Was messing with those at one point before I caved and tried umaf, at least back then they didn’t seem to do all that much.
I am still just using the power and temp limits in ryzenad and just leave stapm turned off in bios/umaf, I am using my own skin temp management (if hurt don’t put on skin XD).
I do get why they need skin temp management but they could at least have used an actual skin temp sensor instead of just guessing the skin temp.
Apparently they do have sensors but it’s not exposed. I played video games without any BIOS or ryzenadj settings. After power goes down to 28W I lifted the laptop and used two desk fans to blow into the bottom surface of the laptop, after a minute the power slowly but surely went back to 33W. If repasting/LMing lower the Tctl but power still reduced to 28W, not repasting but cools the outer surface of the laptop increase power to 33W, apparently there’s a sensor.
Are you sure that wasn’t just because it dropped below 80c for long enough?
Edit: I just checked my spreadsheet, without bypassing stapm mine can do 33W while staying under 80C (both with tpm and lm). With a temp limit set to 80 you’ll never get stapm throttled but you also won’t get a lot more than 33W with the stock heatsink.
No, and paradoxically, using a desk fan increases the CPU temp!
Notice and compare CPU (Tctl/Tdie), CPU Skin Temperature, CPU Package Power, CPU PPT SLOW Limit % and APU STAPM Limit %.
My explanation is the temperature between junction and skin depends on thermal conductivity. The better the thermal conductivity the lower the CPU temp the higher the skin temp. in the Ryzen 7, the iGPU has larger surface area than the CPU, thus at a given cooling system, both thermal conductivity(K) and thickness(d) are constant, for iGPU load, the cross-sectional area(A) is much larger than CPU load. For single-core CPU load, the A is even smaller. That’s probably why High CPU temperatures at low utilization. The fan of the FL13 does not consider Tctl, that’s why the fan slows down on CPU load.
In conclusion, improve the thermal conductivity by repasting/PTM7950/LMing will reduce the CPU temperature, but it might increase the skin temperature, making bypassing the STAPM limit even more necessary. This applies only to FL13, on FL16 the opposite is true as the power is often capped by Tctl due to uneven thermals, in this case, repasting increases CPU power.
I wonder if we are using different sensors, I have never had stapm throttling under 80C but I am not 100% sure what sensor I looked at for that.
Looking at the stapm throttling it really was just decrementing the power by some factor over time as slong as it was over 80 and incrementing when under 80.
While I do agree that ptm/lm increases skin temperature I think it is because you have a lower fan speed for the same power output.
It’s also why you should not run the fw passive even if it can totally run like 10-15W without any fan pretty much indefinitely, the skin temp just gets extremely/illegaly hot.
Given it is pretty much not necessary at all with the stock paste that is a pretty reasonable statement XD.
In my case I have a dbrand skin on it which makes skin temperature a lot less of an issue for me but an even bigger one for the computer XD
