Is my laptop acting really slow?
Is my laptop acting really slow?
I have been feeling really bad about how slow my computer is getting lately for a long time. I tried many things to fix it (but one didn't work) and now nothing helps. My laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad S340-14API with a Ryzen 7 chip and Vega graphics. I got this laptop back in 2020 so that I could use my old Intel PC as my main computer. It used to run super fast when I wanted to do whatever on it. But from late 2020 to early 2022, I took the upgraded PC and kept my laptop there just to help me multitask and watch streams. So I didn't have a lot of stress on the old laptop during that time. However, by the end of January 2022, my main PC's motherboard and graphics card died which made me go back to using my laptop again because my PC had no built-in graphics. I remember being able to play Valorant at about 75-100 fps then. At that time I already noticed it was running slower than how I remembered it should be, but at least the games were still playable. A few days or weeks later, my laptop started getting really frequent stuttering where the whole system would only have 2 frames for a couple of seconds every other few minutes. At first I tried reinstalling Windows (I kept all the files since too many on it was too much trouble to clean them up), but that made my webcam quality worse and I haven't solved that problem yet. I noticed that my laptop gets these bad moments when it is hot enough after a few minutes of running a game, so I decided to clean out the dust from inside and repaste the CPU with Arctic MX4 which helped somewhat since my laptop no longer got those stuttering moments. With that problem gone, the laptop still underperformed badly. Valorant has been unplayable ever since February 2022 because of major stutters in the audio and screen tearing on the visible display. Even though in GTA V Online it seems to be playable, its underperformance is still very noticeable. I always make sure to check my laptop's temperatures and the CPU package temps are normal at minimum 45C - maximum 75C. At one point I tried fixing it again by adding more RAM making it 12GB from the previous 8GB but that didn't help performance at all. Now thinking about it, the RAM really wasn't going to help anyway since the laptop already had major issues with it. Having said that, I use this laptop as a streaming PC even though its performance is degraded so far, it was still able to handle livestreaming at 1080p30 with x264 encoder and Discord too. But note that I have a lot of scenes and elements in my OBS setup. However recently in the last month, I noticed its performance has gotten even worse as streaming with x264 causes major video and audio desync and latency which made me resort to using the H.264 encoder with visibly worse video quality. The only thing left for me to try doing is to completely reset the system and clear all of the drives to clear any software issues that might be affecting the device. Other than that, I think I have done everything I could to get my laptop back to normal followed every optimization video I could check yet it remains stubborn. Any thoughts or responses would be very much appreciated. Here is a copy of the laptop's UserBenchmark results.
Do you see anything on there with hardware info? You can read the temps there too, and maybe it was faulty when we started from the floor.
I use an Open Hardware Monitor tool. Recently I saw that my CPU is running at a slow speed, and you can see that same problem in your User Benchmark scores. Is this something I should worry about or fix?
The clock speeds were really slow way below the processor's base frequency of 2.3GHz. Under power options, apparently having my maximum processor rate at any percent below 100 causes the cpu to max out at just 1.7GHz. This is most likely the cause of the laptop's incredibly low performance. Changing the max processor rate to 100% allows the processor to boost up to just under 4GHz, although the problem with this is that my thermal issues come back into play. Previously, having the cpu capped at 1.7GHz gets a max temp of 75C; now that it has no cap, it heats up really quick hovering around 85 to 100+ degrees when tasks are being run. Having no performance caps, the system could once again run Valorant at 80-120fps, yet very inconsistent as it gets 'seizures'/thermal throttled every time the temp gets past 100C. For the meantime, I capped the CPU to 2.8GHz and lowered my Valorant settings to 1280p60, allowing me to have a decently playable experience. I will try and repaste the CPU again once I can to hopefully get better results, although I doubt that this would fix the rapid increase of temps the system experiences since I already repasted it before.