- Oct 1, 2020
- 46
- 5
- 4,545
I have been experiencing incredible loss in performance from my laptop for a long time now, I have tried many ways (but one) to solve it yet it does not seem to help. Before getting any further, my laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad S340-14API with a Ryzen 7 3700U and Vega 10 graphics. I got the laptop back in 2020 to replace my old Intel 3rd Gen PC as my main computer. The laptop used to run perfectly fine, and its performance used to satisfy my needs when it comes to pretty much anything I wish to do on it. Although from late 2020 to early 2022, I went back to my then upgraded PC and kept my laptop on the side for extra multitasking and as a dedicated streaming computer, so I did not get to stress the laptop too much during this time period.
Unfortunately, by the end of January 2022, my PC's motherboard and graphics card died which ended up with me going back to my laptop since my PC had no integrated graphics. I remember my laptop being able to play Valorant at a somewhat stable 75-100 fps. At that time I already noticed it performing slower than how I remember it to be, but at least my games were still playable. A few days/weeks in (I can't remember), my laptop started to get really frequent stutters where the whole system just had 2fps for a couple of seconds every other few minutes. At first I reinstalled windows (kept the files since I have too many on it to bother sorting them out), but it only made my experience worse by somehow managing to make the webcam quality worse (I haven't yet solved this).
I noticed that my laptop experiences these 'seizures' when it gets hot enough after a few minutes into running a game, so I figured I'd clean out the dust from the internals and repaste the CPU with Arctic MX4 which somewhat alleviated the state of my laptop as it doesn't get these 'seizures' anymore. With that problem solved, the laptop still continued to underperform, Valorant has been unplayable ever since Feb 2022, getting around 30-55FPS with major stutters in audio and visible screen tearing. Although in GTA V Online it seems to be playable, its underperformance is still very much noticeable. I always make sure to monitor the laptop's temperatures, and the CPU package temps seem to be normal at min 45C - max 75C.
At one point I once again tried to fix it by adding more RAM making it 12GB from the previous 8GB, but it didn't seem to help the performance at all. Now that I think about it, the RAM really was not gonna help anyway considering the laptop already had major issues. Having mentioned that I use the laptop as a streaming PC, regardless of its degraded performance, it was still able to handle livestreaming at 1080p30 with the x264 encoder as well as discord, note that I have a lot of scenes and elements in my OBS. Yet recently in the last month, I notice its performance has gotten even worse as streaming with x264 causes major video and audio desync and latency, which had me resort to using the H.264 encoder with visibly worse video quality.
The only thing left for me to try doing is to completely reset the system and clear all of the drives to clear any software issues that may be affecting the device. Other than that, I think I have done everything I could to get my laptop back to normal, followed every optimization video I could, yet it remains stubborn. Any thoughts and responses would be very much appreciated.
Here is a copy of the laptop's UserBenchmark results.
Unfortunately, by the end of January 2022, my PC's motherboard and graphics card died which ended up with me going back to my laptop since my PC had no integrated graphics. I remember my laptop being able to play Valorant at a somewhat stable 75-100 fps. At that time I already noticed it performing slower than how I remember it to be, but at least my games were still playable. A few days/weeks in (I can't remember), my laptop started to get really frequent stutters where the whole system just had 2fps for a couple of seconds every other few minutes. At first I reinstalled windows (kept the files since I have too many on it to bother sorting them out), but it only made my experience worse by somehow managing to make the webcam quality worse (I haven't yet solved this).
I noticed that my laptop experiences these 'seizures' when it gets hot enough after a few minutes into running a game, so I figured I'd clean out the dust from the internals and repaste the CPU with Arctic MX4 which somewhat alleviated the state of my laptop as it doesn't get these 'seizures' anymore. With that problem solved, the laptop still continued to underperform, Valorant has been unplayable ever since Feb 2022, getting around 30-55FPS with major stutters in audio and visible screen tearing. Although in GTA V Online it seems to be playable, its underperformance is still very much noticeable. I always make sure to monitor the laptop's temperatures, and the CPU package temps seem to be normal at min 45C - max 75C.
At one point I once again tried to fix it by adding more RAM making it 12GB from the previous 8GB, but it didn't seem to help the performance at all. Now that I think about it, the RAM really was not gonna help anyway considering the laptop already had major issues. Having mentioned that I use the laptop as a streaming PC, regardless of its degraded performance, it was still able to handle livestreaming at 1080p30 with the x264 encoder as well as discord, note that I have a lot of scenes and elements in my OBS. Yet recently in the last month, I notice its performance has gotten even worse as streaming with x264 causes major video and audio desync and latency, which had me resort to using the H.264 encoder with visibly worse video quality.
The only thing left for me to try doing is to completely reset the system and clear all of the drives to clear any software issues that may be affecting the device. Other than that, I think I have done everything I could to get my laptop back to normal, followed every optimization video I could, yet it remains stubborn. Any thoughts and responses would be very much appreciated.
Here is a copy of the laptop's UserBenchmark results.
Last edited:
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