AN515-57-50JH Nitro i5 - Faulty GPU? severe lag and low FPS

Docskillz

Good day! I just wanted to get some general advice before taking more drastic steps. I have been using an Acer Nitro 5 AN515-57-50JH that was bought around 6 weeks ago.

Its a device with the following stats: 11400H 8GB RAM 512GB SSD GTX 1650

I previously had the same type of Nitro i5, the only real difference was that it had a 1tb regular hard drive instead(and it was windows 10, not 11). On the previous laptop, I could generally run GTA5 on highest settings with no issues. Now on this new one, I was able to complete the first part of the first mission, then when it got to the cutscene with Michael in the psychologists office, it suddenly did the following:

Severe lag(like going from a regular high framerate to maybe 5 frames per second)

Severe audio distortions and warping(like the sound is half the speed but it has a distorted tone over it)

Computer suddenly turns off without any warning or message.

Since then, ive tried to play a few times while monitoring the performance. It all looks relatively normal - however the problem persists. I got passed that cutscene, did most of the first mission until the cops arrive, then the problem hit again. I thought simply pausing, waiting and unpausing might fix it, but it doesn't. The last time it did it, I immediately shut down the game before it shut my pc down, and I noticed that for a few minutes after the game was shut down, any time I touched volume up or down, it would do the "ping" sound with the same distortion as before. When monitoring performance in the task manager, everything appears normal - except that the internal gpu seems to abruptly jump to 90 or 100%. Then when i noticed the sound returned to normal, it appeared that the gpu also became more stable(anywhere between 0 and 30%).

So of course, researching the issue comes back with standard advice - Make sure the game settings are correct, Make sure you have the latest drivers(Ive got that NVidia experience so it shouldn't be an issue), make sure there aren't too many background processes. I can obviously still test and completely ensure that these aren't issues. But I still think that the behavior is unusual for a new laptop playing a relatively old game? I must also mention that about a week after getting the laptop, there was some kind of GPU crash. I restarted the laptop and didn't think much of it at the time, but I did note that my previous Nitro didn't once have that issue after 2 years of using it.

So any advice is appreciated. I'm personally thinking its faulty and will need replacement under the warrantee - But its quite drastic to get it replaced so if anyone has any other ideas, or if there are more advanced ways to troubleshoot, please let me know

[Edited the thread to add model name and issue detail]