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Acer Nitro 5 Extreme Overheating - Tried Everything, Don't Know What To Do

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rosetta11

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I am experiencing extreme issues with overheating my gaming laptop, an Acer Nitro 5 AN515-57. It came with an i5-11400H, RTX 3050 Ti and I upgraded it to 32 GB of RAM. This will be a long post, describing every little detail I could give about the problem I have, in the hopes that I could find a solution.

What is the issue?
I play DCS (Digital Combat Simulator), a military flight simulator, which is extremely demanding, and over the course of about a year, the laptop started having issues with thermals, CPU throttling and so on. It gets extremely hot, above 90C, up to 95C, and throttles to the point where it is unplayable (BD PROCHOT). What I want to emphasize is that the laptop wasn't always like this, and after all this time I still haven't found out why.

How have I tried fixing it?
- Updating the OS, BIOS, drivers, etc. No change;
- Lowering graphics. No improvement - it can handle medium to high graphics. Even with the lowest graphics, it only gets way, way more FPS, but still overheats and throttles;
- Fans are running at the maximum speed, airflow is not obstructed and I even keep it slightly elevated over the desk for airflow underneath. I open it up and clean the fans every couple weeks;
- I have had it repasted about 2 month ago. Almost no change, it still overheats, but maybe over a slightly longer time;
- Over the last month I have learned about ThrottleStop and undervolting. It improves temperatures, but it is extremely unstable

Issues that appeared with ThrottleStop:
I recently learned about undervolting, so I gave it a try after unlocking it with the insyde tool thing, as my CPU had voltage control locked by default. After many BSODs, I managed to reach a semi-stable setup with the following settings:
- Core/Cache undervolted by -80/-50 mV
- Balanced power plan (High performance kicks the Turbo in for the CPU clocks and drives the temperatures up way faster. The simulator runs perfectly on Balanced, and in general I am willing to sacrifice performance to get lower temperatures)
- No TPL tweaking as I don't use the turbo
- BD PROCHOT disabled
To my surprise, it had a noticeable improvement - temperatures were now sitting in the 80-90C range, and NEVER went above 90C, and no performance hit. I went on DCS to test it out and all seemed fine - until the laptop had shut itself down randomly after about 45 minutes on it. I kept testing and it was randomly shutting down after performing perfectly fine in the game, sometimes after 10 minutes, other times after even 3 hours. The temperature never went above 90C, as I was tracking them on another monitor. No power limit was hit, as it's capped at 25W by the Balanced power plan, and in general, no warnings/limits ever showed up (I had the TS Limit Reasons page opened).
As a test, I enabled BD PROCHOT again, and weirdly enough, while playing with ThrottleStop running, BD PROCHOT kicked in at temperatures as low as 81C, which never, ever happened before, and to this day I am clueless why it kicks in so early.
Currently, I have two options with ThrottleStop - either have BD PROCHOT on and have it furiously throttle, or have it off and have the laptop randomly shut down after a random amount of time, even though, once again, temperatures never go above 90C.
I should also note, this only happens with DCS, but even with a low loading game like Counter Strike 2, the temperatures go extremely high, up to 95C, and for whatever reason the laptop can handle it on CS2 and other games, but not on DCS at LOWER temperatures.

How did it get to this point?
I got this laptop a little over 2 years ago as I needed a reasonably powerful machine for my university degree in computer science and because I wanted something decent to game on compared to an almost 8 year old PC at the time. The laptop did an exceptional job with most games, especially since I had upgraded the RAM. However, I didn't envision before buying this laptop that about hald a year later I would start playing a game as demanding as DCS. The laptop first handled it extremely well, although, over time, it degraded significantly:
- 1 and a half years ago was when I first started playing the simulator. For about 6 months it ran perfectly fine. Temperatures weren't going crazy, I didn't have to worry about the fans, it wasn't throttling at all, and above all, I even had less RAM, only 16.
- About a year ago I upgraded to 32 GB of RAM and a second SSD because DCS is a huge game. However, it had since started to getting high temperatures and throttling
- For a period of time, only cranking the fans to the maximum speed worked. In the meantime I have had its fans cleaned multiple times
- Then, about 6 months ago, it started to not be enough and still kept throttling
- 2-3 months ago I had it get its thermal paste replaced
- For a few weeks it was barely fine again until it started throttling again
- Then about a month ago I got installed ThrottleStop, fixed the throttling but now it randomly shuts down.

