Let's begin with a confession. I've been an idiot with regards to trying to control the thermals of Eileen-II. I had focused so much on the CPU side of things that I cleanly forgot about the GPU side of things, despite commenting before on how both those two share the same cooling system.
The thing is, I had tweaked too much of the Nvidia Control Panel settings to the point that the GPU was always running at maxed out clock speeds all the time, regardless of the associated workload. This is a terribly inefficient use of the available power into the system, and has a tendency to continuously generate excess heat that needs to be dissipated. The sad thing is that it is not as though those tweaks were improving the overall throughput of the rendering by much.
And so, I decided to reset all the settings to default and just tweak the FPS limiter to keep it at 142 fps (compared to 144 Hz screen refresh rate). I tried running Grim Dawn, Minecraft (with Optifine on default shaders), and Halo 4.
The thermals were significantly lower, with nearly the same performance as expected---we're talking about idle temperatures of 37--42°C (compared to the 50--60°C prior for the GPU), and 35--42°C for the CPU (compared to 50--70°C prior for the CPU). My first attempt prior to the default setting was to tweak the power management setting to adaptive while leaving all the other tweaked settings in place, but it ended with a hard crash---I was miffed and decided to apply the most reductionist thing I could think of, having remembered the observation that people have a tendency to want to add more [constraints] to improve something, instead of taking things away.
I had also turned off the Alienware overclocking [of the GPU]. That additional 50 MHz wasn't really going to help do much considering that the GPU clock rate could already peak out at 1.9k+ MHz without that over-clocking (while idling sedately at 300 MHz under a power-optimised setting).
The only draw back from the original 142 fps limitation was that when Grim Dawn's visuals got sufficiently hectic, there were some serious lag spikes that dropped the frame rate to about 40 fps---I mitigated that by setting the limitation to 164 fps to give enough head room to handle the spike better. My very first frame rate limitation was set to 288 fps, but I dropped it down to 142 fps to avoid having to use VSYNC, before switching to 200 fps. The final selection of 164 fps was the observation that for Grim Dawn, even the most sedate scenes didn't bust the 170 fps consistently; it was more like 165 fps or lower.
Setting the frame rate limit is important. For one, it avoids destroying GPUs through bad programming in game or bad components in GPU since it provides the final ``hard'' limit to prevent the scenario of unbounded workload application. For two, setting a frame rate limit higher than the screen refresh rate improves input latency since the input processing [that leads to the rendering of a frame] is more frequent, making any interaction register much quicker than otherwise. VSYNC isn't needed when the screen refresh rate is this high, because any tearing that may occur can happen only in the reciprocal of the refresh rate---so, for my 144 Hz refresh rate, the screen tear occurs for a duration of 7 ms, as compared to the 17 ms from a 60 Hz refresh rate. 7 ms is a really short amount of time, and in this case it is less than half the duration of the 17 ms that happens in a 60 Hz refresh rate screen, which is already considered a gold standard for console-gaming---it's basically negligible.
So with a sufficiently screen high refresh rate, VSYNC is basically obsolete, and with a powerful enough GPU, the latency can also be reduced through setting the effective computational frame rate higher than the screen refresh rate.
But back to thermals. I've not seen such low idling thermals on Eileen-II; I have seen something like that for the PC that I built for mum, but to be fair, a PC has much better cooling characteristics than a laptop even without any special effort to do so, simply because there is so much space for heat to move out by convection via the mass of air that can flow through.
I'd still float Eileen-II to improve air in-take when I am doing more heavy processor usage (like when gaming) though---it's just a good idea in general whether or not I have improved the thermals through not being an idiot.
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Anyway, today is National Day. Yay. We remember SIN city's independence some fifty-six years ago. Everyone virtue-signals through their colourful patriotic display of wearing red and white (while not hanging out flags at their windows outside of their apartments), talk about how SIN city is awesome, and show off the little liberties that they have taken on this public holiday to celebrate the occasion.
And then when tomorrow comes, it's back to cussing out everyone else's stupidity, the confuddlement of policies, and the capitalistic tendencies of SIN city in lieu of taking care of its citizens.
That's all I have for now. Till the next update.
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