Repasted laptop, CPU still throttling. Advice? Zephyrus M GU502GV (i7-9750h, RTX 2060)

CoalitionGaming · April 14, 2022

So my brother has been having an issue with his laptop that has gotten progressively worse. He finally had the last straw the other day so I sat down to go through testing rounds to figure it out and identified what appeared to be a GPU throttling issue. It will, seemingly at random, drop frequency of the GPU which goes down to around 960mhz and the wattage of the 2060 will drop as well, down to around 40 watts. Obviously this tanks performance, but have tried many things to no avail. Verified it does this in both COD Warzone (2019, Black Ops Cold War, Cold War Zombies, and Vanguard), and Apex Legends so far. My brother also streams from his laptop and I had him install MSI afterburner and get the overlay configured so we could see whats happening when it behaves like this and we caught it live. Also id like to point out for OBS Studio that its been set in windows graphics settings to run in High Performance (so running on the 2060), and the preview window is disabled. Here's a clip of after it was running like normal, then throttled, then went back to normal and you can see the behavior i've described.

https://clips.twitch.tv/ObedientVainPlumageOSfrog-ahLMOppvm4kebI0U

Have tried: Clean reinstall of drivers, DDU and clean reinstall of drivers, windows 10 full reinstall, specifying any/all games and OBS Studio in the windows graphics settings to run in High Performance mode (so it runs on the 2060 instead of iGPU), setting GPU to "prefer maximum performance" in nvidia settings, setting Asus Armory Crate to max performance for the laptop, trying different game graphics settings, Hardware accelerated graphics scheduling on and off, set windows power plan to high performance, created custom max performance windows power plan.

Figured okay maybe there's thermal throttling, lets just repaste it. Had my brother come over and we cleaned out the fans and heatsinks and redid the thermal paste. I was unfamiliar with the thicker goop used on the VRAM and VRMs though (come to find out its K5 Pro). We put some Kingpin KPx I happened to have (spread manually) on the CPU and GPU and I had extra Arctic MX-4 that I put a thick dollop on the VRAMs and small dollop on the VRMs and everywhere else that had the thicker goop. I'm seeing that many people online used 1mm thermal pads instead for anything that wasn't the CPU or GPU, so I may have to revisit this. He ran through a short amount of testing and the original issue described above seems to have cleared up. No more GPU throttling dropouts. But GPU temps can still reach mid-80s and CPU mid-90s. Watching him test this live on his stream with the MSI afterburner overlay going, I saw the CPU going from around 4ghz down to 2.6ghz and bouncing around like that. Here is a clip.

https://www.twitch.tv/tzalman/clip/BlightedRelentlessMagpieYee-ESBJswGV0_TK-WGI

No framerate drops like from the first clip though. So it feels like 2 steps forward 1 step backwards. Thinking of ordering thermal pads for the VRM and VRAM chips and redoing this again. Any feedback on KPx on the CPU and GPU or should I try something else? Thanks in advance.