Ideas for Improving Thermals on ASUS Laptops

I figured I'd start a thread to consolidate ideas on reducing thermals. Some of this won't apply to all Asus laptop variants. I happen to have a 2021 Zephyrus G15. I'm also not really including the basic/obvious stuff, like making sure your vents aren't dusty, keeping your environment on the cooler side, and turning off background resource hogs that might be utilizing CPU or GPU resources.

Some/most of these ideas come with tradeoffs, so decide what is right for you.


1) Disable or change processor boost mode

This is something that I did on my last laptop, which had an Intel processor, that made a HUGE difference. I was really happy to see that same effect when I applied this to the Zephyrus G15, which has an AMD processor. The steps to do this are all over the web, but here's one way:

• Press Start > Type Regedit > Open it > Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > Power > PowerSettings > 54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00 > be337238-0d82-4146-a960-4f3749d470c7 > Right click Attributes > Modify the value of ‘Attributes’ from 1 to 2 > Data should change to ‘0x00000002 (2)’. This will now show a hidden power option. From there, right-click on your battery icon > Power options > On any of the power plans go to ‘Change plan settings’ > ‘Change advanced power settings’ > Expand ‘Processor Power Management’ > Expand ‘Processor performance boost mode’ > Change from "Aggressive" to whatever you desire for your current power plan.

Note that you'll need to change it for each power plan, and some power plans only become available by switching in Armoury Crate. Something that I find pretty wild is that these power plans all seem to have the setting defaulted to Aggressive, even on battery power.

Personally, I changed it to DISABLED for everything except the one power plan that I use for gaming, where I changed it to "Efficient Aggressive." This resulted in a 3 deg Celsius drop in maximum temp on my CPU while gaming. Not too shabby. By the way, in HWINFO, you can see that Disabled setting will leave your clocks at the base frequency, which makes sense... you're not going to boost any higher. That's going to result in most reduction to your thermals, but also the biggest hit to performance. That's why I chose "Efficient Aggressive" for my gaming power plan, and I haven't seen any decrease in FPS compared to Aggressive setting.

Important Note: If you want to know what the different settings mean, you can read up a bit here. Some users have said that these AMD chips don't support "Efficient" P-state behavior, and so if you set it to an "Efficient" setting, the chip will actually default to Disabled without telling you, and you'll get no boost, it'll be the same as setting it Disabled. I'm not sure if that was the case in the past, but I can say that it's not true for this Zephyrus G15. When I set to "Efficient Aggressive", HWINFO shows that I'm boosting just fine.

2) Use a Laptop Stand

This one seems straightforward, but there's a lot of stands out there, and some are better than others. Decide if you want an active (has powered fans) or passive (just raises the laptop up to improve airflow). I'm a bit of a minimalist with my desk, so I prefer passive laptop stands. Even with these, some are better than others. Here are my three tips when buying a laptop stand --

• Distance between the support arms matters. You don't want to be tapping your keys on the left edge or right edge, and have the laptop tilt, tip, or wobble because your the stand's legs don't extend wide enough to provide stability.
• Stability of the back part of the stand matters. Most stands I've tested have been foldable, or set up sort of like a tent, where you unfold the support legs and hook them into holes in the bottom arms, allowing you to choose the height of the stand. The problem I found with that design is this: those support legs aren’t directly beneath the back of the laptop. As a result, anytime I would type, the slight “give” in the very back of the stand would cause a minor bounce back from the laptop. When you start typing quickly, even without too much force, you create a sort of resonating bounce that causes the whole laptop to start shaking, and you have to stop typing for a few moments to get it to stop. You want a stand where the back supports are directly beneath the arms.
• The bottom part of the legs that are hook shaped to hold the laptop in place — the height of that part (the amount it protrudes upwards) matters. If this “hook” is too high, your wrist might be laying on top of it uncomfortably, rather than sitting on the flat area beneath the keyboard. Or, you might constantly be hitting into it when you move your hand to the other side of the keyboard. You want a stand where the hook is high enough to prevent it from sliding, but doesn’t protrude upward enough to extend above the laptop itself.

Here is the passive stand that I recommend that checks all those boxes for a cheap price. By the way, a note with the G15. This laptop stand reaches just short of the ergolift hinge underneath the laptop when the screen is open, meaning that opening the screen doesn't raise the laptop anymore than it already is. I've really liked that fact, I think it makes the general setup even more elegant. The ergolift just gets used when I'm on the go and my laptop is on a flat surface.

