Question Asus gaming laptop massively underperforming

[fureniku]

Hey everyone,

Looking for some help with my laptop. I'm not sure why but for the past few months it's been massively underperforming.

I don't use it often at all, and I'm actually just preparing to sell it at this point but obviously want to fix any performance issues before I do.

It's not a wimpy laptop by any stretch. Specs:
i5 8300H
24GB RAM
GTX 1050 Ti
512GB Evo 870 SSD
1tb HDD

It struggles to even hit 10fps in games like Apex Legends despite being above the requirements.

I ran a user benchmark test, and that confirmed that everything seems to be running well below what it should. It did highlight that the GPU wasn't being used at all which I'm in the process of resolving now, but that still doesn't explain why my CPU, RAM and SSD are all running so poorly:
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/25464018

Finally, in terms of OS - I reinstalled Windows back in September for a completely fresh start and as I said, I very rarely use this. It's almost stock bar installing a few games, I mainly use my desktop and if I go out, I take my much lighter and better-battery-having iPad pro

Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

 

[rgd1101]

check temp?
malware scan?

 

[fureniku]

CPU temp is sitting at about 60c when doing a benchmark, I'm just installing a game to see how it handles at a more continuous test. I did find that for whatever reason my performance power plan had CPU set to use between 5-100% when plugged in, which was a bit odd, bumping to always allow 100% usage did improve things a little performance-wise.

I've managed to get the GPU working fine now (turns out it needed a special ASUS driver, not the standard NVIDIA driver. I hate laptops), so it's only really the CPU that's underperforming now.

Fresh test results: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/25620378 - The CPU "turbo" is still sat at the base clock which suggests there's a further config error somewhere, but it's a lot better than "turboing" down by 50%!

As for malware, AV can't find anything, and while not impossile it's relatively unlikely to have anything. It was fresh installed from the official Windows ISO, and has only had Discord, EA Origin (with a few of their games), Steam and Chrome installed (as well as a couple of things after the issue to help narrow down like GPU-Z and UserBenchMark). I've never even checked email or anything like that on here, it's basically been treated as a portable games console