Laptop Throttling

[Setech]

Hey,

 

So my lady friend complained about her laptop being insufferably slow (Acer inspire V nitro something). The good boyfriend I am, I obviously started to look into it. What I've discovered is that the laptop is only using less than half of it's resources for any given task. I did an extended play test with Total War: Shogun 2, and it runs like crud... however, for brief moments the frame rate jumps to +60 fps, same with a game like R6: Siege, runs like crap. GPU Z, and HW monitor give peaks for the CPU at ~40% and a peak for the GPU at 60% while running an average of about 35-45%. When I bought this thing, Shogun 2 for example ran absolutely perfectly with 0 issues, so I know there's "umph under the hood" but it's just not being used.

Now, I'm fairly convinced this is some planned obsolescence bullshit Apple style. A complete system reinstall doesn't help, the problem persists. The bios on this laptop doesn't let me tinker with anything but boot priority. Anyone got a clue what's going on, and what to do about it?

Specs:

i5-4210H

8gb of RAM

nvidia 860M

[Silentprototipe]

How are the temps? Or the power plan? Perhaps one or the other could be the culprit 

[Guest Generallee]

Does it have switchable graphics ? Sometimes it sticks to the iGPU instead of the dGPU

[wojtepanik]

clean the fan and radiator, change termopads, paste, format and throw ssd in if it has not any  

[Mira Yurizaki]

By "complete system reinstall", was that a factory reset or reinstall of Windows + updates?

 

A factory reset would better tell if it's more a hardware or software problem.

[bANONYMOUS]

Start with AIDA64 and run a stresstest to see if the loss of performance is thermal throttling, if it is thermal related, at stated above, pop it open, clean the fan and heatsink, apply new thermal compound, always use high end compounds in laptops.

If it's not thermal throttling, again, try as stated above doing a fresh install, just backup your Steam folder, and then go to your user account and copy the entire account folder to an external drive to back up all of your data, download the latest version of windows 10 from their website, if you downloaded an ISO use Rufus to make a USB installer, if you downloaded Media Creation Tool than you're good to go, follow the on screen goodies and you're ready to do a fresh install of windows 10.

Prior to formatting, use AIDA64 again to backup your Windows Key just in case it doesn't auto active on install. Do the fresh install, don't install anything when it's done, do all of the Windows updates as it will find the majority of the drivers for you, once everything is done, download your GPU driver from the manufacturer, bingo bango, you're ready togo, should be running flawless after that, if it's not, burn it, it would be a hardware issue if those two suggestions don't work and it's not worth the time and effort needed to repair.

Also, don't do a factory reset, that will keep all of the manufacturer bloat ware installed and whatever (if software related) caused this issue, it will still be there to cause it again down the road.

Hope this helps.

EDIT:
I use Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound in my laptops