CPU Bottleneck / Overheating

[Basileos Leandros I]

So I bought a new laptop recently, a nice ASUS FX503 with pretty good specs. However, right off the bat I got problems with it - and it involves either a CPU bottleneck, SSHD issues or an overheating problem.

Intel Core i5 7300 HQ 2.8 GHZ
8GB DDR4 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX1050 4GB
SSHD 1TB - 5400 rpm (8GB SSD)

Had problems with it from the beginning with very slow loading times but now that has improved markedly - SSHD after all. My main problem is either a CPU bottleneck or an overheating issue causing it to throttle.

I experience very choppy gameplay in some games (CoD WW2) and for example in Attila, I could very nicely move around the battlemap, very smoothly, but the actual battle was an absolute pain to manage - the rendering of 8000 units and a city was a nightmare for a very modern computer. (Attila is from 2015)

So... any ideas? What's the core issue here?

[Commissar Caligula_]

Attila is pretty poorly optimised in general.

[King Athelstan]

With a program such as Speccy or MSI afterburner you can monitor the temperatures of your components, so might want to give that a try to see if throttling is the problem.

[Ishan]

Yeah there could be multitude of factors behind choppy gameplay. You would have to monitor the hardware usage during gameplay and see what's causing it. Games like CoD aren't CPU intensive like Attila so CPU shouldn't cause any problems there.

Afterburner is an excellent tool for such a thing, as pointed out earlier. Like this is how i tested Rome 2 using MSI (old post):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Finished the battle in 5 minutes and 19 seconds. The result:

VRAM out of 6GB was roughly around 1.8GB. So a 2 GB graphics card could also handle that scenario. Remember i had unlimited video mem option checked there.


VRAM Mem Clock wasn't used to its full potential and it remain almost constant at around 3500 MHz


GPU Core clock speed. This was very surprising:

The default boost state of Titan X is 1089 MHz and my graphics card did more than that upto 1320 MHz. A very awesome overclock performance here. Would easily beat Titan X here. Simply amazing.

Now the CPU Usage:

It remains under 30%, meaning the battle wasn't taxing at all for the CPU.

CPU Temp remained at an avg of 45ºC. And this was logged in the afternoon where it was quite hot since i turned off my room A/C. Liquid cooling seems to be greatly working here.

Also i need to bench it again in full stack and in a full city to see a more extreme result. I was just testing as i had no idea i would even succeed in benchmarking it properly like this.

GPU Fan Speed:

Remains under 70%, making no noise outside of the case. Excellent.

GPU Usuage:

From 55-100% varying usage, as it's expected.

Framerate\FPS i got in the ultra settings:

An Average of 138 fps.

GPU Temp:

Got a max of 77ºC which is below 80 and very good number, considering this is an Indian summer.

So, tomorrow i will finally nail all the benchmarks and then start playing games for real.
Will do videos too but they will slowly keep coming as they complete upload. Not much i can do there.

Gameplay gets choppy when your frame-rate constantly drops below 30. So first you gotta ensure the hardware isn't the issue here and then optimize the game settings to handle the game.

[Basileos Leandros I]

It varies quite a lot the performance - Assassins Creed Unity runs butter smooth, no issues whatsoever; Attila is a mess, so is CoD WW2.

I installed Speccy and during high load, CPU cores go up to 75-80 degrees Celsius. When I have 5-10 Chrome tabs open, it hovers around 50 degrees Celsius. In less than 3 minutes, after going into a game, the CPU fans spool up to max. ASUS laptops are noisy, especially the gaming ones, but this is just plain weird.

I feel as if there's a combination of an SSHD not that good, lack of RAM (8GB is good for Unity, apparently Attila and CoD which are resource hogs don't like 8 GB only) and possibly some other issues I can't identify.