Keep in mind, it was running perfectly fine a year ago. I really need to emphasize this. It had no issues, it even had worse maintenance in terms of dusting/cleaning/repasting, it even had less performance due to the lower RAM, and of course, there was no throttling.
What could possibly have happened? I am so clueless and running out of hope. I have asked many people about how to fix this, and some common responses I got were "you can't expect to play such games on a laptop without it overheating" or "try lowering your graphics" or "clean your fans" or many other surface level fixes that I had tried countless times without effect.

The entire reason I wrote this very long post is because 1. I want to know what's wrong - whether it is something I can fix or not and should just look to move on, and 2. Because it was running fine in the past. If it had these issues right from the beginning, I would not even have made this post.

So, my questions are:
1. What could possibly be the underlying issue, given that the laptop has the best possible airflow and I constantly clean the fans? Could the fans maybe be damaged in a way? They still go up to 7000 RPM and they seem fine.
2. As I've said earlier, with ThrottleStop running and BD PROCHOT enabled, why is BD PROCHOT triggering at lower temperatures (in the 80-90C range) when it's supposed to be much higher? And why only on DCS and not other games?
3. With ThrottleStop running and BD PROCHOT disabled, why could the laptop possibly be randomly shutting down, considering the temperatures never go above 90C, and that the CPU max temperature allowed is 100C?
4. Knowing these issues, is there some part that is damaged? Is the CPU maybe degraded from the stress over a long time and can't handle temperatures even in the 80-90C range anymore? But then why can it handle temperatures up to 95C on other games?
5. Could the temperature sensors give wrong readings (from possible damage over time?) for this to happen? Maybe it was shutting down because the real temperature reached was 100C, when it was only displaying below 90C?

These are just my uneducated guesses/speculations. I am not very educated in how hardware behaves under thermal stress. I am running out of hope and I would appreciate any kind of advice. I really hope anyone knows what I should do to fix this. Even knowing that "yeah, your laptop is cooked, it's too damaged, there's nothing you can really do" would be helpful to know, it would at least give me some closure to know that I shouldn't keep beating a dead horse.

I would highly appreciate any kind of help. Cheers!
 
By the sounds of it that game is quite CPU intensive and also you mention fans as in plural so I take it your model has two fans and not the single fan the early models had.
I believe they had issues with overheating in those early models and improved the cooling system.
From memory you should set core/ cache to the same undervolt such as -50mV at the most, also just thinking out loud now, the temp sensor for the CPU might not be registering each core, rather be a general temp for the die, so if there is a faulty or excessively hot core that may cause an issue. That can be caused by incorrect application of thermal paste.
Does the secondary SSD impede internal airflow in any way, or is it an NVME drive?
 
Caring1 said:
By the sounds of it that game is quite CPU intensive and also you mention fans as in plural so I take it your model has two fans and not the single fan the early models had.
I believe they had issues with overheating in those early models and improved the cooling system.
From memory you should set core/ cache to the same undervolt such as -50mV at the most, also just thinking out loud now, the temp sensor for the CPU might not be registering each core, rather be a general temp for the die, so if there is a faulty or excessively hot core that may cause an issue. That can be caused by incorrect application of thermal paste.
Does the secondary SSD impede internal airflow in any way, or is it an NVME drive?
Click to expand...
I have two fans in my laptop, one for the CPU and one for the GPU. At least with ThrottleStop's temperature readings, I am pretty sure the max temperature reached is the highest temperature any core has reached, at least from my observations over time, as ThrottleStop displays information about each core on the main window.

