Question Does paste improve performance with NVidia RTX 4080 Mobile? Does GPU throttle on temp or power draw?

[Grovest]

Under heavy load, I noticed that the GPU seems to adjust power draw in order to keep the temperature around 80C.

When sitting on a desk, with no obstruction to cooling, I found that the GPU draws around 130W (fluctuates between 125W and 136W). When sitting on my lap, so the cooling intake vents on the bottom are partially obstructed, the temperature remains the same, but the power draw eventually throttles down to around 80W.

This got me wondering, as better paste is reported to improve cooling by as much as 15C, would this improvement in cooling significantly boost performance by allowing the GPU to draw more power while still remaining around 80C?

Game used for testing is AC Valhalla set to Max Settings @ 4K.

Windows is set to Max Performance, NVIDIA Control Panel options are set for Max Performance. GeForce Whisper Mode and Battery Boost are turned off and BIOS settings are set to Max Performance.

 

[Fix_that_Glitch]

The better you can cool a gpu and a cpu the better the sustained performance.

 

[Lutfij]

You need to understand that changing thermal paste isn't eh end all be all solution. You're advised to keep the intake as well as the exhaust vents free from obstruction so that cooler ambient air is fed into the intake while the heat is expelled as fast as possible.

If your temps drop when the obstruction is removed, that's your main cause of the throttle. Yes thermal paste can help bring temps down as the heat is transferred to the cooling stack faster. You can also try and undervolt the iGPU, CPU and discrete GPU using ThrottleStop.

 

[geofelt]

Changing paste is not the cure-all.
It helps only if the current cooler was not mounted well.
You are more likely to screw something up mechanically trying to change paste.

Keeping vents clear is clearly a good thing to do.
On your lap, perhaps a laptop pad would be more effective.

 

[Phaaze88]

Does gpu throttle on temp or power draw?

Both, actually. Gpu Boost will back off or boost up based on both.

 

[Grovest]

Both, actually. Gpu Boost will back off or boost up based on both.

Thanks... Based on your opinion, I tried a cooling pad with the system to see what effect that would have.

Temperature dropped by 10 degrees, from 80C to 70C.

When running on a desk, power draw use to flutuate between 110W and 138W. It now holds pretty steady at around 135W.

Thus, it looks like the the GPU in the P16 G2 has been limited to 80C and 135W.

What I was not expecting was the impact running cooler would have on clock speed. With the test game I have been using to benchmark, before running with a cooling pad, most of the time, the clock speed was sticking around 1800MHz, but, with the cooler, the clock speed holds pretty steady sticks around 2100 and I have occassionally seen 2280.

I wasn't expecting much of a change in frame rates, but in the game I used for my testing the jump was dramatic... not as much in the average framerate which increased from around 40 fps to close to 50 fps, but the big change was in the 99% fps which jumped from 14 fps up to 32 fps.

This time I was using Kingdom Come for testing, with all settings set to Ultra running on a 4K 120Hz external monitor with HDR and FreeSync enabled.