i5-7300HQ, ThrottleStop, and TPL! Oh My!

InZillaWeTrust · February 26, 2021

My current "gaming" setup is an ACER Aspire VX-5 591G with an i5-7300HQ and a GTX 1050 4GB (Speccy Sheet). I use ThrottleStop to undervolt my CPU and occasionally use Afterburner to get minor gains while gaming. I have 3 profiles set up in ThrottleStop called Gaming (MAX), Performance, and Battery (See screenshots). I have 2 profiles set through Afterburner Profile 1 is from using the OC Scanner Tool and Profile 2 is copied from Profile 1 without the Memory Overclock, I rarely use these as I find it doesn't seem to make much a difference in the end and I assume I would benefit from spending a bit more time nailing down the best settings there but I find I rarely bottleneck from my GPU.

It's worth mentioning out the gate that Acer made some poor decisions with my laptop model and have given no ability to control fan speeds through any software and the UEFI is locked down to the point of being useless. As far as I've read it seems the fan speeds are linked to load percentage and not temps. I am using Acer Fan Control so that I at least have the option of running my fans at max speed when needed. I also use a laptop cooling pad with a single fan anytime I am gaming. I also have Project Lasso running, use Bitsum High Performance as my power setting and have set most of my Nvidia settings to maximize performance over quality. Up to date on Windows, Nvidia Drivers, etc. My goal is consistent performance and I usually prioritize fps above any graphical fanciness.

I have been having some issues with heat and performance as of late. I am comfortable enough with both pieces of software and have done my due diligence with testing stability (Cinebench, Superposition, Heaven, etc) and I am quite confident in my setup being stable with my current settings.I do occasionally have issues with my GPU disconnecting (Not sure if this is the correct term) during gameplay which results in the game itself freezing visually but I can hear sound and other players confirm I will still be moving around, the only fix has been a full system restart if I am unable to force close the game. I also recently repasted my CPU & GPU with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut in January, added some additional Thermal Grizzly Minus Pad 8 to some chips and installed a cheap little heatsink for my M.2 NVMe SSD (WD SN750 500Gb) because it was hitting 75-80C under load without the heatsink, and luckily maxes out at about 59C now that it has the heatsink which is great.

I have used ThrottleStop to undervolt CPUs across a few computers and know the ins and out there, however I have never really touched the TPL settings. I believe I found a thread somewhere where Unclewebb made some suggestions for the exact same CPU that I have and I copied the TPL settings from there. I currently have Turbo Disabled on all profiles except my Gaming (Max) profile but I feel like this is a lazy approach and leaves me with underutilization. I am looking for some suggestions on how best to maximize performance in my setup that I may not have already done. I feel like I am missing out by not understanding or utilizing the TPL settings in ThrottleStop. I'm hoping that the saviour of all things ThrottleStop Unclewebb or anyone else can offer so suggestions for me.

TL;DR:

Imgur Album of Screenshots
ACER Aspire VX5 591G
i5-7300HQ
GTX 1050 4GB
16GB RAM
NVMe M.2 SSD 500GB + Low Profile Heatsink
ThrottleStop
Afterburner
Project Lasso

Looking for advice on how to lower temps, improve performance and understand more about how to best use TPL settings.

unclewebb · February 26, 2021

The first thing I notice is that your C0% is really high. When your computer is idle with nothing open, what does ThrottleStop report for C0% on its main screen? The easiest way to improve performance is to work on lowering your idle C0% so your CPU is not spending all of its time processing background tasks.

Here is an example of a 4 core CPU that is able to spend more than 99% of its idle time in C7. If you are nowhere near that number, open the Task Manager, click on the Details tab and organize the background tasks by CPU usage. The first core looks overloaded. Something must be keeping it busy.