Also, both SSDs are NVMe's. I don't know how they could block the airflow, though. And sure, I will try -50 for both core/cache either later today or tomorrow, although I don't see how that would prevent it from shutting down from getting hot. If I apply less undervolting, doesn't that mean there is slightly more unneeded voltage, which would cause a shutdown? I am of course not an expert, but when I was first adjusting the values and applied too much undervolting, it was blue screening, it wasn't shutting down.

Caring1 said:
By the sounds of it that game is quite CPU intensive and also you mention fans as in plural so I take it your model has two fans and not the single fan the early models had.
I believe they had issues with overheating in those early models and improved the cooling system.
From memory you should set core/ cache to the same undervolt such as -50mV at the most, also just thinking out loud now, the temp sensor for the CPU might not be registering each core, rather be a general temp for the die, so if there is a faulty or excessively hot core that may cause an issue. That can be caused by incorrect application of thermal paste.
Does the secondary SSD impede internal airflow in any way, or is it an NVME drive?
Click to expand...
Although actually, now that I think about it, the timeframe of me upgrading to a secondary SSD and from 16 to 32 GB of RAM kind of overlaps with when the throttling and overheating started.
Or at least I am pretty sure it was within the same month of me upgrading, can't remember exactly, as it was about a year ago.

Do you think there could be a link between these? I don't see how a second NVMe SSD would cause these issues, but you never know. If so, what should I do?

I just tried undervolting by -50/-50 mV and sure enough it had the same result on DCS. BD PROCHOT triggered at 83C and after disabling it, the laptop shut down after 15 more minutes. I forgot to mention all this time that the laptop is plugged in when gaming, and battery does not drain at all.

What should I do? I'm still left with all those questions from the original post unanswered.
 
Maybe you have a poorly pressed heat-absorbing element of the cooling system (heat pipe) to the processor. Try replacing the thermal paste. Of course, it is better to use a phase transition, such as Noctua NH-T2 or Honeywell PTM7950.
 
Artem_M said:
Maybe you have a poorly pressed heat-absorbing element of the cooling system (heat pipe) to the processor. Try replacing the thermal paste. Of course, it is better to use a phase transition, such as Noctua NH-T2 or Honeywell PTM7950.
Click to expand...
I have looked them up and can't find any of them in my country, do you know some other more common, reliable thermal pastes?
 
rosetta11 said:
Я шукав їх і не можу знайти жодного з них у моїй країні. Чи знаєте ви інші більш поширені, надійні термопасти?
Click to expand...
Probably, the most common is the Arctic MX-6. I have not personally tested it, but according to reviews and feedback, it is a good option.
 
Your thermal paste probably dried out.
 
Laptops are really hard (Pump-out) on thermal paste. I would get PTM7950 if you can. I personally also limit (BD PROCHOT OFFSET) the CPU to around 89C.

Good luck on your future laptop endeavours.
 
Arco said:
Laptops are really hard (Pump-out) on thermal paste. I would get PTM7950 if you can. I personally also limit (BD PROCHOT OFFSET) the CPU to around 89C.

Good luck on your future laptop endeavours.
Click to expand...
I can't find PTM7950 in my country here, do you know any other more common thermal paste that's reliable?

Also, I tried setting the PROCHOT offset to as low as 85C, and it still triggered. As I said, for whatever reason, it triggers at a much lower CPU temperature when playing DCS, but when playing other games the CPU can go way higher, up to 95C, without any BD triggering.

Could it maybe be another component that is getting way too hot? It's certainly not the GPU, because it goes to 86-87 regardless of what I play. Are there any other hardware components that can get too hot and trigger BD PROCHOT or shut down the laptop altogether if BD PROCHOT is disabled?
 
rosetta11 said:
I can't find PTM7950 in my country here, do you know any other more common thermal paste that's reliable?

