No sign of overheating, performance stays within safe ranges.
No sign of overheating, performance stays within safe ranges.
I have an Asus Dash F15 with a 3070 , it was a gift so there isn't much to complain about, but I've noticed some quite odd thermal behaviors. The 3070 is configured to an "85"watt TDP on the product page, but the time it spends at 85watts is incredibly seldom. It seems the GPU is thermally limited to 62c, any time it touches 62c it drops down from 85w to ~67w, and if you restrict the cooling a little bit so it touches 62c again it'll drop all the way down to 55w. Since the GPU isn't heating up past 65 there isn't much chance for the systems fans to ramp up past a hum on any of the silent/default/turbo modes. There is absolutely 0 user controllable fan that I can find. I know it can spin up much faster because I've left it on my bed for a few minutes and the CPU got a chance to heat up enough for it to scream. I've always loved Asus products and have been with them since the mid 2000s, I absolutely hate complaining against them but this is a bit much. Any suggestions would be great.
This problem is quite typical. My Ryzen 2500U experiences the same issue but it tends to be more consistent—running at full power for about ten minutes before it sharply limits performance. I’m not sure why, but my thought is that the power delivery VRMs are getting much hotter than the CPU or GPU, which causes the power cap to drop. What’s really annoying is that I’ve never seen such details advertised, so you only get a general idea of what performance will be under stress versus sudden spikes. That’s why choosing a laptop feels so tricky; you have to depend on reviews instead.