claiming they were able to fix it with a re-paste of the heat sink fan rig.

 

So I took the plunge and re-pasted the HSF with Arctic MX-4 thermal compound. Ensuring proper contact upon replacement of the cooling hardware on the motherboard and taking care to not bend or twist any part of it, I closed up the laptop and booted. No improvement. I was disappointed, to say the least, and I began to regret my purchase.

 

That was last year. Fast-forward to the present and I came across a post where a user had not only re-pasted the CPU and GPU but also replaced the thermal pads on the VRAM and other surrounding components. I decided to give it one last shot.

 

I opened it up (this is an achievement by itself, just look up a teardown video), cleaned up the old paste, applied new paste and replaced the thermal pads. This time I used Arctic Silver 5 and Arctic Thermal Pads (1.5mm thick). I also did something that may be frowned upon: I replaced all thermal pads, regardless of stock pad thickness (which varied from 0.5mm to 1mm and 2mm in one area) with 1.5mm and a 1.5+1.5mm thermal pad sandwich for the 2mm.

 

To make sure that the copper parts of the HSF rig were properly making contact with the CPU and GPU, I carefully placed the HSF rig back over the motherboard and held it in place without the screws. Then I meticulously squished each of the thermal pads where they were too thick, causing a gap between the other contact points. Now the HSF was sitting flat on the CPU and GPU. Next I slowly removed the HSF rig ensuring not to let the thermal pads peel off or shift. After applying the thermal compound on the CPU and GPU, I again placed the HSF rig back on and screwed it in place.

 

I had extra thermal pad left over so I placed one on top of what looked like the PCH (maybe?), as well as beneath and above the two NVMe SSDs and on both RAM sticks.

 

After closing up carefully ensuring all the cables and screws were securely in place, I booted up and ran Cinebench R20. To my absolute and complete delight, the core temp value reported by  HWiNFO did not exceed 84C. By the way, I had a stable undervolt of -155mV already set, which obviously helped. The machine sustained a boost frequency around 3.3Ghz at 35W power limit and resulted in an average Cinebench score of 2460 over three consecutive runs. Other than undervolt and power limit, there are no other performance/heat limiting settings enabled.

 

For good measure, I also ran Prime95 stress test and Unigine Heaven graphics benchmark to check system stability. All checked out. Temperatures did not exceed 84C. I want to clarify that this was in a non-AC room where the ambient was around 24C which is on the warm side of comfortable. Needless to say, thermal performance would be even better in a cooler environment.

 

The Nvidia GTX 1060 hits 90C running Heaven benchmark on Extreme preset but the CPU caps out at 71C. The fans are loud, which is to be expected, but they run noticeably quieter than before. For reference, the max fan speed set in MSI Dragon Center is 65% for CPU and 75% for GPU.

 

I hope this helps anyone else facing similar problems. And as I said earlier, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask!

I know it’s been a while since your post but I’m looking to do the same since my temps aren’t normal anymore (don’t know if they’ve were normal though). But as I wanted to order thermal pads I was wondering how much were about needed for each thinkness. Do you by any chance still have a rough idea on this?
 

Something I was also wondering about is if it’s easy to reinstall the cooler and if it is possible to overthighten it. 
 

Edit: I the one I have is the MSI GS 65 8SE this means I have the model with a 8750H and an RTX 2060

Edited January 4, 2022 by lowieCOOL
Included laptop specs

[random.user]

As someone mentioned it's really hard to find much information about this so I thought I'd share my experience. I have a Stealth GS75 8SG with an RTX 2080 purchased at the beginning of 2019. My process was very similar to OP's:

 

TL;DR:
Replaced fans with higher RPM's, customized fan speed settings to lower temps
Repasted cpu, gpu
Replaced thermal pads on vram, vrm (my guess is .5 mm and 2 mm)
Don't use Turbo mode.

 

The full story:
My laptop ran hot from the beginning. Regularly getting 97 and above for both cpu gpu. I'd heard that they just run hot and that maybe wasn't so bad but I wasn't getting the performance I expected. Since then, after much trial and error, I've gotten it to run much cooler and boost performance. Here are the things that seemd to help -

 

First I replaced the cpu and gpu fans - iirc stock fans hit 7500 rpm max, new ones get over 12000 (and quieter!) This helped but improvement was lost as the computer ran hotter over time.

 

I finally decided to try replacing the thermal paste on both the gpu and cpu. When I removed the heatsink it looked like (imo) someone used too much thermal paste and it seeped out. I cleaned it up and repasted both chips with Arctic MX-4.

 

Unfortunately, when I removed the heat sink the thermal pads broke apart oreo cookie style with some of it stuck to the heat sink and some stuck to the vrm and vram. At first I just left it and reassembled the computer. I saw improvement with the CPU temps now getting between 85-90 under load but the gpu performance was worse.

 

I decided to replace the thermal pads but I couldn't find any information about them, not even their thicknesses. I could tell that the pads I needed to replace were in at least 3 different thicknesses: 1 is pale greenish color and can't be more than .5 mm. There's a pale blue pad that looks like it's the same thickness so I imagine they're different materials rather than thicknesses but it was impossible to tell. Then there's a much thicker pad, also pale green. It looks to be about 2 mm but is very soft/elastic (not sure what the metric is... it's very squishy).

 

It took a couple different tries but I ended up using Arctic TP-3 at 1.5 mm and 1.0 mm, and Gelid GP-Ultimate at .5 mm. I ended up stacking pads on top of eachother but I don't recall which, though I'm pretty sure I avoided mixing brands. However, I do remember that 1.5 mm + 1.5 mm, as OP tried, was too thick, but my laptop isn't the exact same model and may differ in this regard. Since then the GPU is significantly cooler. I haven't seen it reach much over 80c under load (I'm sure it does I just haven't monitored closely)

 

Due to dis/reassembling the laptop several times I ended up repasting the CPU again, though I probably didn't need to in retrospect. I think I got it too thick because the temps climbed back up a bit (cpu only) It's still much cooler than it was, keeping to mid to low 90's, so I can't be bothered to open it back up for the time being.

 

Through the MSI app that came with the PC (mine's called "Dragon Center") I changed the fan settings to turn on at much lower temps than the default. I notice a huge difference when gaming otherwise (non-gaming default is fine). I don't know if that's indicative of an unresolved or new issue, but as long as I'm using the custom fan settings it runs great! I also don't use the "Turbo" setting. I just don't see the need. All that's to say, really, is that I haven't tested it.

 

Hope that is somewhat helpful for others! I've loved both MSI laptops I've had, but I know they're not most people's top choice.