Grab the updated version,

ThrottleStop 9.3

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlestop/

Turn on the Log File option and go play a game for at least 15 minutes. When done, go in your ThrottleStop / Logs folder and attach your log to your next post or copy and paste the data to http://www.pastebin.com

InZillaWeTrust · February 26, 2021

38 minutes ago, unclewebb said:

The first thing I notice is that your C0% is really high. When your computer is idle with nothing open, what does ThrottleStop report for C0% on its main screen? The easiest way to improve performance is to work on lowering your idle C0% so your CPU is not spending all of its time processing background tasks.

Here is an example of a 4 core CPU that is able to spend more than 99% of its idle time in C7. If you are nowhere near that number, open the Task Manager, click on the Details tab and organize the background tasks by CPU usage. The first core looks overloaded. Something must be keeping it busy.

Grab the updated version,

ThrottleStop 9.3

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlestop/

Turn on the Log File option and go play a game for at least 15 minutes. When done, go in your ThrottleStop / Logs folder and attach your log to your next post or copy and paste the data to http://www.pastebin.com

Alright, so I ran Valheim for 15 minutes and created a log which I uploaded to PasteBin here: https://pastebin.com/RZ3is22j

I also took a look at Task Manager and grabbed a screenshot of the processes sorted by CPU. I restarted my computer after updating ThrottleStop to 9.3 and took a screenshot of the main screen after a fresh reboot.

I know that Project Lasso has some sort of CPU Core Parking that it does but to be honest I pretty much installed it and left it alone. I mainly use it as an official alternative to ISLC which I started using with Warzone last year to prevent stuttering I was experiencing. Could that be a problem potentially? I'm not attached to the software but assumed it was better to have it than not.

Edit:
I also want to mention that I did both a Windows Defender Scan as well as a Malwarebytes scan a few days ago because I wanted to make sure I did not have any malware eating away at my resources.

Edited February 26, 2021 by InZillaWeTrust

unclewebb · February 26, 2021

CompatTelRunner.exe is Windows 10 telemetry garbage. That seems to be the biggest offender.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-performance-winpc/what-is-compattelrunnerexe-on-win10-64-bit-and-why/3af9a0ea-bb18-4df7-99d5-4930ae59d247?auth=1

Consider turning off some of the more useless parts of Windows by using O&O ShutUp10.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Your log file looks good. CPU and GPU performance and temperatures are OK and there are no throttling problems. Keep trying to get the C0% lower. The more CPU cycles you can free up, the better your computer will run. CPUs need to spend very little time in the C0 state processing background tasks after Windows 10 has been cleaned up.

The TPL window is OK. You do not need to change anything because you are not having any problems.

InZillaWeTrust · February 28, 2021

On 2/25/2021 at 7:49 PM, unclewebb said:

CompatTelRunner.exe is Windows 10 telemetry garbage. That seems to be the biggest offender.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-performance-winpc/what-is-compattelrunnerexe-on-win10-64-bit-and-why/3af9a0ea-bb18-4df7-99d5-4930ae59d247?auth=1

Consider turning off some of the more useless parts of Windows by using O&O ShutUp10.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Your log file looks good. CPU and GPU performance and temperatures are OK and there are no throttling problems. Keep trying to get the C0% lower. The more CPU cycles you can free up, the better your computer will run. CPUs need to spend very little time in the C0 state processing background tasks after Windows 10 has been cleaned up.

The TPL window is OK. You do not need to change anything because you are not having any problems.

Alright after a few days of trial and error I figured I'd post an update in case anyone comes across this post looking for answers to high C0% with a similar setup to mine.

As it turns out it seems that Project Lasso was causing my high C0% even on idle. The attached screenshot is from a fresh boot (after the dust settled of course) WITHOUT Project Lasso or Park Control running. I will be investigating further to see if I can avoid this while still maintaining my Project Lasso/Park Control usage but until then I have them both disabled.

It's also worth mentioning that I had some issues with my Nvidia GPU driver and needed to use DDU to uninstall everything completely and do a fresh install for that as well since my last update. I'm not sure if it was just a bad driver update or what exactly happened but for the sake of providing as much info as possible I thought it was worth noting.