I am experiencing extreme issues with overheating my gaming laptop, an Acer Nitro 5 AN515-57. It came with an i5-11400H, RTX 3050 Ti and I upgraded it to 32 GB of RAM. This will be a long post, describing every little detail I could give about the problem I have, in the hopes that I could find a solution.
What is the issue?
I play DCS (Digital Combat Simulator), a military flight simulator, which is extremely demanding, and over the course of about a year, the laptop started having issues with thermals, CPU throttling and so on. It gets extremely hot, above 90C, up to 95C, and throttles to the point where it is unplayable (BD PROCHOT). What I want to emphasize is that the laptop wasn't always like this, and after all this time I still haven't found out why.
How have I tried fixing it?
- Updating the OS, BIOS, drivers, etc. No change;
- Lowering graphics. No improvement - it can handle medium to high graphics. Even with the lowest graphics, it only gets way, way more FPS, but still overheats and throttles;
- Fans are running at the maximum speed, airflow is not obstructed and I even keep it slightly elevated over the desk for airflow underneath. I open it up and clean the fans every couple weeks;
- I have had it repasted about 2 month ago. Almost no change, it still overheats, but maybe over a slightly longer time;
- Over the last month I have learned about ThrottleStop and undervolting. It improves temperatures, but it is extremely unstable
Issues that appeared with ThrottleStop:
I recently learned about undervolting, so I gave it a try after unlocking it with the insyde tool thing, as my CPU had voltage control locked by default. After many BSODs, I managed to reach a semi-stable setup with the following settings:
- Core/Cache undervolted by -80/-50 mV
- Balanced power plan (High performance kicks the Turbo in for the CPU clocks and drives the temperatures up way faster. The simulator runs perfectly on Balanced, and in general I am willing to sacrifice performance to get lower temperatures)
- No TPL tweaking as I don't use the turbo
- BD PROCHOT disabled
To my surprise, it had a noticeable improvement - temperatures were now sitting in the 80-90C range, and NEVER went above 90C, and no performance hit. I went on DCS to test it out and all seemed fine - until the laptop had shut itself down randomly after about 45 minutes on it. I kept testing and it was randomly shutting down after performing perfectly fine in the game, sometimes after 10 minutes, other times after even 3 hours. The temperature never went above 90C, as I was tracking them on another monitor. No power limit was hit, as it's capped at 25W by the Balanced power plan, and in general, no warnings/limits ever showed up (I had the TS Limit Reasons page opened).
As a test, I enabled BD PROCHOT again, and weirdly enough, while playing with ThrottleStop running, BD PROCHOT kicked in at temperatures as low as 81C, which never, ever happened before, and to this day I am clueless why it kicks in so early.
Currently, I have two options with ThrottleStop - either have BD PROCHOT on and have it furiously throttle, or have it off and have the laptop randomly shut down after a random amount of time, even though, once again, temperatures never go above 90C.
I should also note, this only happens with DCS, but even with a low loading game like Counter Strike 2, the temperatures go extremely high, up to 95C, and for whatever reason the laptop can handle it on CS2 and other games, but not on DCS at LOWER temperatures.
How did it get to this point?
I got this laptop a little over 2 years ago as I needed a reasonably powerful machine for my university degree in computer science and because I wanted something decent to game on compared to an almost 8 year old PC at the time. The laptop did an exceptional job with most games, especially since I had upgraded the RAM. However, I didn't envision before buying this laptop that about hald a year later I would start playing a game as demanding as DCS. The laptop first handled it extremely well, although, over time, it degraded significantly:
- 1 and a half years ago was when I first started playing the simulator. For about 6 months it ran perfectly fine. Temperatures weren't going crazy, I didn't have to worry about the fans, it wasn't throttling at all, and above all, I even had less RAM, only 16.
- About a year ago I upgraded to 32 GB of RAM and a second SSD because DCS is a huge game. However, it had since started to getting high temperatures and throttling
- For a period of time, only cranking the fans to the maximum speed worked. In the meantime I have had its fans cleaned multiple times
- Then, about 6 months ago, it started to not be enough and still kept throttling
- 2-3 months ago I had it get its thermal paste replaced
- For a few weeks it was barely fine again until it started throttling again
- Then about a month ago I got installed ThrottleStop, fixed the throttling but now it randomly shuts down.
Keep in mind, it was running perfectly fine a year ago. I really need to emphasize this. It had no issues, it even had worse maintenance in terms of dusting/cleaning/repasting, it even had less performance due to the lower RAM, and of course, there was no throttling.
What could possibly have happened? I am so clueless and running out of hope. I have asked many people about how to fix this, and some common responses I got were "you can't expect to play such games on a laptop without it overheating" or "try lowering your graphics" or "clean your fans" or many other surface level fixes that I had tried countless times without effect.
The entire reason I wrote this very long post is because 1. I want to know what's wrong - whether it is something I can fix or not and should just look to move on, and 2. Because it was running fine in the past. If it had these issues right from the beginning, I would not even have made this post.
So, my questions are:
1. What could possibly be the underlying issue, given that the laptop has the best possible airflow and I constantly clean the fans? Could the fans maybe be damaged in a way? They still go up to 7000 RPM and they seem fine.
2. As I've said earlier, with ThrottleStop running and BD PROCHOT enabled, why is BD PROCHOT triggering at lower temperatures (in the 80-90C range) when it's supposed to be much higher? And why only on DCS and not other games?
3. With ThrottleStop running and BD PROCHOT disabled, why could the laptop possibly be randomly shutting down, considering the temperatures never go above 90C, and that the CPU max temperature allowed is 100C?
4. Knowing these issues, is there some part that is damaged? Is the CPU maybe degraded from the stress over a long time and can't handle temperatures even in the 80-90C range anymore? But then why can it handle temperatures up to 95C on other games?
5. Could the temperature sensors give wrong readings (from possible damage over time?) for this to happen? Maybe it was shutting down because the real temperature reached was 100C, when it was only displaying below 90C?
These are just my uneducated guesses/speculations. I am not very educated in how hardware behaves under thermal stress. I am running out of hope and I would appreciate any kind of advice. I really hope anyone knows what I should do to fix this. Even knowing that "yeah, your laptop is cooked, it's too damaged, there's nothing you can really do" would be helpful to know, it would at least give me some closure to know that I shouldn't keep beating a dead horse.
I would highly appreciate any kind of help. Cheers!
