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Increasing Laptop GPU Power Limit While On USB PD - TUF Dash 15 FX517ZR, RTX 3070

pomplemus
Level 7

Hello!


I recently purchased a new laptop after my previous one got stolen the other week, the Asus TUF Dash 15 (2022) FX517ZR with 12650H and RTX 3070.

The performance is ample for me and I'm quite happy with the frame rates in games while plugged in to AC power.

However, I have a somewhat odd use case where most of the gaming I will be doing on this machine will be in my car while camping out in the forest. I spend a lot of time in the outdoors, and after the sun goes down after a long day of hiking in the Sierras is when I usually have time to game.

I power my laptop off of a big 100 w USB PD power bank with an auxiliary battery for almost 1 Kwh of total capacity, enough to keep gaming for many hours. I suppose I could also get an inverter and power it off of AC, but I love the convenience and efficiency of just needing to take a 100 W USB C cable with me instead of the AC brick. In fact I almost never use the AC brick, even when at home, USB C charging is just too convenient.

I know 100 W is only half of the 200 W AC power brick, so I don't expect the system to perform quite as high on PD as AC, and even slowly discharging is fine with me, as long I can get reasonable gaming performance for a few hours at a time. I would prefer slightly higher performance while discharging over a couple hours, as opposed to lower performance but keeping the battery at 100%.

Anyway, basically right now the performance is a bit lower on PD charging than I would like, coming at about half of what it is on AC. I would like to get it closer to around 2/3 - 3-4 of the AC performance, so I can keep frame dips above 60 fps.

The RTX 3070 in this model has a 80 W TPG with 25 W dynamic boost, and it absolutely achieves this 90-105 W sustained on AC. However, on both battery power and PD it's locked to only 55 W with no apparent dynamic boost, halving the performance.

Ideally, I would like to get closer to around 65-85 W under load on PD for that 2/3 - 3-4 of AC performance I am looking for. It will probably slowly discharge, and that's fine with me.


I know the hardware can handle it, as interestingly enough it DOES go up to around 80-95 W  with a corresponding performance boost while on PD right when I change the performance profile in Armory crate (from Silent to Performance, or the other way) for about 15 - 30 seconds or so. If I keep toggling back and forth between them, I can keep the GPU power draw at that higher level indefinitely. I believe that dropping back to the 55 W power limit corresponds to the time it takes for the system to determine battery charge state is decreasing, and this poll is reset every time the performance profile is switched. 

 

I've also managed to sometimes get the GPU power limit on PD to "stick" to this higher level for a time by activating the MUX switch to the discrete GPU only while renaming some GPU switch EXE files in the Armory crate install folder. So it definitely CAN do it, I'm just looking for a better/more reliable way to do it that does't require toggling the performance profile button every 20 seconds.

As far as I can tell, armory crate identifies PD charging as the same lower system "power state" as on battery, as opposed to AC power. It would be nice is Asus made a middle profile between the two for PD charging, or allowed the user to prefer higher performance on PD at the expense of charging the battery.

A couple things I have tried with no success:

  • BIOS update (I hoped it might have a higher GPU power limit on PD)
  • ​​​​​​​Disabling whisper mode/battery boost in GeForce experience
  • Uninstalling Geforce experience
  • Updating drivers
  • Rolling back to a driver version from February that unlocked power limit adjustment in Afterburner. I can reduce it further, but 55 W is a hard upper limit on PD.
  • Changing Nvidia control panel to "prefer maximum performance". This keeps the clocks higher at idle, but they still drop in accordance with the 55 W limit under load.
  • Disabling "NVIDIA Platform Controllers and Framework" in device manager. Just turns off dynamic power limit boost without changing the base values.
  • Registry edit to set perflevel0. Same result as above.

Based on my experimentation, there are couple possible ways I see to get the result I want, not sure how possible these are:

  • Flash the Vbios to a higher TPG 3070. However, I have no idea if this would increase the power limit when not on AC, and I'm reluctant to try as it could mess with my display outputs. Everybody posts success stores of power limit increases with a Vbios flash, but those are all the maximums while plugged in, I can't find any information on how those affect the power limit when not on AC power. It would be great someone else with a mobile 3070 machine could share how the power limit changes when on PD/battery!
  • "Trick" the system into thinking is on AC power when it is only on PD power.
  • Keep the reported battery percentage at a fixed value.
  • And the kludgiest of all- set up a script to open and close a program in the background every 10 seconds that is tied to a Scenario Profile in armory crate that triggers a power profile change. Basically automating spamming the shortkut key to switch between Silent/Performance.
  • Something else much better/obvious that I haven't thought of?

 

I've done my best to clearly explain myself here to avoid an XY problem, let me know if anything is unclear.

Any help/suggestions are appreciated, thanks!

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1 REPLY 1

Anbby_ROG
Customer Service Agent

Hi @pomplemus ,

To ensure stability and efficiency, the system automatically identifies and provides the optimal performance based on the charging mode. 

We appreciate your feedback and understanding of your usage needs. We will provide this feedback to the relevant team for reference. Thank you.

Due to the regional holidays, my responses may be slightly delayed.
Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding 🙂