ACER A515-44 if battery is below 40% and plugged in dramatic CPU and performance throttling.

AtomicHobo

ACER A515-44 if battery is below 40% and plugged in dramatic CPU and performance throttling. If I then unplug it, the performance returns.
I've already spoken with Acer support who claim a few things; It's working as intended, it's an OS issue or I don't understand how power saving works.
<Having spoken to two other technical agents, one said it is possible that this is how your device is suppose to work, that the settings adjust at 40%.  Another said he knows of a laptop that could change the power performance via creating a High Performance Plan to adjust the performance, but he also knows of another laptop that was unable to adjust the performance with creating a High Performance plan.>

I have already tried the following:

• changed power plan
• created new power plan
• update all drivers
• updated AMD drivers
• reset the laptop and reinstalled windows using the rescue partition
• tried the battery reset - the little pinhole next to battery housing
• purchased a higher output charger to see if that helped - it didn't make a difference

More information on the performance hit. If I am playing Minecraft, I can noticeably see a drop in frame rate (144+ to approx 25 fps) when the battery is below 40% AND plugged in charging. The CPU maxes out at approx 1.25hz. If I remove the charger, the CPU usage goes back up to full speed and performance returns to max fps in Minecraft and lagging disappears.

Easwar

Hi @AtomicHobo,

Is the issue return again.

AtomicHobo

Do you mean if its still an issue then yes, yes it is and has been since we got the laptop. 

AtomicHobo

Uploaded screenshots showing how the battery behaves when unplugged/plugged in. 

AtomicHobo

So I've manage to fix my own issue. No thanks to ACER support or CURRYS where I purchased it.
Using a 90w charger removes the bottleneck when charging. Perhaps ACER should consider including a more powerful charger than the 45W.
Thanks for nothing and now I'm out of pocket, but hopefully someone else will see this.

JustAName33

AtomicHobo said:

So I've manage to fix my own issue. No thanks to ACER support or CURRYS where I purchased it.
Using a 90w charger removes the bottleneck when charging. Perhaps ACER should consider including a more powerful charger than the 45W.
Thanks for nothing and now I'm out of pocket, but hopefully someone else will see this.

Thanks for sharing the solution. I have the same issue with my laptop. And if may i ask, what type of the 90w charger? Is it a charger from another Acer laptop or universal laptop charger that i can find on online marketplace?

AtomicHobo

JustAName33 said:

Thanks for sharing the solution. I have the same issue with my laptop. And if may i ask, what type of the 90w charger? Is it a charger from another Acer laptop or universal laptop charger that i can find on online marketplace?

I bought one off Amazon which did the trick. I will avoid Acer in future.