I have a Intel Core i7 CPU and a hybrid Intel/Nvidia GPU. I play on my external monitor, with the screen of my laptop as second screen (mainly to keep an eye on what my hardware does with Conky).
I’ve been trying to play The Finals on Steam for months now, but even with almost every video settings low the game crashes (freezes, so I have to go to Steam and stop it from there) several times an hour. I noticed that my CPU temperature is always 97°C while I’m playing, but I’m guessing it’s the max my sensors/Conky will display, and I suspect it is even higher.
My GPU on the other hand is never used to more than 75% of its capacity (still according to Conky) and is much cooler than my CPU (usually around 65°C).
Things I tried:
turning off my VPN (which I still do whenever I remember to do so, even though it’s not helping — because I realized it was silly to let it on while gaming);
tweaking power management settings (and indeed the more I go towards power saving the more it crashes — but even in “performance” mode I still have crashes);
as said above, lowering the graphics of the game: it helps, but it’s not enough;
adding gamemoderun %command% to the launch options of the game: no luck either;
playing with/without Proton Experimental (that’s recent, up until last week Proton was required);
rebooting and playing while making sure as few processes as possible were running in the background;
updating Steam, the game and my system over and over as updates come up;
reducing the FPS settings of the screen on which I’m playing, both in the game settings and in my system settings.
As you can see I did my best to hunt the issue… But I found nothing. All help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
Post your system plz: inxi --admin --verbosity=7 --filter --no-host --width
Blind guess, clean your cooler? Additional replace heat paste?
Laptops are terrible for gaming… cooling will always be a big issue in a small papercase, there is terrible airflow… its just physics.
I hope you using your Laptop on a clean and flat table. Otherwise your heat issues accelerate.
You reducing your Hz from your Monitor and switching to Vsync to Limit your fps? If im translate this info right… this isnt a good move, better only use a FPS Limiter.
Not add… but clean it and refresh your heat paste… and possible with a really good and expensive one… like Thermal/Cryonaut Grissly or how that paste ever called…
Also collect information what other Laptop Model buyers archive for Temps and try to copy the situations.
Reducing your Hz is terrible… only if you have above 144Hz, reducing to 120Hz is still good refresh rate, in this case v-sync is fine… but a real fps limiter is always better.
To be honest, i have no idea what the best way to limit your fps.
I heared in Protondb alot people using Mangohud and some people in this Forum told me to use strangle-git.
Install strangle-git from the AUR and you can launch your game by limiting the max framerate easily like that strangle 60 %command% for a Steam game (in its properties → launch options).
But i don’t like the idea to use more and more AUR Packages… i still hope to get a better option.
? How do I test this? What command do I run in my terminal? Or is this supposed to be in my game’s launch options — in which case, what exactly should I write?
This is a Steam command, right click on a game in your library and properties, under start option you can use this command.
But it probably required MangoHUD, hey and im just see that MangoHUD is finally into the official repo… so you no longer need AUR for it.
Additional advise, you can also Under Volt your CPU or Disable the little cores (called E-Cores/Efficient Cores) from your Alder Lake CPU… The Power Cores are most of the time your goal for gaming… this little cores are only good for maybe hardcore power user stuff, like encoding videos and image processing.
When you deactivated this small cores in your Bios, you can also reduce the Vcore additional… but you better get more information when you really want to do Undervolting.
“…to better suit the size of laptop chassis, MSI has chosen to limit the RTX 4060 within the Cyborg 15 to a paltry 45W. That’s significantly less than the Gigabyte G5 KF, which runs its RTX 4060 chip at 75W.” MSI Cyborg 15 (RTX 4060) gaming laptop review | PC Gamer .
It does seem to hold better, and I could even crank up the graphics — first deconnection after around 50 minutes of playing, which is pretty good (compared to before!).
However, the CPU temperature (displayed by Conky) seems to be the same (97°C or more), so I can’t say for sure wether the changes mentionned above are due to these changes in my launch options… And, the crashes greately varied in numbers from day to day… So thank you for your answers, I’m confident that the improved things a lot, but I’ll wait a few days to make sure the issue doesn’t come back. If it doesn’t, I’ll mark this thread as solved!
It’s been a few days now and the game worked quite consistently, crashing about once an hour (I played with a chronometer on so I could be sure how long it was between the crashes). I can play with maximum graphics. It’s amazing, thank you so much @MrLavender and @weingeist for your help!
I’ll mark this thread as solved, as I think crashing once an hour is a pretty big improvement already, and the remaining crashes might be related to something else. Below the launch options that I use now:
Well the solution is spread over several comments, so I did the best I could: gathered them in a short, readable answer and mark that as solution. However if the helpers think, like you, that this is not the way, then I’ll happily change that and mark one of the most useful posts as solution. I never really know what to do when one of my threads reaches a solution through discussion and collective effort. sorry…
