My friend recently disassembled his PC to clean out a lot of dust, which was really affecting performance. Before the cleanup, everything was running smoothly, but now he's experiencing significantly lower frame rates in games—down to 30fps even in simple titles. He has a 10th gen i7 and a 3070 card, so this drop is puzzling. Regular tasks are manageable, but gaming is definitely suffering. We made sure to reseat all components and check connections, but he keeps getting notifications that the CPU is overheating. We've noticed his clock speed drops to about 1.3 GHz while gaming. After reapplying thermal paste and confirming that all fans are operational, we're at a loss for what to do next. I'm considering installing HWMonitor to check temperatures and voltages, but I'm unsure of the proper voltage ranges and where to go from there. Any suggestions on what might be wrong or how to proceed?
2 Answers
Sometimes, after cleaning, the fans might be misconfigured or not performing at full capacity, which can lead to overheating. Make sure they're all spinning and set to the right profiles in the BIOS. That could also cause the CPU to throttle and drop performance in games. Also, consider monitoring temps to see if they're spiking unexpectedly during gameplay; that'd help pinpoint if it's a cooling issue.
It sounds like you might have a bad thermal paste application or the heatsink isn't making proper contact with the CPU. When the heatsink is removed, the thermal paste should be visibly spread out. If it's not, that could lead to overheating and throttling, which would explain the low clock speeds and frame rates. I'd recommend checking that first just to be sure. If the paste looks good, it might be worth looking into whether the heatsink is secured correctly on the CPU.
I think he should definitely check the heatsink contact. If it's loose, that could explain everything!
Good call! I'll make sure he checks the fan settings in BIOS too.