GTX 970M laptop performing three times worse than it should.

[Arthasdmc]

Hello.

I bought a used MSI GE72 2QF Apache Pro.
I installed FEAR 3 to play with my friend and I noticed that it was performing quite bad for computer like this, fps was jumping and the gameplay wasn't smooth at all.

I decided to benchmark and see what's up.
Temperatures at load are ~87C on both GPU and CPU.
On Unigine Heaven 4.0 the GPU usage is 100% but CPU usage is around ~8-10%.

And even when GPU is at 100% the performance was quite bad.
I didn't do the full test, it was like 13 scenes.

I don't really know what might be the problem. If it was thermal throttling, wouldn't the GPU drop down in usage or something?

And for laptops thermal limit is, well, at least for me, for both GPU and CPU it's 105C.

EDIT: Added GPU clock frequency to Afterburner's OSD and I think it's thermal throttling, because the frequency is dropping down, it dropped down to 700 and even less I think if I tested longer.

 

[YoAndy]

Yea it could be thermal throttling you should download MSI Afterburner monitors your entire system not only temperatures. Not only things like CPU usage and temperature by each core, same with GPU. Quote: Overclocking is just one feature of MSI Afterburner. Equally useful is the OSD which allows your to display the Framerate, CPU usage and Temps, GPU usage, Coreclock, Memory Clock and GPU memory used. You can also display per frame latency and Memory usage.Because of the amount of information you can display with Afterbruner, it makes a great performance troubleshooting utility. If you are playing a game and are wondering if your GPU or CPU is bottlenecking performance you can use the OSD to display CPU usage and GPU usage. If all CPUs are maxed out at 100% but your GPU is only at 50%, then your CPU is holding your GPU back, or the game is simply not optimized (happens a lot with newly releases games) And that's only an example of what you can troubleshoot using Afterburner.

Also is not a bad idea for you to buy a pad with fans for underneath the laptop.

 

[10tacle]

Well this is probably too obvious, but make sure your power setting in Windows is set to performance instead of balanced or energy saving. I also assume you have AA off. You don't say what i7 CPU you have in there however. That can make some +/- difference, but not what you are seeing. You are down about half according to this site (scroll down about half way to see the Heaven bench of their 970m): https/www.notebookcheck.net/Clevo-P651SE-Schenker-XMG-P505-Barebones-Notebook-Review.127978.0.html

 

[rgd1101]

Yea it could be thermal throttling you should download MSI Afterburner monitors your entire system not only temperatures. Not only things like CPU usage and temperature by each core, same with GPU. Quote: Overclocking is just one feature of MSI Afterburner. Equally useful is the OSD which allows your to display the Framerate, CPU usage and Temps, GPU usage, Coreclock, Memory Clock and GPU memory used. You can also display per frame latency and Memory usage.Because of the amount of information you can display with Afterbruner, it makes a great performance troubleshooting utility. If you are playing a game and are wondering if your GPU or CPU is bottlenecking performance you can use the OSD to display CPU usage and GPU usage. If all CPUs are maxed out at 100% but your GPU is only at 50%, then your CPU is holding your GPU back, or the game is simply not optimized (happens a lot with newly releases games) And that's only an example of what you can troubleshoot using Afterburner.

Also is not a bad idea for you to buy a pad with fans for underneath the laptop.

Did you post this? or just plagiarize
https/wiki.mikejung.biz/MSI_Afterburner

 

[Arthasdmc]

Well this is probably too obvious, but make sure your power setting in Windows is set to performance instead of balanced or energy saving. I also assume you have AA off. You don't say what i7 CPU you have in there however. That can make some +/- difference, but not what you are seeing. You are down about half according to this site (scroll down about half way to see the Heaven bench of their 970m): https/www.notebookcheck.net/Clevo-P651SE-Schenker-XMG-P505-Barebones-Notebook-Review.127978.0.html

It's i7-4720HQ.
And power profile is set to gaming, and in Nvidia control panel the power management setting is set to prefer maximum performance.

 

[10tacle]

It's i7-4720HQ. And power profile is set to gaming, and in Nvidia control panel the power management setting is set to prefer maximum performance.

Well I'm the idiot for not looking at that, heh. Anyway how mechanically adept are you? Would you feel comfortable taking apart that laptop and looking inside and seeing if it's a dust clogging issue causing thermal issues? You can blow compressed air into the fan intake port but it does not guarantee any real cleaning should something be clogging exhaust (or intake) ventilation. At this point it does sound like a thermal throttling issue with the CPU.

 

[YoAndy]

Sorry I didn't know you guys where detectives. Benchmars are really demanding for both the CPU and GPU so is normal for a "laptop" to generate a lot of heat, specially if is not a "gaming laptop". That's why keeping them dust free is really so important.