Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

CPU clock drops as GPU clock increases

by Jul 15, 2018 6:59AM PDT

So I typically play on PS4 so this is uncharted territory for me. I went home for the holidays and left my console in the dorms but I need to game so I'm trying to use my laptop for some light gaming. It's a Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro - 1370 and it's really not built for gaming.
Intel(R) Core(TM) M-5Y71 CPU @ 1.20GHz (4 CPUs), ~1.4GHz (Up to 2.9GHz)
HD Graphics 5300
But I was hoping I'd be able to get something going, even 720p gaming at the very least but it's all so bad. Every game lags and stutters.
Anyway I'm using MSi Afterburner to monitor the system while I play (or try to) and I noticed that the CPU clock drops to sub-1GHz as soon as any game starts and stays there until the game closes then it's immediately back up to normal 2.6+.
Then I noticed that as the GPU clock gets higher, the CPU clock gets lower. Does anyone know why this happens and if there's a way to fix it?
I really just want any sort of gaming done even if it's 720,low as long as it's smooth and my PC as expensive as it was should be able to handle that.
Thanks for any help at all.

Discussion is locked

3 Posts
- Collapse + Expand Details
- Collapse -
Answer
While I disagree.
by Forum moderator Jul 15, 2018 8:18AM PDT

You have a warranty issue. It doesn't matter what my bet is here but you don't have a MSI laptop so using that tool can result in odd issues. Go back to stock and then make the warranty call.

- Collapse -
Not quite
by cemma2035 Jul 15, 2018 9:19AM PDT

MSI Afterburner is advertised to work on any PC though. But anyway, I've also recorded the same result with the performance tab of Task Manager. I'm not sure what you mean by "stock" in this case but I'm out of warranty anyway. I've had this PC for a while but I've only just tried to play games on it.

So this isn't normal then? The CPU-GPU trade off isn't intended?

- Collapse -
Then try overclocking forums.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Jul 15, 2018 9:25AM PDT

My thought is that it's a design issue. I see this complaint a lot on non-gamer laptops. The best I can do is to clean the heatsinks, redo the compound work and place it on a cooling pad since the slim laptops often just can't dump the heat and slow to protect the chips and system.

I am not offering a fix since the machine is out of its league. This can upset some so I apologize for that but it is what it is.

Nod to overclocking forums?

Back to Laptops forum

CNET Forums

Operating Systems
Software
Electronics & Gadgets
Hardware
Tablets & Mobile Devices
General Help
Brand Forums
Roadshow Autos
Off Topic

Other Forums

Forum Info