Also, I tried setting the PROCHOT offset to as low as 85C, and it still triggered. As I said, for whatever reason, it triggers at a much lower CPU temperature when playing DCS, but when playing other games the CPU can go way higher, up to 95C, without any BD triggering.

Could it maybe be another component that is getting way too hot? It's certainly not the GPU, because it goes to 86-87 regardless of what I play. Are there any other hardware components that can get too hot and trigger BD PROCHOT or shut down the laptop altogether if BD PROCHOT is disabled?
Click to expand...

Do you have Kryosheet
Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet Thermal Pads (thermal-grizzly.com)

This lasts forever once you seat it and performs like a fresh application of MX4

If not then get some TFX, but that will still pump out after a year or so:
Amazon.com: Thermalright TFX 2g Thermal Paste Heat Sink Compound 14.3W/m.k, 2 Grams, Graphic Card CPU Thermal Grease, Laptop Thermal Grease : Electronics


Modern laptops and gfx cards can even pump out PTM7950 after a while, these chips run into the 95c zone by design and just sit there forever, then cool to 45C then to 20C when off -- enough of those cycles and you will eventually get a bald/dry spot somewhere, kryosheet is the way to go if you can find it.

My 4090 had PTM on it from the factory and pumped out, I replaced the oem pad with a fresh ptm and that pumped out after 6 months as well... put a kryosheet on it - no issues since.
 
What is the GPU temperature? It could be that GPU overheating was the cause of hard shut down (Or thermal paste not covering the entire GPU chip)

You can use MSI Afterburner to undervolt the GPU, it will use less power --> lower temps for both GPU and CPU

Here is how I undervolt Nvidia GPU, I also undervolted my Acer Triton 500 laptop with 2070S
 
rosetta11 said:
How have I tried fixing it?
- Updating the OS
Click to expand...

Format the drives, and install a fresh Windows. Try to get all the bloatware away.
Open your laptop again, clean it from the dust, and apply with high quality thermal compound where it is needed - under the CPU, and under the GPU.

If these steps don't fix anything, then simply throw the freaking laptop out of the window.
Instead, buy a Radeon + Ryzen based one.
 
ARF said:
Format the drives, and install a fresh Windows. Try to get all the bloatware away.
Open your laptop again, clean it from the dust, and apply with high quality thermal compound where it is needed - under the CPU, and under the GPU.

If these steps don't fix anything, then simply throw the freaking laptop out of the window.
Instead, buy a Radeon + Ryzen based one.
Click to expand...
I will try reinstalling Windows a few months from now when I finish my study, till then all I will/can do is find a good thermal paste and replace it. Thnak you all for the help/advice.
 
rosetta11 said:
- About a year ago I upgraded to 32 GB of RAM and a second SSD because DCS is a huge game. However, it had since started to getting high temperatures and throttling
Click to expand...

rosetta11 said:
I will try reinstalling Windows a few months from now when I finish my study, till then all I will/can do is find a good thermal paste and replace it. Thnak you all for the help/advice.
Click to expand...

Look, the CPU is 45-watts, the GPU is 75-watts, you have two SSDs which both emit heat, and more RAM, all of which put more pressure on the CPU / north / south bridge.

The Acer chassis can't cool so much heat, hence you get the high temperatures. This Acer chassis works fine with a 15-watt Ryzen 5, and a 65-watt Radeon RX, with 16 GB of 2400 MHz DDR4, and a single SATA SSD.
 
ARF said:
Look, the CPU is 45-watts, the GPU is 75-watts, you have two SSDs which both emit heat, and more RAM, all of which put more pressure on the CPU / north / south bridge.

The Acer chassis can't cool so much heat, hence you get the high temperatures. This Acer chassis works fine with a 15-watt Ryzen 5, and a 65-watt Radeon RX, with 16 GB of 2400 MHz DDR4, and a single SATA SSD.
Click to expand...
I see. So what should I do? Should I downgrade? Remove an SSD?
 
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