Symptoms: I would be gaming with the laptop and all of a sudden I would lose a third or more of my frames as if I was thermally throttled. This happened when gaming while plugged into the supplied power brick only, never when docked at home to my Razer Core X Chroma.
I let it sit without gaming to let it "cool down" and 20 minutes or even an hour later I would wake the computer up from sleep and my frames were still gone. I would try everything you can think of to get the frames back and could never get them to recover. I would just shut it down, unplug it and bring the laptop home with me, giving up on it.
The next morning I would wake up and the thing was perfect again as if nothing happened. Only long gaming sessions would trigger this horrible cycle again and I would give up at the end of the day as usual, knowing that the next morning things would be fixed.
So what happened?
Without explaining all the horrible troubleshooting steps I took and the back and forth of the same testing over and over, I will just tell you how it all works.
While you're gaming with the provided power brick, the laptop slowly loses 1% of battery at a time, little by little. The charging brick cannot supply enough power to stay ahead of the max draw of the MX150. This does not happen on my Razer Core because it outputs way more power than the charging brick.
As the laptop drains, it hits a hidden battery percentage threshold, 30% to be precise, and then the comp throttles the CPU/GPU and you lose a ton of performance. Now here's the annoying part, and the thing that cost me a month.
If you hit 30% and see the throttling, you can stop gaming and let the laptop charge above 30% right there and the performance doesn't come back. You can let it sit there and charge to 100% and be cold as ice sitting there idling, and the throttling is still there. The throttling will even remain through reboots. The ONLY way to get it to go away is to have the battery above 30%, then unplug an re-plug in the power cord. The screen flashes and the throttling is gone until the next time you drop below 30%.
I know there has to be at least a handful of people out there who have experienced this, but I can find nothing online. I only hope to reach that small group of people who are pulling their hair out trying to figure this out. It's pretty frustrating to hit the hidden throttle mid-game and lose a match because you think your PC needs to be RMA'd. I really wish Razer would have been a little more clear on this topic, it would have saved me a month of my life.
Happy gaming. I've already got my eye on the Stealth with the 1650
