Problem: Acer Nitro 5 AN515-52 Overheating (90-95°C)

[GoronsRule]

Hello everyone, hope you are doing well. I've surfed through this site quite a bit for the past year because of its excellent programs and threads that help thousands of people.

I'm here because I've exhausted all of the possible solutions I could think of to cool my Acer laptop. The problems are as follows:

1. Intensive gaming such as Elden Ring, heavy emulation like the Switch, etc., all lead to temperatures that hover around 90-95 WHILE UNDERVOLTED. I tried a trick I've been using that is limiting the FPS to 30 and "duplicating it" with LSFG from Lossless Scaling and it worked for a while when it comes to performance (even if it's fake FPS), but I still had high temperatures nonetheless.

2. Prochot Offset is locked by Acer from what I've seen (there is a yellow lock above it, although the options aren't grayed out), so I can't manually lock the temperatures so that it doesn't overheat.

3. As I've said, I already undervolted and underclocked both my CPU and GPU following some YouTube guides and the nice preset Red Sand (Hero Preset) from the Acer forums, and from what I've read so far, it works nicely. It's not a miracle thing, since the author of the preset said that the fps would be more or less the same but the temperatures would decrease 5 or 20 degrees depending on the games at that time.

4. I've used this 6 year old laptop for 4 years (got it in 2020) heavily (changed OS from Windows to Linux and back to Windows, I'm on Windows 11 which I kinda regret), so I don't know how much life it has left, and may be why it overheats. I upgraded it with 16 GBs of RAM (24 GBs now in total) and a 1TB SSD if that helps. I've sent it for maintenance and thermal paste change, but nothing worked. I even have a cooling pad that lifts it a little bit so it has a better way to cool itself, but it also doesn't do much.

So yeah, these are the issues with my laptop and I require some help. Uncle Webb, if you are reading this, I require your infinite wisdom when it comes to this stuff, and I thank everyone beforehand for reading this and helping me afterwards if possible.

I don't have any benchmark programs at the moment, only some games and HWInfo if that helps. I'll provide logs if needed but I don't know how to do it efficiently, so I'll wait for instructions as well. Have a good day.

 

[eidairaman1]

Hello everyone, hope you are doing well. I've surfed through this site quite a bit for the past year because of its excellent programs and threads that help thousands of people.

I'm here because I've exhausted all of the possible solutions I could think of to cool my Acer laptop. The problems are as follows:

1. Intensive gaming such as Elden Ring, heavy emulation like the Switch, etc., all lead to temperatures that hover around 90-95 WHILE UNDERVOLTED. I tried a trick I've been using that is limiting the FPS to 30 and "duplicating it" with LSFG from Lossless Scaling and it worked for a while when it comes to performance (even if it's fake FPS), but I still had high temperatures nonetheless.

2. Prochot Offset is locked by Acer from what I've seen (there is a yellow lock above it, although the options aren't grayed out), so I can't manually lock the temperatures so that it doesn't overheat.

3. As I've said, I already undervolted and underclocked both my CPU and GPU following some YouTube guides and the nice preset Red Sand (Hero Preset) from the Acer forums, and from what I've read so far, it works nicely. It's not a miracle thing, since the author of the preset said that the fps would be more or less the same but the temperatures would decrease 5 or 20 degrees depending on the games at that time.

4. I've used this 6 year old laptop for 4 years (got it in 2020) heavily (changed OS from Windows to Linux and back to Windows, I'm on Windows 11 which I kinda regret), so I don't know how much life it has left, and may be why it overheats. I upgraded it with 16 GBs of RAM (24 GBs now in total) and a 1TB SSD if that helps. I've sent it for maintenance and thermal paste change, but nothing worked. I even have a cooling pad that lifts it a little bit so it has a better way to cool itself, but it also doesn't do much.

So yeah, these are the issues with my laptop and I require some help. Uncle Webb, if you are reading this, I require your infinite wisdom when it comes to this stuff, and I thank everyone beforehand for reading this and helping me afterwards if possible.

I don't have any benchmark programs at the moment, only some games and HWInfo if that helps. I'll provide logs if needed but I don't know how to do it efficiently, so I'll wait for instructions as well. Have a good day.

From a hardware standpoint, did you ever replace the thermal paste or thermal pads? All of the mobile oems use cheap crappy stuff. Have you blew any vents and fans out over the years of owning this notebook?

Also you may want to consider these cooling pads...

Truth be told, as thin as these things are, definitely a notebook and not a laptop...

@unclewebb

 

[GoronsRule]

From a HardWare standpoint, you ever replace the thermal paste or thermal pads, oems use crappy stuff. Blew any vents and fans out?.

Also you may want to consider these cooling pads...

Thanks for the response.

I have a rather okay cooling pad that I got as a gift. It has like 5 fans although I think it doesn't cool that much judging from the air it releases.

