I have a Razer Blade 17 purchased in May of 2022 (so about a week out of warranty, and I start having issues of course). RTX 3070 Ti + Core i7-12800H.

I noticed recently that I am getting terrible FPS after a minute or two of gaming. The change *seemed* to coincide with the latest Synapse update (20230511) though I can’t say for sure. Here is a timeline for background:

• Preface: I play Grounded with my kids, my son uses the Blade and has his own non-admin Windows account.
• One day last week I noticed his FPS was really bad. Normally he would get 80-100, he was instead getting 30-50 with lots of hitching.
• (His brother plays on a Legion 5, RTX 3060 + Core i7-12700H and gets a steady 70-90 FPS)
• I tried to check Synapse but the Razer Central widget said it was not running.
• I logged into my own Windows account and Synapse was running normally. So problem #1, Synapse won’t load when logged into my Son’s account (I tried re-installing, running as admin, etc. none of it worked)
• I *also* noticed that Synapse was no longer automatically switching profiles when running games. The laptop was “stuck” in my default profile, which has Performance settings set to Balanced + Auto fan speed. So problem #2, automatic profile switching no longer works.
• I manually set the Profile to my gaming Profile, which is set to High GPU and High CPU.
• I ran Grounded again and things looked ok, at least better but FPS was still lower than the weaker-spec’d Legion laptop.
• During another gaming session I saw an FPS drop again so I’ve been trying to dig deeper…

What I can see from Windows diagnostics is that after a few minutes of gaming:

• The CPU Maximum Frequency reported in Resource Monitor is ~50%
• The GPU Usage reported in Task Manager is ~30-50%

I tried running some benchmarks (Heaven, Superposition) but they don’t seem to stress the system enough to reproduce the issue. I tested with another game (Space Engineers) and the behavior is the same. At startup FPS seems normal/fast. After a minute or two FPS drops drastically, CPU @50% max freq, GPU @30-50% usage.

I ran HWINFO for a few tests and the average temps don’t seem out of line. CPU ~80° and GPU 66° while playing Grounded for 25 mins, for example. During this test there were only about 10 instances of thermal throttling according to the logs. Here is a HWINFO log of this run.

Conventional wisdom appears to say this is a heat-related problem but I’m not seeing that in the temps, though admittedly the poor performance could be happening in order to keep the temps down? I have read in other threads to check if the laptop is dirty. I installed a second NVME drive a few weeks ago and didn’t notice any excessive dust. I’ve also elevated the laptop for better air flow (and to separate the hot exhaust from the intake) but still have the issue.

Drivers are all up to date as far as I know. I regularly run Windows update. I also tried the Intel Driver update utility. Nvidia driver is 531.79.

I want to reiterate a couple of points:

•  This Blade sits side-by-side in the same room, same desk, same airflow with a lower-spec laptop that is performing 2x better (and cost half the price).
• This problem started recently. Seems to be related to the Synapse update but not 100% sure.

I’m super disappointed in my $3500 Blade right now, especially since I’ve missed the warranty window by a week It’s getting smoked by a $1500 laptop :(

I hope someone can help, thanks for reading.