@MissPlumbob123 The cleaning you did made a small difference, but the pattern with the CPU temps was the same: cores 0 and 1 were a couple degrees cooler but still reached 90°; cores 2 and 3 were significantly cooler although still hot. This log did also have the relevant GPU info, and unsurprisingly, the graphics card is running hot as well:
While 80° C isn't immediately harmful to your graphics card, it's enough to induce significant thermal throttling. The interesting question is why the card doesn't recover once it cools down, as you'd expect. Even though the card's the temperature returns to a much more reasonable 70° or so, enough for only mild thermal throttling, the core load stays much lower, other than some brief spikes:
I can't say for certain that this is in fact the issue, at least not without your testing while keeping the laptop much cooler. You could try using a cooling pad or fan, or if you just want to get a good reading, open all the windows in a room on a cold night and see what happens. It's easy enough to alt-tab to hwinfo to see what your GPU's temp looks like at any given point; if you notice an fps crash, see whether the temperature just spiked over 80°.
I don't think your laptop is necessarily nearing the end of its life, at least not overall. It's possible the cooling paste on the GPU(and CPU) has dried out and could use another application, which is significantly cheaper than a new laptop. But of course it's worth finding out if lower temperatures keep this from happening in the first place before you spend any money on that kind of work.
I'd also be interested to know whether putting the game in windowed mode, alt-tabbing to something else, minimizing the game for a few minutes, and then bringing the window back up fixes this. That's the kind of process that might force the card to recover and work at its proper capacity again, but I don't know enough about how graphics cards and their drivers work on that level to do anything except speculate.
Thank you for all your help. I'm glad to know it's likely not the game at least. I'll leave it here and have some more digging myself. I've removed some of my older posts with my links in. Have a great day, thanks again 🙂 huge help.
I know this is a really old thread but I had this exact same problem and I fixed it a few minutes ago by turning off the XMP in the BIOS settings and now my game is butter smooth.
