I think one of the cooling fans is faulty because I think there is a slight grinding sound from where the CPU fan is, but the GPU and VRAM are always running too so it’s difficult to hear grinding clearly. I had this problem before on an older laptop but the grinding was loud at times and had to replace the fan.
I constantly look at temperatures and see no obvious problems, which is similar to what happened before on my old laptop. I tried playing games and seemed to be fine, except one brief moment when a game froze for a few seconds, that never happened before so I guess it might have been CPU throttling due to unreliable fan. I don’t know how CPU/GPU throttling looks like in games so it might have been due to something else unrelated.
I already have a replacement fan, but I would prefer to find out for sure first if any fans are really faulty, and make sure I replace the correct one because there are 3 fans in that laptop.
I’ll say you are good from the looks of it, no obvious temperature problem, ‘grinding noise’ that is drowned out by just the noise of the other fan and difficult to hear.
Games stutter for many reasons, I would only be concerned if it happens constantly and not for a single brief moment. Maybe the fan is making you more conscious of micro stuttering?
@Blake
Well, it was Mass Effect 3 regular version from 2012. Not a demanding game for modern laptops, I played it a lot before and never had any sorts of freezes and stuttering before. This time it froze for around 3 seconds and audio was making stutter noises, I was sure it would BSOD or crash to desktop at any moment but it got back to normal. I didn’t have any apps running except Origin and temperature monitoring app.
The fan failing would not surprise me, I had this laptop for over 3 years and for some reason it likes to constantly have the CPU fan spinning loudly even when idle. Apparently, it’s a common flaw with that laptop model.
Blake said: @Bay
3 years? When was the last time you cleaned your fans and changed the thermal paste?
Does this happen only on Mass Effect? Have you tried any modern games?
I cleaned the fans last week, sprayed some compressed air. Not changed thermal paste because I don’t play intensive modern games much and GPU temperatures are rarely above 75°C.
I played Mass Effect Andromeda for hours the day before and nothing happened. I will play some more games this weekend and see if anything unusual happens. Maybe it’s RAM needing replacement, just hope it’s nothing more serious.
@Bay
Thermal paste does get dry and degrade over time, but then again I had a GTX 1050ti running for 7 years without thermal paste change just fine on non-intensive games.
Older games do get less and less compatible on modern hardware, I remember having to download community-made patches to fix performance issues on Kotor 1-2 and some older Fallout titles, it might be the same case with Mass Effect 3.
@Blake
I played Mass Effect 3 on that laptop for years already without problems, I have not installed new GPU drivers or anything that could affect it. It’s a GTX 1070.
I often would install Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim on modern laptops and didn’t have any problems. Play even older games than that too. So far, most work fine or don’t work at all, or have real obvious problems from the first minutes when you start the game. I know only one old game that gets a freezing/stuttering problem on modern computers, it happens in specific situations when AI NPCs are doing things at the same time, and disabling multi-threading doesn’t help.
Kotor 1&2 run fine on my old 2014 laptop without any community patches whatsoever.
@Bay
Oh, I had trouble running New Vegas and Kotor on a 4060, but I guess it’s fine on a 1070.
You can run some benchmarking tools to see if your laptop’s performance is degrading, I’ll recommend the TimeSpy benchmark in 3DMark on Steam, since it can also compare your result with others of the same spec to see if you are underperforming. They also provide you with a performance chart over time so you can check if it’s thermal throttling at some point.
Sorry I can’t be of much help, hope you can solve your problem soon.
@Blake
Yeah, I guess I will just use a tool that can more clearly show when actual throttling takes place, because I am not currently sure of anything. Thanks for the help regardless.