Lenovo y510p games almost unplayable

[Unknown Nerd]

Hello everyone, this is my first post on Tom's Hardware. I recently bought a Lenovo y510p "Gaming" laptop. Some of the games I have tried to play on it have been:

Battlefield 3: extreme lag on high settings, playable but laggy in battles in low settings.
Battlefield 4: Playable on medium-high settings.
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare: one of my favorite games, sadly I can not even play it because it gets too laggy when you get into fights to be able to react to the other players, even on low settings and this is not a demanding game at all by today's standards.
Skyrim: laggy.

Does anyone know what could be wrong? I have already checked the Device Manager, and under the Display Adapter tab, I have both of my Nvidia GT 755m graphics cards enabled and drivers are up to date. In the Nvidia control panel, I turned on the SLI visual indicator, and it is working in all of the above games. The green bar doesn't even max out in the games, but the gameplay is so laggy that I can't really participate in the game.

I don't think my RAM is the problem, because it is only using about 20-30% in the Task manager when I check it with the game running. CPU only using 10% or so.

Could it be my 5400rpm Hard Drive? That is pretty slow but I thought that only affected the loading times and not the actual gameplay.

I wish I had my old Ibuypower desktop back which I replaced with this, it only had a single GTX 560 and 1333 speed RAM, and it was able to play my two favorite games Battlefield 3 and Chivalry: MW on ultra settings without ever giving me an issue.

I would really like to get this issue settled because I am moving to Europe in a few months, and I doubt I will be able to get my money back once that happens. In fact, I am not even sure I can get my money back now since it has been 2 or 3 months since I bought this thing.

CPU: 4th Generation Intel Core i7-4700MQ 2.4 GHz (6 MB Cache) Haswell Processor
GPU: Dual SLI NVIDIA GeForce GT755M 2GB Graphics Card
RAM: 8 GB DDR3 1600MHz stock RAM
HDD: 5400rpm 1TB Hard Drive
Monitor: 15.6-Inch 720p,
Windows 8.1 64 Bit / Bluetooth / Integrated HD Camera / Intel Centrino Wireless N-2230
Optical Drive Type: NONE

 

[IInuyasha74]

Hello.

Okay lets go one piece at a time.
RAM- Not an issue. If it was you would have stability issues. I had extremely slow DDR3 ram once which made it slow down, but they were unusually cheap units. They wouldn't put that in the 510p by default.
HDD- You were right, it only affects load times. Once levels are loaded, no affect.
CPU: Same as RAM for this.
GPU: While I don't know the hardware inside of the cards well enough to say for sure, I am fairly certain that the GPUs in your laptop should be more power than the older Nvidia 560. As for figuring out the issue, as a test I would try disabling SLI and see how that goes. Obviously you want that in the long run, but its possible something got messed up in the setup somewhere and is causing the problem. This might all just be a software glitch.

Also double check and make sure in the Nvidia Control Panel that they are all set to run using the Dedicated GPU and not the integrated. I am sure Battlefield 4 is set in your system given the settings it is running on, but its possible one of the others didn't automatically detect and switch to using the dedicated card.

 

[Znoxz]

Some games just have problem with sli.
Try playing some of games with sli off and see if performance improve.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Some games just have problem with sli.
Try playing some of games with sli off and see if performance improve.

This makes no sense. None of those games have SLI issues, and SLI was designed to support those kind of intense games. Even if they didn't support SLI, it would just use one graphics card. Turning off the ability to use 2 wouldn't affect your performance.

SLI causes issues a lot, and even if it doesn't have a major reported issue doesn't mean it couldn't be something in settings causing an issue with SLI. It is very common to see people have issues when doing SLI or crossfire. Not strange.

The laptop is built to be cooled by itself. If it needed a cooler on the outside to cool it then it would be defective.

 

[Znoxz]

The y510p use an ultrabay for sli right? Remove and reinserted it maybe it loose.

 

[dynamesGN]

Plug the laptop into the wall.

 

[IInuyasha74]

I would consider that defective then if it overheats. I would see the entire design as being defective if it is very common.

Like someone said above, make sure it is in the wall. Could be software lowering the speed of the parts to save power. Also try without SLI enabled encase its causing issues. Worst comes to worst, it doesn't improve. Best comes to best, you know what is wrong.

 

[Unknown Nerd]

I think i may have solved it....the laptop was running in some sort of "power saving mode" in the lenovo energy management center. Switched to "High performance mode" and ran a couple of games, so far I don't see any stuttering and they are playable. *Facepalm*

 

[gabrielperez]

you have to play with your computer plugged in, i was experiencing the same trouble with de lenovo 510p, but once i connect to the wall and high performance, bf 3 wuns in ultra.

 

[iceclock]

whats your system temperatures?

 

[RMXEXE]

you have to play with your computer plugged in, i was experiencing the same trouble with de lenovo 510p, but once i connect to the wall and high performance, bf 3 wuns in ultra.

So strange. You know I originally wanted to get one of those and its graphics power beats my laptop's GPU by a long shot but if they must be plugged to play games and have so many issues I feel I got off lucky.