Hello everyone!
Distro: arch(last update was at sept 23)
Kernel: zen 6.16.7
Bios version: IFGP6.03.05
Hardware confit: Ryzen 7840hs with 128GB of crucial 5600MHz ram
The issue the laptop after aproximately 5 minutes of gaming hits the apu skin temperature(50C) with a very aggresive fan curve(fans at 100%), and the fps gets cut in half, basically from 60 to 30 in most cases. And at 30 it creates a squarewave looking frametime( for a few milliseconds it outpus 45 fps and after for a few milliseconds it outputs 30fps), because of this it looks 3ven more stuttery than it is.
I tried to adjust the apu_skin_temp_limit with ryzenadj, but the system straigh up ignores it.
The interesting part is that the gpu stays at 2700MHz and consumes the sam 35-40W of power.
As you can see the frame time is very spikey and has that straight piece in the middle.
Does anybody have this issue? Or I made something wrong during the installation?
The laptop is doing this since I got it( late july), but until noe I didn’t know the cause of it.
Thank you foe your response!
Same issue, Windows here. Looks like the firmware just rejects changing the APU skin temperature. I’m also seeing a massive hit in performance when I hit this STAPM limit (distance to the APU skin temperature).
Did you found any fix for it? I found a temporary one. Limiting the APU to 25W helps with the temps, and you will only lose about 5% of the framerate. I would want to find a proper fix tho.
I think it’s more a limitation of the hardware and the cooling solution.
The skin temperature of the chassis is definitely getting to the point I’m worried if it was higher (I think I measured 46-47c?). There are ways to bypass this firmware limit with a custom BIOS that exposes the internal settings. I think the firmware setting is correct though - and not a “bug” - more a hardware limitation. The main issue is that working a full day, the chassis just heats up - even with fans locked to 100%. Unlocking the firmware settings is likely only a good idea if you have external cooling in-place.
For me, 25W would be a massive hit in performance (I do rust compiling) - I went the “mod path” when I replaced the liquid metal with the phase change pad - lapping the heat sink, sandwich method, etc. IIRC I was easily hitting 54W when compiling.
Personally, I switched to the Framework Desktop for work, completely removing this issue. All my weird jittering issues have completely gone away (which tells me the issue was the skin temperature as I suspected). Plus I get to play with 128GiB of unified memory out-of-work 
All that said, I don’t blame the F16 - this is an issue I’ve had with all laptops - I’m very sensitive to the jitter issues.
I looked a little bit more into the issue and found out that not just the chassis but the ram gets very hot too, like 77-78 C which is probablt why it decreases performance. Luckily for short periods of time it can handle the max 54W of continuous power draw. My main issue is when the igpu starts to work, only then it starts to throttle. When I am compiling something it always managed to do its best.
What are these hacks you mentioned? In theory my laptop should have came with the ptm instead of liquid metal. But what are the others?
Hardware hacks are basically removing the vapor chamber, lapping the area, and using a copper shim to improve thermal transfer “sandwich method“ (the original design is still for liquid metal, so it had to make compromises because liquid metal can’t touch copper directly). With this mod, we appear to get slightly better performance compared to the liquid metal, which slightly more improvements over pure PTM (effectively makes the PTM thinner).
I was already in there, so I thought I might as well, I was happy with the results (although, it was obvious there was an issue originally, there were black marks on the CPU die that took a bit to remove).
There’s apparently a modded BIOS floating around to remove the firmware limits (or rather, expose the firmware settings that AMD exposes to OEMs). I’m not sure where to source this BIOS though. I haven’t tried this though or looked that deep (given my stance this is a hardware limitation that shouldn’t be bypassed).
