[SOLVED] i7 7700HQ random fps drops in every game

[MarcusShane6]

I use an Asus ROG GL702VS and have been experiencing random fps drops in almost every game. Haven't been able to find the core of the issue but I'm very certain it's CPU related because I checked through HWMonitor that during gaming the CPU's utilization drop by 10-30% depending upon how demanding the game is. Eg- While playing Ghost Runner, the usage is around 45-60% typically but it suddenly drops to 15-20% on all cores and causes massive fps drops for 2-3 seconds every 2 minutes or so. The clock speed never changes during this time and temps are normal (It never shows thermal throttling in Intel XTU). I do have a 125mV Underclock on the chip but these drops have been happening before the underclock, they've just gotten worse lately. Idle temps have been high lately (60-70 C) but they're never crossing 94 C on load. RealBench, Prime95 and a few lighter stress tests haven't shown anything, seems to happen only while actually gaming. If some particular tests can help solve the issue better I can go through with them. Any help is appreciated, feel free to ask for any additional info.

My specs-
i7 7700HQ (underclocked -125mV)
GTX 1070
500GB m.2 nvme SSD (contains my OS)
1TB HDD (7200rpm)
Windows 10 Home

 

[MarcusShane6]

So what I ended up doing was...

1. Undervolted the CPU a bit more, to around -140 mV (seems like the limit because it BSOD'd at -145mV during heavy benchmarking) [Made sure to keep Core and Cache Voltage same]
2. Increased Thermal limit of the GPU from 81C to 91C with 'GPU Tweak II' which increased stability a bit.
3. The GPU was still reaching 90C so added a bit of undervolt to stabilize the clock speed through MSI Afterburner. (825mV - 1640MHz seems stable after testing)
4. The fans were slowing down in a couple of hours so used 'Notebook Fan Control' to fix them at 100% always since they're not too loud and I use headphones mostly anyway.

Works pretty great now when GPU is working hard. The problem from what I gather was actually the GPU at 81C holding back the CPU.