3 years Old LOQ ,went 70%+ fps changing to PTM7950!
My specs:
Lenovo LOQ | i5-12450H | RTX 4060 Laptop | 16GB DDR5 | Gen4 SSD | 32°C room (no AC, India)
The problem:
Was getting 90-100 FPS in Apex Legends. Felt wrong for a 4060. Pulled HWiNFO logs and found the CPU was hitting 100°C and thermally throttling 100% of every single gaming session. GPU was sitting at 30% load, starved by the throttled CPU.
What I tried in order:
- NVIDIA settings, dGPU mode, Lenovo Vantage Performance mode
- Baseline stuff. Didn’t fix it. CPU was the bottleneck not GPU settings.
Lenovo’s EC overrides MSR limits via MMIO. Capping PL2 removed CPU burst headroom that Apex needs, while thermal throttle continued anyway. Don’t do this on the LOQ.
Note: undervolting is locked on i5-12450H (12th gen Alder Lake). Don’t waste time trying.
- PTM7950 phase change thermal pad
Result: +26 FPS on top of repaste, +60 FPS total (85 → 145 avg FPS)
• CPU avg temp dropped from 95.7°C to 83°C
• Thermal throttling went from 100% → 10.4%
• GPU load jumped from 30% → 52%
• CPU can now sustain 49.5W avg vs 30W before
• Max FPS hit 298 in a session
Why PTM7950 worked so much better than regular paste:
It’s a phase change material — melts above ~45°C and flows into every microscopic gap, then resolidifies when cool. Reseats itself every gaming session. No pump-out, never dries. Perfect for a CPU that sees 95°C heat cycles constantly
NOTE: 3rd row (hm501v2 is actually arctic mx6 chnage in the image)