u/alcrazeyx

Sup boys, so let me tell you my story.

About 3 months ago, I got my Lenovo LOQ laptop. It came with an RTX 5060 and an i7-14700HX. Naturally, I was hyped to play games. I've been a gamer my whole life bro, I was playing Call of Duty 1121 in the womb.

Anyway, I started trying out some games and everything seemed great. The laptop was performing well and I was thinking, "Yo, this thing is absolutely banging."

Then I installed MSI Afterburner and GPU-Z to monitor my temperatures. To my surprise, I was seeing CPU temps around 98°C to 100°C while gaming. I immediately thought, "Yo, hold up. That can't be right."

The laptop was running in Balanced mode, so I started getting worried. I went down the YouTube rabbit hole trying to figure out what was going on. Everyone was saying, "Buy a cooling pad, bro."

The problem was that I didn't have the money for one, so I started experimenting. I tried lowering graphics settings, using power-saving options, and pretty much everything else I could think of. Nothing worked.

Eventually, I found a YouTube guide showing how to unlock the Turbo Boost setting in Windows Power Management.

Here's what I did:

Open Control Panel

Go to Power Options

Select Balanced

Click Advanced Power Settings

Find the Processor Performance Boost Mode option

Change it from Aggressive to Disabled

I also started gaming with Windows set to Best Power Efficiency.

The result?

My temperatures dropped from 98-100°C all the way down to around 77°C.

I was shocked.

At that point, I thought I had completely solved the problem.

But then another issue appeared.

Whenever my laptop was in Best Power Efficiency mode, I would randomly get Blue Screen of Death crashes. Most of the time it happened when I plugged in the charger or when the laptop was sitting idle.

After a lot of testing, I realized that the HX processor boosts very aggressively. When the laptop is in a low-power state and you plug in the charger, Windows suddenly wants the CPU to boost, but the power-saving state can create conflicts. That's when the crashes would happen.

So I was like, "Fuuuck, dude."

I switched everything back to Balanced mode, but then my temperatures were high again. I thought I was back to square one.

Turns out I wasn't.

After all the crashes, something weird had happened with my laptop's Embedded Controller (EC). Gaming laptops can occasionally experience EC glitches, especially after crashes or power-related issues.

So I performed an EC reset.

How I did it:

Shut down the laptop completely.

Unplug everything, including the charger.

Wait about a minute.

Hold the power button for around 60 seconds.

Release the button.

Plug the charger back in and start the laptop.

And boom.

My temperatures immediately dropped back to around 77°C again.

That's when I realized the issue wasn't just Turbo Boost. The EC had likely glitched at some point, and the BSODs may have contributed to it.

From that day on, I stopped leaving my laptop in Best Power Efficiency mode. After gaming, I always keep it on Balanced mode.

My current setup is simple:

Windows Power Mode: Balanced

Performance Mode: High Performance when gaming

Red performance light enabled

Ever since doing the EC reset and avoiding Best Power Efficiency mode, my temperatures have stayed low. I can game comfortably around 77°C even while getting great performance.

So if you're dealing with high temperatures on a gaming laptop, an EC reset might be worth trying before spending money on cooling pads or other accessories.

That's how I fixed my issue.

One thing though, bro: dropping from 100°C to 77°C just from an EC reset is unusual. It definitely can fix fan-control glitches, but there may have been multiple things happening at once (fan profiles, power settings, boost behavior, BIOS updates, etc.). Still, if it's been stable for months, that's what matters.