GT 630m throttling after 30 mins of gaming.

Hi there

Recently I bought the said GPU (GT630m) expecting better gaming performance that what I had on my very old graphics card. I was right, and I was really happy with its performance because I'm a casual gamer overall, and can live on 30fps. However, when I play for long and extended times, my GPU starts to downclock to 662MHz (GPU Clock). Then it goes further down to 475MHz which starts making Borderlands 2 and Crysis 3 lag. I run both games comfortably on high settings (not ultra) usually, but about 30 mins in, they start to lag because of the throttle (drops from about 80 fps to 20 fps in Borderlands 2). My temperatures are 49C on idle, and while gaming they are 78C. When I first bought my laptop (Asus N56VM), it was much cooler, so I think it might be the newer drivers.
I have tried the following things:
Also, I'm interested in overclocking the GPU, so if anyone could give me a guide on how to do that, that would be awesome.
How can I improve overall performance on this GPU?

Any input is much appreciated.

 

Always clean your laptop first. Apparently no one ever cleans their laptop. Higher temps are almost always due to dust build up.

Buy a can of compressed air, turn of your machine and clean the vents, fan, with short controlled bursts. Overclocking will, at best, give you around 10% more performance. So if something runs at 20fps, it will run at 22,... not worth it.

 

I can't speak for the overclocking potential of the 630m, but overclocking in general can net you a lot more than 10% more performance. Most Kepler cards can easily gain a 20-30% increase in framerates. Not saying a low end fermi card could overclock that much, but I think it could probably do better than 10%

 

Actually these lower end Fermi cards were pretty good overclockers so a 20-25% boost isn't that far fetched.

 

Depending on the laptop itself and it's cooling solution, the quality of silicon etc, a reasonable performance (not clocks, but actual in game performance from avg fps etc) increase is a free 10% for general notebooks. Properly cooled and moded machines can achieve much more, and great designs in laptops helps, but not all machines are equal.

Besides, whatever ends up being the bottleneck in a particular game, is not the same for each and every game, so the overclock gains can also be mute at some point.

If the OP is already having problems with temps, it might suggest he is not accustomed to cleaning/repasting/tweaking, which might end up making things worse with OC as it will run hotter, underclock itself etc.

Never consider the best case scenario as a general. I have had old GTX260m cards die with no overclocking, others with 5% OC etc. Of course I also have had machines with 20 to 30% OC which lasted a year, but that doesn't mean everyone can. My old HD5870m could overclock 30% the core easily, but only 2% the memory before inestability.

 

Overclocking isn't the issue here, it's throttling after 30 minutes. I have no clue though if temps are in check. Although check the CPU temps, that may be the culprit not the GPU.

 

Yes. The cpu can definitely cause throttling if it overheats but here it's the gpu that's downclocking. You should clean the heatsink and the fan like everyone else recommended but if that doesn't work than your thermal paste has probably worn out. In that case you'll need to do a repasting as well. Preferably with something good. Arctic mx-4,Gelid GC extreme,Thermaltake TG-1,Antec F-7,ICD 7 are all good pastes. At least one of them will be available in your country.

 

The throttling is due to heat, so lowering the CPU multiplier with Throttlestop may help by lowering temps inside the case.

 

But temps are only 78C during gaming. No GPU should throttle at 78C.

 

Some do, it's not unheard of. For example, the stock acer 3830TG throttles the GPU(GT540m) at 75C.

 

Turn off intel speedstep and let us know the results.

 

I'm not sure how to turn off intel speedstep. I went to power options but I'm unsure of what to do next. I can't see anything saying intel speedstep.

Using speedfan, I noticed that none of my temperatures increase past 81C for my cpu and my gpu. My CPU's core speed does not seem to go down or up when a game is running. It remains at about 3093.00 - 3100.00 MHz. I used CPU-Z to check.

I clean up my laptop every month or so with a can of compressed air to remove the dust, so I know it can't be that. I don't know where the heatsink is in the laptop.

Also, I tried overclocking (my brother taught me yesterday) with nvidia inspector but I saw no changes in fps no matter how high I put up the GPU clock, shader clock, and memory clock. The highest GPU clock I got was 797MHz, and the temperatures did not exeed 78C for my GPU. It then fell as time went on, as was my earlier problem.

I have the latest nvidia drivers.

 

Well you'll probably need to take it apart and change the thermal paste. The stock paste has worn out. Alternatively you could revert back to stock drivers to see if that helps but drivers don't cause overheating in my experience.