Throttle at 51C? Weird.

[FoxClubNiner]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to play Guild Wars 2 on my Asus Q400a. The game run well on other peoples Q400a's from what I have seen and read on the internet. And to boot it is officially "Playable" according to intel:
http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-033387.htm

I have the game on lowest settings and generally get 60FPS. However the are awful dips in FPS into the teens and 20's every 20 seconds or so. So I installed this utility to monitor things:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...p-boards-software-extreme-tuning-utility.html

It turns out that the "Thermal Throttle" value spikes at 100% and lowers the GPU clock drastically. That coincides with my FPS drop. I was getting high 80's low 90's Celsius temperatures on the CPU and GPU! Typical laptop I guess!

So I went to town on cooling mods. I bought a laptop cooling pad, some high performance thermal paste, and even drilled holes in my case around the CPU fan and GPU heatsink to increase the airflow!

It worked like a charm. Sort of. My temps are now high 50's and low 60's at a the games start up and generally hanging around 75 after 10 minutes of play. Here's the kicker though. It's STILL thermal throttling! According to the utility I'm getting 100% thermal throttling at only 51 degrees!

What gives? I'm not sure what to try next. I know this laptop can run the game and others just fine because other people can. The specs are quite decent:

3rd Gen i7 boosts to 2.9GHz
HD4000
8GB 1600MHz RAM
250GB SSD
Win7 64Bit

Any ideas? Im all out.

Obligatory obvious answer list:
- Bios is up to date
- GPU driver is up to date
- Chipset driver is up to date
- CPU fan works

 

[primetime]

looks like a though issue to figure out...just bumping your thread so possibly some else with same set up knows of a fix

 

[Brian_B]

Guild Wars 2 is pretty CPU intensive, and your pushing integrated graphics at the same time

That being said have you seen what it does on a heavy CPU bench (like Prime95, possibly running something like FurMark simultaneously) - that gets you a static heavy load where you can see exactly what your temps are doing - rather than a game load that can change based on what zone/map/other people are around.

 

[unclewebb]

Lots of different Asus laptops have similar throttling problems.

Try the advice that I just posted in this other [H] thread. Different problem but same solution.

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041524484&postcount=3

 

[GiGaBiTe]

I would also make sure your AC adapter is up to snuff for heavy laptop loads before using tools to stop throttling.

Many laptops will ship with a cheap low wattage AC adapter and use the battery to supplement current requirements under heavy loads. Then when the battery inevitably drains, the laptop will go into gimpy mode and throttle down the CPU/GPU so it doesn't damage/destroy the AC adapter.

I've seen pretty much every brand do this, even on the high-end models.

 

[FoxClubNiner]

ThrottleStop did the trick!

Guild Wars 2 is at 30-60fps depending on map size and players on screen. Temps are low 70s. Thanks yall!

AC adapter gets hot but no problems playing the game all weekend!