Thankfully, the lackluster thermal paste was changed like 1 or 2 months ago plus cleaning all the dust it had accumulated through the years. It honestly didn't change much, it still performs and heats the same from what I've tested so far.

 

[eidairaman1]

Thanks for the response.

I have a rather okay cooling pad that I got as a gift. It has like 5 fans although I think it doesn't cool that much judging from the air it releases.

Thankfully, the lackluster thermal paste was changed like 1 or 2 months ago plus cleaning all the dust it had accumulated through the years. It honestly didn't change much, it still performs and heats the same from what I've tested so far.

The way oems sardine can in the parts in the chassis nowadays with no space to breath they definitely thermalsoak and throttle. I believe the fans aren't powerful enough with as thin they are and use like 1U heatpipesinks. 1U fans are as noisy and annoying as a blue star is hot by the way.

The coolers I suggested are like forced induction on a Super Charged or Turbo Charged Automobile.

And the way fans are you need good cooled air, otherwise blowing warm air on parts just makes it worse.

 

[unclewebb]

I require your infinite wisdom

Acer likes to set low ball thermal limits for many of their laptops so they will start to thermal throttle sooner than they should. Acer also likes to lock the PROCHOT Offset setting as you found out so there is not much you can do about this part of the problem.

You are probably already doing all you can with ThrottleStop. Post some screenshots of the main window, the FIVR and TPL windows so I can at least see your settings.

I've sent it for maintenance and thermal paste change, but nothing worked.

Replacing the thermal paste is critical. I would not let anyone do this to my laptop. Order some Honeywell PTM 7950 and buy a few screwdrivers. Watch some YouTube repair videos for your laptop model. I am sure you can do a better job compared to someone that doesn't care nearly as much about your laptop. Some of the generic / bulk / cheap thermal paste used by some repair shops is junk when applied direct die to a mobile CPU.

 

[eidairaman1]

Acer likes to set low ball thermal limits for many of their laptops so they will start to thermal throttle sooner than they should. Acer also likes to lock the PROCHOT Offset setting as you found out so there is not much you can do about this part of the problem.

You are probably already doing all you can with ThrottleStop. Post some screenshots of the main window, the FIVR and TPL windows so I can at least see your settings.


Replacing the thermal paste is critical. I would not let anyone do this to my laptop. Order some Honeywell PTM 7950 and buy a few screwdrivers. Watch some YouTube repair videos for your laptop model. I am sure you can do a better job compared to someone that doesn't care nearly as much about your laptop. Some of the generic / bulk / cheap thermal paste used by some repair shops is junk when applied direct die to a mobile CPU.

It's like the P6 Architecture (Pentium Pro, Pentium 3, Core Duo) and Skt A Days, back then AS5/AS Ceramique was the stuff to use.

 

[GoronsRule]

Acer likes to set low ball thermal limits for many of their laptops so they will start to thermal throttle sooner than they should. Acer also likes to lock the PROCHOT Offset setting as you found out so there is not much you can do about this part of the problem.

You are probably already doing all you can with ThrottleStop. Post some screenshots of the main window, the FIVR and TPL windows so I can at least see your settings.


Replacing the thermal paste is critical. I would not let anyone do this to my laptop. Order some Honeywell PTM 7950 and buy a few screwdrivers. Watch some YouTube repair videos for your laptop model. I am sure you can do a better job compared to someone that doesn't care nearly as much about your laptop. Some of the generic / bulk / cheap thermal paste used by some repair shops is junk when applied direct die to a mobile CPU.

Sure enough, here's the screenshots. Thank you and Eidair for the help.

 

[GoronsRule]

Alright.

I made some tests here and there, and the results are a little underwhelming but it may be the only thing I know I can do for now.

I limited the turbo clocks by 3.0 GHz on every core, and that gave me some decent temperatures (80-85 C° on heavy use like gaming, TS Bench and emulation), although with more or less okay performance.

I was wondering if I could disable hyperthreading and only leave the real cores and threads working, so that it may have better temps and maybe performance wouldn't be affected as much since some games require better single core performance than multi core performance. I tried leaving one core on 3.8 and the rest on 3.0 GHz, but it seemed that the clock speeds from the other cores made the single core also run at those speeds. None of the options I mentioned here are good, but they are the only options I can think about. Any recommendations and help is appreciated, I'm just sad I'm out of ideas.

As Uncle Webb said, repasting with his recommended paste by myself is a good option, but I can't afford the paste since I'm from a third world country and don't have the budget for it, which I forgot to mention, so I apologize if I can't use either Eidair fan recommendation or Uncle Webb thermal paste recommendations. Thanks to both of you for the help either way, and I'm also sorry if I started this thread maybe too late at midnight.yesterday.

 

[eidairaman1]

Alright.

I made some tests here and there, and the results are a little underwhelming but it may be the only thing I know I can do for now.

