[SOLVED] Old Desktop outperforms Brand New Laptop!?

[alarch88]

You heard the title right. Let's go over specs, shall we?


Ol' reliable (my desktop) was starting to slow down on me but college was starting soon, so I actually went ahead and bought and gaming laptop for multi-use. I went with the Asus TUF FX505DU-WB72 which I got on sale, as it looked like it had amazing specs for the price. Here those are:

AMD Ryzen 7 R7-3750H
8 GB Memory
GTX 1660 TI
256gb SSD


I'm not some PC guru but I've built a few, and to me these sounded like great specs for under $800, or at least I thought. This laptop runs INCREDIBLY slow, from the time I unpackaged it from the box. I normally compare it to my desktop, which has a nearly 7 year old processor yet out performs this laptop in every way possible, my desktop specs are:

Intel core i7 4700
16gb ram
gtx 1060 3gb
500 gb SSD

Now anyone looking at this would assume the laptop performs MUCH better, yes? No, my desktop with those old specs and running 4 monitors out performs my brand new laptop in every area. Gaming, startup time, and just general use. The only area that I can upgrade on the laptop is RAM, (Which I now have in the mail heading my way). But there's no way something like that can slow me down that much, right?

Some examples are:

RDR2, demanding game gets about 30 FPS on my desktop, yet barely boots and just crashes on my laptop?
PUBG runs just fine on my desktop, I'd say 40-50 FPS? Yet I can't even load into a game onto my laptop, it just crashses.
And to be honest just general use, every thing on this laptop lags, I would even go to say my grandmas 10 year old AIO opens firefox faster than this thing

So what is going on??

I was going to wait till I got this ram upgrade, then I Was going to reset the laptop and make sure I had all my drivers, but I just thought I would make this thread now and update it as I tried things. Thank to anyone with some wisdom, this whole mess makes me worried to ever go Ryzen again even with what everyone is saying...

 

[richiestang_78]

First I would make sure windows and the GPU drivers are both up to date. If that fails to improve performance next I would try and "reset" Windows to factory settings firstly if you are having issues, or if the laptop came with a recovery drive or partition just restore it to factory settings.

Make sure you have the laptop set to maximum performance in Windows power saving. Balanced and pwoer saving both will throttler performance.

The next thing to check is that the laptop isnt thermal throttling on either the GPU or CPU. Use the Ryzen Master Utility to check the CPU thermals and you can use something like MSI Afterburner to monitor the GPU.
Sadly this is extremely common these days for "gaming" laptops. A couple solutions that wouldn't void your warranty would either buy a laptop cooling pad or simply make sure the back is elevated slightly so there is a gap between the bottom of the laptop and the surface its resting on.

Finally make sure ASUS didnt install any bloat ware that is running in the back ground and make sure any security software like antivirus isnt actively scanning the computer

 

[alarch88]

First I would make sure windows and the GPU drivers are both up to date. If that fails to improve performance next I would try and "reset" Windows to factory settings firstly if you are having issues, or if the laptop came with a recovery drive or partition just restore it to factory settings.

Make sure you have the laptop set to maximum performance in Windows power saving. Balanced and pwoer saving both will throttler performance.

The next thing to check is that the laptop isnt thermal throttling on either the GPU or CPU. Use the Ryzen Master Utility to check the CPU thermals and you can use something like MSI Afterburner to monitor the GPU.
Sadly this is extremely common these days for "gaming" laptops. A couple solutions that wouldn't void your warranty would either buy a laptop cooling pad or simply make sure the back is elevated slightly so there is a gap between the bottom of the laptop and the surface its resting on.

Finally make sure ASUS didnt install any bloat ware that is running in the back ground and make sure any security software like antivirus isnt actively scanning the computer

First off, thanks for the reply. Secondly I do plan to reset windows after I upgrade the ram a little bit and check all my drivers. I'll go ahead and monitor thermal throttling now.

What's odd is watching simple applications like task manager itself take up 40% of my CPU usage while idiling, or my background antivirus software constantly taking 10-20% usage, so I feel like this throttling may be a possibility?

And you mentioned fixes that don't void my warranty, say, got any fixes that do void my warranty?

 

[richiestang_78]

First off, thanks for the reply. Secondly I do plan to reset windows after I upgrade the ram a little bit and check all my drivers. I'll go ahead and monitor thermal throttling now.

What's odd is watching simple applications like task manager itself take up 40% of my CPU usage while idiling, or my background antivirus software constantly taking 10-20% usage, so I feel like this throttling may be a possibility?

And you mentioned fixes that don't void my warranty, say, got any fixes that do void my warranty?

For thermal throttling the popular fix would be to use a higher quality thermal paste or if possible use liquid metal. Thermal paste replacement is pretty straight forward but liquid metal is something you need to proceed with at your own risk, because it will turn aluminum into fragile dust (so the heat sink needs to be copper and is electrically conductive so you have to apply conformal coating around the CPU die. Again proceed at your own risk with this. I've also heard people use lapping plates to make the heatsink "flatter" so it sits more uniformly on the die.

I would suspect though that your issues isn't thermal since you are having slowness outside of demanding tasks. If it were me I would start with a factory reset, update Windows and GPu drivers then go through any bloatware that may be present.

After all that then I would monitor the thermals and make sure you are hitting thermal limits and throttling.