Question One CPU core 10-15 degrees hotter than the rest

[cookiesandcreampie]

Using a 2022 Asus laptop, comes with i9-12900H and 3070ti mobile, and I constantly have Throttlestop running to reduce clocks and therefore heat (can't undervolt unfortunately).

I know the cpu load bias for this laptop is for cores P2 and P3, so I expected those 2 to have the highest temps/usage. But I'm seeing the P3 core be 10-15 degrees hotter than P2 or any other P core during gaming. It's doesn't seem to be sustained heat but the temps for P3 are constantly and rapidly jumping up and down about 15 degrees from 80C - 94C.

HWInfo shows P3 doesn't have higher core usage or higher clocks, so I'm not sure what's wrong. Is this something I should be worried about for long-term health? I'm still within the return window but considering the QA nightmare Asus laptops have been I'd like to keep this one.

Any suggestions?

HWInfo screenshot below:

https://imgur.com/a/zlaHdzX

 

[hotaru.hino]

Maximum doesn't really tell us anything other than that's the highest it hit at some point. For all I know, that core could be constantly hitting an upper end of utilization, but never maxing out.

Kinda need to see CPU utilization over time to make a better decision on what to do.

 

[cookiesandcreampie]

Maximum doesn't really tell us anything other than that's the highest it hit at some point. For all I know, that core could be constantly hitting an upper end of utilization, but never maxing out.

Kinda need to see CPU utilization over time to make a better decision on what to do.

https://imgur.com/a/jbjCB5E

Here it is, graph data is taken from HWInfo logs. I separately confirmed P2 and P3 cores have highest utilization among all cores, so here are the comparisons between the 2. Overall it seems that clocks and utilization is pretty much the same? P3 just consistently remains about 5-7 degrees hotter that shoots to 10-15 degree differences in temp spikes.

 

[Unolocogringo]

Most games have one major/main thread and several smaller threads.
So when playing these games one core will always see more use/heat than the other cores.
A few games are very multi-threaded but they are few and the exception.