Acer Nitro 5 AN515-51 Worse GPU Performance Plugged in VS on Battery

Hey everyone,

I recently downloaded Userbenchmark just to see where my laptop stacks up against others and I noticed that after my benchmark it showed my GPU as massively underperforming (6th percentile) even though it was plugged in and on 100% power. After some troubleshooting I realized that the issue goes away when I have the laptop unplugged.

I originally bought this laptop when I lived in Germany and now I live in the USA so I was thinking maybe the power adapter isn’t getting the input voltage required to power the laptop fully? But on Amazon the only chargers I find say they require 240v input voltage.

I have the latest nvidia drivers installed on the laptop and I use throttlestop to undervolt the cpu for better thermals, just in case that’s important in some way.

I’m happy to provide more information if required

Thank you!

Note: While writing this I just tried running the benchmark again without throttlestop running and it improved my GPU score a bit (now 11th percentile) I’m totally confused now, maybe my throttlestop is configured incorrectly? Or maybe some weird power management stuff is happening because the power supply cannot supply enough Wattage for the whole system on 120v vs 240v

Accepted answers

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1207426#Comment_1207426

Check your Advanced Power Plan setting at what % the max. processor power state is when plugged-in, maybe you reduced that to 95% because of overheating issues? Have you updated your BIOS recently, Acer introduced battery charging modifications in the latest UEFI firmware. This should be the other way around; better performance when plugged- in, reset your Power Plan and do that bench again using the Ultra-High Performance Power Plan with the power adapter plugged in.

All comments

D4rkPho3n1x

I also noticed now that there is one particular GPU benchmark that seems to be the issue.

With Throttlestop running:

Splatting only gets a score of 0.3

Whereas without Throttlestop:

Now it gets a score of 13.8

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1207426#Comment_1207426

Check your Advanced Power Plan setting at what % the max. processor power state is when plugged-in, maybe you reduced that to 95% because of overheating issues? Have you updated your BIOS recently, Acer introduced battery charging modifications in the latest UEFI firmware. This should be the other way around; better performance when plugged- in, reset your Power Plan and do that bench again using the Ultra-High Performance Power Plan with the power adapter plugged in.

D4rkPho3n1x

I’m at work atm but I know that I have the max power state at 100%, I solved heat issues with a -125mv offset in throttlestop.

I haven’t updated the bios ever for this laptop so that could probably be it. When I first got it back in 2016/2017 I wasn’t really focused too much on benchmarks and performance as long as it could play csgo decently. So this could’ve been an issue since I got it that I just didn’t notice.

The only reason I decided to fire it back up was so my fiancée had a computer of some kind to play games like Warframe and Rainbow 6 Siege. But the GPU performance isn’t what I remembered it to be. Hopefully this’ll fix it, I’ll probably be able to give an update around tomorrow afternoon

D4rkPho3n1x

Alright I finally got some more results to share and it kinda worked? The performance difference between plugged in and unplugged is now gone but the gpu is still at that 11th percentile mark. Stopping both MSI Afterburner and Throttlestop does nothing except increase thermals and make my score slightly worse.

I have no clue why my GPU performance isn't what it's expected to be, even with a significant overclock in Afterburner:

I've done plenty of tests to make sure the overclock is stable so that wouldn't be the issue and I tested again without Afterburner running just to make sure and there was no difference besides a slight decrease in performance.