Throttling Asus ROG Strix (14900HX & 4070)

[Letty]

My laptop experiences such a picture: 14900HX goes up to 70-80C in games and spikes up to 90-99 ocassionaly for milliseconds (then comes back to 70-80) with 1-2% (sometimes 6-8% but rarer) throttling. For example, when i am opening a map or starting some loading stuff in a game. No freezes and I don't notice any slow downs in the game. But. It happens either at stock settings or throttlestop.
It looks like that (100% CPU load was a stress test with 0% throttling after setting ThrottleStop, after it was Cyberpunk 2077):

My ThrottleStop looks like that. It is very rough and currently I am not about a fine tuning, because somehow even if I set PL1 and PL2 to such ridiculous limits for 14900HX it still hits 90C+ and throttles. I have tried to set the Prochot offset to 100C, no changes. Seems like the CPU throttles even at 91C.

As you can see, Max Power was 83W during the game, but CPU still hits 90+ and throttles in game moments. How come? Shoud I reduce my 14900HX to 15W and make him a Celeron to avoild it? xD Probably I miss something out.
GPU is running 75C during the game, as far as CPU sits upon the same cooling pipe it should be close to GPU temp. Is it even real to prevent the CPU from spiking up with such a little but throttling?
Any thoughts?

 

[unclewebb]

How come?

A 14900HX in a laptop is like having a funny car engine in a passenger car. The cooling has to be perfect.

I am not familiar with your Asus laptop model. Some Lenovo Legion laptops with the same 14900HX can run in the 150W to 175W range before they inevitably trigger thermal throttling. Your level of cooling is about half of that. I am not sure if the heatsink Asus used on your laptop is in the same league as what Lenovo is using. I do think it should be able to dissipate more heat than what it is presently capable of.

If it was my laptop, I would open it up and replace the thermal paste with some Honeywell PTM 7950. It is possible that the person working on the assembly line that day botched the installation of the heatsink. This is a known issue. I would not trust the local shop to try and fix this. You have no idea what level of experience they have or what thermal paste they will use. It is usually best to do this critical maintenance procedure yourself so you know it has been done properly.

GPU is running 75C during the game

Nvidia GPUs tend to run cooler compared to Intel CPUs in the same laptop. This might only mean that Intel does a better job of positioning their multiple core temperature sensors on the hot spot of each core. Trying to compare the peak temperature of a Nvidia GPU vs an Intel CPU does not really tell you anything useful.

 

[Letty]

150W to 175W range before they inevitably trigger thermal throttling

The weird thing is - it doesn't work that simple in my case. I can run a test at 120W with no throttling for hours.
1) A liquid metal here from the factory. Both the CPU and the GPU.
2) A steady load goes well. So the CPU may throttle at 80W in some apps but can be calm at some 120W steady load.
3) And the most interesting thing: the speed of fans is the same when throttling happens or doesn't happen in these scenarious (like 4500 - 4000 - 5600). This laptos has 3 fans.
4) You know, something might have worked out if I saw a dose-dependent effect. Like I set 120W = 20% throttling. I set 80W = 5%. Yet nope, the change is minimal. 1-5% anyway.
5) I didn't compare the chips but I meant that while GPU heats up the same pipe up to any dergree - a CPU goes up to the temp

 

[unclewebb]

Some laptops use an embedded controller EC to set separate turbo power limits compared to the MSR and MMIO power limits that ThrottleStop has access to. Whether the Nvidia GPU is active or not can be used to determine how much power is available for the CPU to use.

liquid metal

That is what I thought. It is still possible that someone did a poor job applying it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ASUSROG/comments/17cs9fm

So the CPU may throttle at 80W in some apps but can be calm at some 120W steady load.

When testing, is the GPU active at 80W? The extra heat from the Nvidia GPU might cause CPU thermal throttling even when CPU power consumption is lower compared to a 120W CPU only stress test like Cinebench.