What is wrong with my Nitro 5 Spin (NP515-51)?

lorddestrian

I purchased a Nitro 5 Spin, with an i5-8250u, 8GB of RAM and a GTX 1050 somewhere near the end of July 2019 from an authorized Acer Store. i had my exams back then and as a result never got to spend a lot of time gaming or performing GPU intensive tasks. When I finally started gaming, somewhere around August or September, I realized there were tons of problems. CS:GO which is a potato game, wouldn't give me a steady 60 fps, no matter what map I was on, no matter if I was offline or not. Also, when I say steady 60 fps, I mean it would play fine at 60 fps for 10 mins tops and would plummet down to 30 and constantly dip into the lower 10s every 2 or 3 seconds. This continued to occur despite numerous complete PC resets, replacing the motherboard, fan and changing the thermal paste (All done by Authorized Acer Technicians). It's been almost a year now and my laptop performs exactly the same and no, CS:GO wasn't the only game I tested, I've also tested Alan Wake at 1920x1080 on the High Setting Preset and I averaged at around 14 fps. (This is all when the power connector is plugged in by the way) On the insistence of the Acer Technician that was assigned to my case, I gave my laptop to them once again. They made me change the game from my HDD to my m.2 nVME SSD, which obviously didn't help and then tried installing it on their own SSD, which again, yielded no results. For the past 3 days, they've been trying to fiddle around with different driver versions and facing the exact same problem. Doesn't this make me eligible for a refund? I have proof of mails ever since the problem started and to be very honest, I'm extremely frustrated. Every component in my laptop has been replaced atleast once with the screen being the only thing that's been the same.

GAMING6698

@lorddestrian
I think your GPU/CPU is overheating.
Follow these steps→
1)open nitrosense then minimize it
2)Then open and play your game for 10min
3)after 10min close your game open nitrosense take screenshot and post here

lorddestrian

GAMING6698 said:
@lorddestrian
I think your GPU/CPU is overheating.
Follow these steps→
1)open nitrosense then minimize it
2)Then open and play your game for 10min
3)after 10min close your game open nitrosense take screenshot and post here

I know it's been overheating. Here's the thing, The NP515-51 doesn't come with NitroSense software. It's essentially a Spin 5 with a GTX1050. That said I used HWMonitor to monitor my temps. and I get a decent 70-75 degrees on both CPU and GPU.

anujsoni1997

I stopped using this laptop since past 2 years. But I still remember how you can work around this problem to get better frames at games.

You need a few things for this:

1. Thermal paste your cpu & gpu (I suggest noctua nt-h2)
2. Any fan cooling stand for laptop (to be used as a dock) is recommended because after a few optimizations, your laptop will be throwing out heat like a 1000W room heater.
3. Get a 135W Acer charger. (usb C is only uptill 45W. And no, don't use both of barrel plug and usb C charger together)… if you use 90W charger with the optimizations, while playing games the battery will get discharged slowly.
4. Install throttlestop, And do some common optimizations:
   1. undervolt. Around -0.80 works well. (Play around with Throttlestop basically.)
   2. increase CPU package turbo boost time to max
   3. increase total wattage to be used by CPU to around 25W. (can try more if you need better results)
   4. Disable intel speedshift/speedstep & some other options… I can't recall all of them rn.
5. Do use notebook fan control & create custom profile for your machine. (use max speed while playing games)
6. Uninstall Intel DPTF driver from Driver manager while playing games to stop thermal & power limit throttling.

Before these steps, I was getting around 100-60 fps with frequent dips. These optimizations should work well with any laptop in general. After, I was able to get 200-250 fps in CSGO back in the day.