3) Use a Manual fan curve

This is one where you need to decide how much you care about fan noise. I happen to game with a headset, so maximum fans don't matter to me.

Everyone knows you can set a manual fan curve, but the pieces I want to stress are:

• Start by understanding what your "comfortable" level of fan noise is. Obviously that varies by what you're doing, but you want the early part of your curve to be the "maintenance" part, meaning you're maintaining CPU and GPU temps between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius while performing basic stuff on the laptop -- the things you do the most, like surfing the web.
• Ramp up FAST. Have your curve be steep. Why? Because if you set your fans to really high when temps are just starting to heat up (in the 70s C) rather than already really hot (90s), your temps will take longer to get to those higher temps. That means you'll spend more time in the 70s, and that means you'll have more headroom before hitting thermal performance bottlenecks. Try a fan curve where you're 70% at 70 deg C, 80% at 80 deg C, etc. Compare that to a fan curve where you quickly ramp to 100% at 70 deg C. You'll see that typically your average temps after a few hours of gaming are lower with the latter profile, because the mitigations were in place earlier. To most people, that's probably obvious, but I wanted to note it, because I often see curves where the fans don't hit 100% until temps are at 90 degrees or higher. Obviously, the drawback is fan noise, if you're not using a headset, or if that's something that bothers you.

My curves are the same between GPU and CPU. Here's what it looks like. Note that my fans are OFF until I hit 49 deg C, and even so, my temps stay lower than that while browsing. You might want fans to be ON at some low setting instead, based on your use.



By the way, some of you might point out that I can just switch to silent mode in Armoury Crate while surfing the web and stuff. However, one of the reasons I created this curve for constant use is because Armoury Create doesn't let you assign Manual mode to Scenario Profiles, so rather than having to switch profiles all the time, I decided to just make one that fits all of my use, while plugged in anyway. YMMV.


4) Use a small High Speed Ball Bearing Muffin Fan

People might laugh at this one, and for good reason. First of all, these things are pretty loud. They're like the fans that you might install in a desktop PC tower, similar in size. If fan noise is an issue for you, maybe don't bother with this one. This is really something that you'll want to break out only when you're playing a game or doing some resource intensive work that is pushing your laptop to its limit, and again, when the noise doesn't bother you (*cough* headset *cough*).

Here is the fan that I use.

So how does it work? Well it's simple -- you take the High Speed Muffin Fan, and position it beside your laptop in a way that supplements the airflow (mind your laptop's intake and output vents). On my Zephyrus, I just position it so it's blowing air beneath the laptop, across the keyboard, and especially across the bottom bezel of the screen (where the hot air output vents are).

Again, I really only take this fan out and sit it on my desk alongside my laptop when I find a game pushing the laptop to its limit. Frostpunk was a good example of a game that had my CPU close to throttle, and this simple fan dropped the temps by a good 5-9 degrees Celsius.


I'm going to add to this list over time. I figured maybe others might have good suggestions too.

 

What about thermal pads, xoticpc and some others offer to put thermal pads on heat sensitive surfaces for an extra $50. I've never used them before, but I quickly read up on it and maybe it would help? but at the same time wouldn't it also reduce air flow inside? I'm so confused.

Edit: Speaking of which, there needs to be a market for a 3rd party expanded bottom for laptops which include severe extra cooling. I wouldn't mind an extra half inch if my laptop would actually stay cool and last longer. Who really needs a laptop so skinny, it doesn't go in our pockets. Weight I get if you're carrying it a lot, but an extra half inch I can't imagine anyone would notice.

 

I think these are great ideas/tips. I was just checking the price of the G15 and see that it can be a really affordable/good value laptop. Any tweaks that further improve performance cost effectively and with minimal quality of life impacts are invaluable. Thank you for starting this thread!

 

For the AMD Ryzen chips....You can knock down near 15-20c by just disabling turbo boost. Thats pretty amazing, and thats not even tampering with the TPD.

I'm not sure if Intel has the same capabilities.

 

I talk about this in the first item above— the downside is that if your chip is 3.3ghz to 4.6ghz, disabling boost leaves you stuck at 3.3ghz. It’ll still perform well, but depends on your application, whether or not that trade off is worth it.

also, this did work for me on my last Intel chip laptop as well. Although, that was a 10875h chip that has a base frequency of 2.1ghz and still higher power consumption (and higher temp) than the AMD chip.