I limited the turbo clocks by 3.0 GHz on every core, and that gave me some decent temperatures (80-85 C° on heavy use like gaming, TS Bench and emulation), although with more or less okay performance.

I was wondering if I could disable hyperthreading and only leave the real cores and threads working, so that it may have better temps and maybe performance wouldn't be affected as much since some games require better single core performance than multi core performance. I tried leaving one core on 3.8 and the rest on 3.0 GHz, but it seemed that the clock speeds from the other cores made the single core also run at those speeds. None of the options I mentioned here are good, but they are the only options I can think about. Any recommendations and help is appreciated, I'm just sad I'm out of ideas.

As Uncle Webb said, repasting with his recommended paste by myself is a good option, but I can't afford the paste since I'm from a third world country and don't have the budget for it, which I forgot to mention, so I apologize if I can't use either Eidair fan recommendation or Uncle Webb thermal paste recommendations. Thanks to both of you for the help either way, and I'm also sorry if I started this thread maybe too late at midnight.yesterday.

Remember ambient air temperatures will determine the thermal load on your parts, so if you are in an arrid clomate with no ac, you are just blowing hot air on already hot parts which will make it run hotter.

 

[GoronsRule]

Remember ambient air temperatures will determine the thermal load on your parts, so if you are in an arrid clomate with no ac, you are just blowing hot air on already hot parts which will make it run hotter.

The temperatures are 20 - 25°C around here. I only have a tower fan to the right of my room, not an AC, so it really just blows room temperature air most of the time.

The laptop sits at the corner on a flimsy table next to the left and front wall, so it probably doesn't have any airflow or any way to make the hot air go away (if that makes any sort of sense). Also, sadly the cooling pad I have doesn't blow much air, so it doesn't help much other than lifting the laptop.

Maybe the conditions of my room are suboptimal for my laptop? It could be a possibility, but without an answer or solution when I think about it.

 

[GoronsRule]

Quick Question: Should I use the latest version of Throttlestop for my 2018 laptop?

As the title says, my old gaming laptop is from that year, and the components such as the GPU (GTX 1050) are probably even older. My CPU is an i5-8300H which has the Prochot Offset locked (thanks to Acer), so I really can't benefit from the new options of the following updates. I underclocked it down to 3.0 GHz from the 4.0GHz turbo it had, so performance is kinda bad but temperatures are better (although it still reached 90°C). Thermal paste was repasted and laptop was cleaned one or two months ago with no results or benefits so far (not by myself, but by a local person who repairs laptops and other stuff for cheap since I can't afford doing it myself and breaking it or a more professional repair), and I have a shabby cooling pad which has different speeds and 6 small fans but it also provided no benefits.

Should I use the newest update of Throttlestop nonetheless? What should I do to cool my laptop and achieve 80-85°C max? Shoutouts to Eidair and UncleWebb for sharing their wisdom last time I posted here, any help and information is appreciated. Have a good day.

 

[unclewebb]

Thermal paste was repasted

What thermal paste was used? Many thermal pastes will fail within a month when applied to a mobile CPU. Honeywell PTM 7950 works much better long term.

I would not recommend using ThrottleStop 8.70. It uses the old WinRing0 driver which has a known security vulnerability. ThrottleStop 9.6 works best on your CPU.

There is no reason to undervolt the System Agent. It is the Intel GPU and the iGPU Unslice that are synced internally. If you are going to undervolt the Intel GPU, it is the iGPU Unslice that should use the same offset undervolt as the Intel GPU is using. I would not bother undervolting these. There is next to nothing to be gained undervolting these if you have a Nvidia GPU.

 

[GoronsRule]

What thermal paste was used? Many thermal pastes will fail within a month when applied to a mobile CPU. Honeywell PTM 7950 works much better long term.

I would not recommend using ThrottleStop 8.70. It uses the old WinRing0 driver which has a known security vulnerability. ThrottleStop 9.6 works best on your CPU.

There is no reason to undervolt the System Agent. It is the Intel GPU and the iGPU Unslice that are synced internally. If you are going to undervolt the Intel GPU, it is the iGPU Unslice that should use the same offset undervolt as the Intel GPU is using. I would not bother undervolting these. There is next to nothing to be gained undervolting these if you have a Nvidia GPU.

Hello Uncle Webb, sorry for starting another thread in the wrong place when it was kinda the same issue.

Thanks for the advice on using the latest version and removing the undervolts for the iGPU and System Agent. No changes so far, but I consider your advice as important wisdom so I'd rather follow it than ruining something myself.

I'll make sure that the next time I repaste my laptop or a future one, I'll do it myself with the Honeywell you recommended and with a tutorial rather than sending it for other person to do it.

I'm sure there is nothing else I can do for now, so if I ever need help for this laptop in the future, I'll make sure to ask here instead of making another thread or post. Thanks for the help and attention, have a good day and thanks for your wisdom and program that help plenty of people in the world.