Throttling on 560M, with almost every game

Typical throttling. About 15 minutes into playing my framerate halves itself for about 5 minutes until returning to normal. After about an hour it's 90% uptime on the throttle, with barely any lag free play. So I opened up MSi afterburner, and my GPU gets up to 85C REALLY fast, throttles to 80, then comes back up. I used to not have any issues until:

I installed an SSD
Reinstalled Windows

I'm not sure how either of those could affect the temperature so drastically (used to sit at 70C all the time with an overclock) Made sure all my screws are tight, and drivers up to date, but I don't know what could be causing this and it renders almost every game unplayable. I hope you guys have some suggestions. thanks :c

 

When was the last time you clean the vent?

 

Never. How would you recommend going and doing that?

(It blows out plenty of hot air though, seems to me more than before, but whatever helps)

 

always advisable to clean vents ever 1-3 months.
remove base plate with a watch philips screwdriver and use a can of compressed air to blow out the vents and in and around the fans.

 

Blowing out plenty of hot air means that there's a lot of heat being produced, which is generally not a good thing. However, it also means that the vents aren't so clogged that they're preventing air from being blown out, so a vent cleaning might only get you halfway to where you want to go thermally. You might need to repaste the CPU and the GPU, or maybe do a copper mod on the GPU, where you essentially use thermal paste to paste a thin sheet of copper to your GPU, then paste that to the heatsink. Redoing the paste should make a big difference there already, but people seem to get significant increases in thermal conductivity with this kind of modification.

 

If hot air is coming out then that's good actually, means thermal paste is doing its thing. However if it's doing it at idle then repaste and clean fan and vents and see how it fares.

 

More hot air going out can either mean less hot air staying in or more hot air being produced - if the GPU heats up so rapidly and throttles for a significant portion of playtime, the cooling system is underperforming or the -PU's are performing very inefficiently.

In my little experience (much less than yours), a thermal overhaul such as fan cleaning and repasting has always decreased the temperature of the air coming out because more efficient cooling prevents the system from reaching higher temperatures.

I suppose if your cooling system is barely efficient enough for the components at its most efficient, cleaning it up and improving its performance would end up creating more hot exhaust. The theory there being that it would operate near its maximum temperature in processing-intense situations whether or not it's running efficiently, but better cooling would mean less throttling, so it's actually creating more heat when running efficiently. The throttling time in that case is time when the GPU is creating less heat in order to allow the cooling system to remove some of the ambient heat it created at full speed - much like how a CPU or GPU with good-enough silicon can run faster on water (or nitrogen) cooling than air cooling - the water moves heat away faster, so the chip can afford to produce more heat in the same amount of time - in some situations that means throttling versus running consistently at full speed, in other situations it's a matter of more or less overclocking headroom.

 

Get some compressed air cans and spread it into the vent. However, it's best to open up to the heatsink level and clean it, Toshiba X775 is a bit complicated to dissasemble if you are a first timer.

If you are planning to open it up, you could use this disassembly guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/toshiba/651540-x775-x770-disassemble-thermal-repaste.html

Once you get to this step, unscrew the fan cover and the inside of the heatsink will be exposed.

Spoiler