My 12th Gen was running slowly, and exhibiting weird CPU throttling and/or excessive fan noise.
I have seen a mix bag of the following:
- CPU throttled at 400MHz while running heavy loads (like compiling code, or even running
s-tuiin stress mode) - CPU frequency alternating between full speed and 400MHz when under a bit of load
- fan running at full speed for hours despite the room being fairly cool, and CPU load staying well under 20% for prolonged periods of time
After spending multiple weeks reading this forum and bugging tech support for help, I decided to give my CPU a repaste.
While I was at it, I decided to give the fan assembly a deep clean.
I followed Heatsink and Fan Replacement Guide - Framework Guides and cleaned the fan as best I could by blowing on it and rubbing it with an alcohol soaked cloth (the one that came with the thermal paste kit) to remove the dirt stuck on it.
What I have seen nowhere in the docs is the following:
- once the fan assembly is disconnected, flip it over, and remove the 3 tiny screws circled in red below
- carefully remove the tape marked in green
- pay attention to the clip marked in blue when you lift the fan itself from the heatsink
I found about 1cm3 of lint in there, like the stuff found in laundry dryers! I removed that, and cleaned the heatsink with the same cloth. Blew through the fan outlet like in a harmonica.
Basically, the fan couldn’t really cool things down as half of its exhaust was blocked.
After repasting and reassembling everything, all the annoying symptoms above are gone.
My machine is ~1.5 year old, and I’d tried to clean the fan before, but not to this extent.
@Loell_Framework Since we have exchanged a few emails around this topic but cleaning the fan never came up in support’s suggestions, can I suggest you update relevant docs?
I would also suggest a laptop cleaning guide that includes these steps 
Hope this helps someone!