Nitro 5 AN515-55 CPU Power Throttling at 35W while rated 45!!

handsometomato

I have an ACER Nitro 5 AN515-55 with RTX 3060 and I5 10th gen. After the latest BIOS and VBIOS update from acers website , my laptop is stuck 35W in using power draw while before that it was always 45 and better performance. Right now I am getting really high temps while doing nothing like it is 70 C with one tab open on chrome. I have lost like 30-40% performance in CPU heavy games!!!! Can anyone help me with this?

Thread was edited to add model name to the title

Frodosynthesis

First of all, the laptop has dynamic boost. So if the CPU is not needed, it will run at a lower wattage, and allocate those 10W of power to the GPU (so the GPU gets to 90W). Completely normal. Unless you have directly seen lower FPS, you cannot know if you've lost "30-40%" performance in CPU games. Unless you can post the FPS you're getting now, compared to before in games, there is nothing wrong.

2nd: The 70C when opening Chrome or anything like that is normal.

To explain: When you're idle, the CPU (my 5600H + 3060 Nitro 5) is around 40-50C. The moment you move the mouse, open any program, do anything at all, the CPU will boost it's clocks and the current will flow through the CPU. Now this current is quite high, dozens of amperes, and if you've taken any sort of electric engineering class, you'd know that's A LOT. Now current heats things up. The CPU is located on a small die (<300mm^2) and when you send a high current through it, the temperature can spike by 20+ degrees C in a matter of milliseconds. The CPUs are designed to handle that. Mobile CPUs even more so.

Of course, the spike wouldn't be this high if the fans were running at a higher power (CPU/GPU voltage regulators usually tell the fans how fast they should turn with special sensors for temperature in case of 90C+ so they ramp up to full throttle. At least that's how it used to be, don't know if Nitro 5 uses the same principle).

So you have:
1) Idle CPU at 40-60

2) Fans on low speed because the CPU temp is low

3) You open a program, boost the CPU -> Modern CPUs want the user to have the best experience, so they want to open the program as fast as possible -> voltage spikes from 0.8V to 1.3 (at least in my case on 5600H), amperes go running through and the temperature spikes to 70-80 degrees Celsius

4) Fans kick in to cool it down and once the CPU is no longer needed to quickly open stuff, it will run at some steady clock

5) Temperature will hover/spike in the [60,80] range usually (if the fans are clogged or the thermal paste job is bad, then the idle temps will be high)

To ease up on the temperature you can do the following:

In the Balanced Power Mode, advanced settings, you can set maximum processing state to 99%. That effectively disables Turbo Boost. That way, the CPU will usually always run at the base clock speed with low voltage (usually around 1V is enough to sustain up to 3.3 GHz clock on all cores).

That way, when you're browsing the net, watching movies and stuff like that, where you do not need some crazy CPU power, the CPU will sit at a comfortable 50 degrees C (max 60).

And when you game, the laptop automatically switches to high performance which should have the highest settings possible for performance (100% processor state, etc).

You should also check the GPU settings. Both global and for the specific game. Sometimes the Nvidia driver can set the default performance to balanced and not run at full power, which leads to lower performance (especially for older games where it judges the extra juice is not needed)

EDIT: There is also the fact that Intel CPUs are s*** and much worse than Ryzen at pretty much everything except single threaded performance

handsometomato

I have recorded dips in games like apex went from giving me 144 fps in firing range to 60 fps which is more than 30-40 % , Control on the other hand is not 15-25 (did not touch 30 at all) while it was like 50-60 always! 

Intel CPUs are ***** and I know that. The engineer from acer came to check and finally they concluded with already defective CPU because it blue screened like 5 times while he was operating. Idle temperature are increasing everyday and today it is 80 -100 which explains blue screening while doing basic tasks.