CPU throttling and performance worsened (Acer Nitro 5)

parzival4107

At the start of January got an Acer Nitro 5 (i7-12650H, RTX 4060) and performed fine, no throttling too bad but about 1 or 2 months ago performance was suddenly worse, got a little more than half the average frames in most games, and especially on Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 got significantly a) worse performance and b) a lot more CPU throttle even when it was only at 10% utilisation. Posted this about a month ago, tried a lot of things but they didnt help, even fully reset pc (or something like that, all my programs were uninstalled). I'm pretty annoyed that this issue hasn't gone away, if anyone has any ideas on what could be causing this/how it could be fixed, please reply.

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/705841/cpu-throttling-and-performance-worsened-acer-nitro-5

Is the battery fully charged, is the power adapter plugged in 24/7, if you are using a non-laptop USB-C charger the system will throttle the power. Don't limit the battery charging to 80% with Acer Care Center or other battery monitoring programs, when the battery charge gets low Windows will throttle the performance to preserve battery power, turn off Battery Saver, change Power Plan to Best Performance and also the battery power plan in Power and Sleep Settings (Battery meter taskbar).

Axxo

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)

scopergab

i am facing the same problem but i can't find a solution for it. did you fix the problem?