Question The GPU wattage on my laptop is not getting higher than 30 watts ?

[ritiksharma454]

I purchased a new Dell G15 5520 laptop with i5-12500H and RTX 3050 (95 watts)) 2 weeks ago but I'm facing a problem here.

When I'm playing any game the GPU wattage is normal but after 10 minutes the wattage is capped to 30 watts and its not increasing. This leads to performance issues and decrease in FPS. I contacted Dell and they told me there is no hardware issue from our side so we can't take it back. I don't know what I should do, I even had video proof but they are not doing anything that can help me fix my problem.

In MSI Afterburner and GPU-Z, it is telling me the performance cap or limit reason is temperature and power. but temps are not even getting to 80-85. and 80 degrees is normal for a gaming laptop. Is it a bios issue or something else ?

Then I saw this community channel on reddit so I'm posting this so I can get help from you guys.

Every thing is set to max performance (power options, mux switch is on, maximum performance option is selected from nvidia control panel, etc.)

 

[BFG-9000]

I am not a fan of nVidia's TGP version numbering system which is supposed to describe the rated maximum boost clock of the GPU.

For reference, RTX 3050M is rated 35-80w TDP depending on what the boost clock is set at, 1057-1740MHz. Your Dell claims it's the 1695MHz boost version so is well under 80w TDP yet has a "95w TGP" rating.

In practice, any notebook manufacturer can limit the actual boost clock to whatever their thermal solution allows, regardless of which TGP version GPU is installed. The software may be calculating wattage differently (as in the usual TDP way), and/or your GPU is actually being limited to lower boost clocks for thermal reasons (which may be from different sensors than that software knows how to read). What boost clock do you see while playing games after 10 minutes?

The normal situation with Dell laptops seems to be that later BIOS updates usually set the fan to run faster/noisier, I don't know if they regularly underestimate real-world thermal conditions when designing the things, or they just plan to annoy you into getting a new laptop after a couple years or so as a standard practice, but my experience is that their laptops only seem to be nice and quiet when brand new. Perhaps in your case they limited performance too much to make it silent, for now.

 

[ritiksharma454]

These are the boost clock I'm getting before that "10 minutes" and while the 30 watt limit and after I closed the game and was on desktop.
I'm giving you the link to the folder which contains the screenshots.

Link to the folder

 

[BFG-9000]

If it won't return to normal speeds no matter how long it sits at idle and actually needs a reboot before it does, then it probably is a BIOS issue which only Dell can fix.

Sometimes it's not the absolute temperature but the rate of change that trips the thermal protection. Try capping the boost clock lower, even to below the rated 1695MHz to see if this behavior changes, as 1905MHz boost seems rather high