Laptop Woes

Over the past week or so, I've become a little bit more technologically savvy.

This... this following photo is of my baby. Open for dust-clearing surgery.

I bought it last year during the End of Financial Year sales -- otherwise there'd have been no way I could have afforded it -- and it's been an amazing little companion up until I decided to buy and download and run Cyberpunk.

When Cyberpunk was released, many people out there complained about audio issues. There was crackling, popping, stuttering. I was one of the unfortunate people who was in the same crackly audio boat and it was driving my ears crazy. I did all sorts of stuff to try to fix it! Sometimes it would seem as though it was fixed after I had done something and I would gloat and pat myself on the back, and then after a few hours it would start up again.

Little did I know, thanks to everyone else complaining and my assuming I had the same problem as them, that the game must've caused a massive heatspike in my system and lightly fried a couple of things.

I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately. Mostly because my partner is and I enjoy spending time with him and our friends doing dungeons together. I had almost forgotten how much fun WoW is as a -multiplayer- game.

We're in-game and chatting on Discord most nights and everything was fine at first... until my audio started to crackle. My first thought? "Bloody Cyberpunk has completely ruined my audio! Now it's affecting other games! And Discord too!"

It wasn't so bad at first. I could deal with it. But then over the past few weeks it got so bad I couldn't understand a thing anyone was saying and my ears were being molested by crackles of death.

Thinking that there was something wrong with my soundcard, or perhaps the laptop, for whatever reason, couldn't handle running games and audio at the same time anymore, I bought myself an external sound card and thought all my problems would be over.

I was wrong.

They got worse. The little external soundcard would crackle instantly instead of within the half hour I was previously allowed, then BAM! All sound would cut until I rebooted the laptop.

Annoyed and horrified that I might have to return my still-under-warranty laptop to the seller all the way across the country, I tried other things.

I went into the BIOS and found it to be the most limited thing ever.
So I simply reset the laptop. Sound didn't get better.
I sent error logs to a friend who was horrified by what he found. Background programs crashing for no reason, CPU cores randomly stopping for no apparent reason. Ugh.
So I decided to fully format the laptop and do everything from scratch. Sound didn't get better.

Then he asked me what temperature the laptop was running at, that perhaps it was thermal throttling.

I'll be honest... this thing has always run hot. Very hot. And I've never had an issue with it, despite it being unreasonably hot.

Apparently my rtx 2060 will thermal throttle when it exceeds 88 Celsius. It always ran at 95.
Apparently my i7-10875H should not be allowed to exceed 83 Celsius. It... uh... always ran at 99-100.

I knew it was hot. But seeing as there had been no crashes or anything, I thought the manufacturer must've done something to its insides to protect it. Laptops are known for running hot, after all.

Infused with the knowledge that this was actually bad, very bad, I stopped chatting to people and dived into the ocean of Google-fu. How could I lower my laptops temperatures? Was a cooling pad really the only thing I could do? Surely not!

And that's when I discovered undervolting. And apparently people do it all the time. I downloaded a program called ThrottleStop and went to work learning how to use it and adjust it appropriately without killing my machine.

I set everything to run around -110 under. Then turned on Speed Shift.

And...

Games now run at a solid 65 Celsius.

My audio is now fine. Not a crackle-of-doom in audible range.

I am pissed off that I formatted everything and have to start anew when I should have allowed common sense to strike that boiling hot temperatures were really not normal.

However, I am happy that we got to the bottom of it, that my laptop is no longer a fiery slab of doom that could one day melt through the table, and that in a few months I can play the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition without fear of audio annihilation.