Question What is going on with my Laptop?

AngryNerdNoises

Commendable
Apr 1, 2017
3
0
1,510
I recently acquired an Alienware 17 R5, brand new from Dell, and it was running great. I reformat it to get rid of the Bloatware on there, and downloaded all the drivers, updated windows, and did what needed to be done. Everything is to the most current up to date driver, but ever since the reformat, I've been having an issue in games.

I will start the game up, and it will run perfectly fine for a while, but then it will get lag spikes. Not because of Network drop or anything, I will just go from 70-80 frames to 20-25, sometimes even lower. This will last anywhere from 20 seconds to a full minute, and then return to normal speeds.

I've taken it apart and cleaned out all the fans, so there is no dust, I double checked my drivers, they are all current, I've ran diagnostics, and it says everything is working fine, but I still get these lag spikes.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

My computers specs:
CPU: i7-8750H 2.2 GHz (4.1 Turbo)
Memory: 32 GBytes DDR4
GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX 1080 GDDR5X
Storage: 1 x 256GB NVME SSD, 1 x 512GB M.2 SSD, 1 x 1TB 7200RPM HDD.

My OS is Windows 10 64bit on the NVME drive, as well as the main game I play (Destiny 2 and World of Warships), the other two drives are used for storage/ other games.
 
Double check for driver issues in Device Manager, then also check that it's running off your 1080 instead of onboard graphics.

Most laptops with Nivida graphics and also onboard graphics lately are by default set to work with Nvidia Optimus, which automatically determines which graphics to use dependent on things like available battery power. You may need to change some of those settings in Nvidia Control Panel and Windows Power Plan.
 

AngryNerdNoises

Commendable
Apr 1, 2017
3
0
1,510
Double check for driver issues in Device Manager, then also check that it's running off your 1080 instead of onboard graphics.

Most laptops with Nivida graphics and also onboard graphics lately are by default set to work with Nvidia Optimus, which automatically determines which graphics to use dependent on things like available battery power. You may need to change some of those settings in Nvidia Control Panel and Windows Power Plan.



I did all that, and it still lags. I can't figure out why its doing it, other than I might have a defective Video Card?