Yesterday I decided to try using msi afterburner and overclocking my laptop for the first time. I had no background information going into it so I was just following youtube tutorials on it. And a heads up, I am not very knowledgeable about things like this in general regarding laptops. The rest I wanted to use msi afterburner is because my laptop has impressive parts in it, yet I have now had it for about 1-2 years and it has slowed down a decent amount (due to my lack of knowledge on how to manage a computer). The main game I play is Escape from Tarkov and it is a demanding game when it comes to specs. My specs should be good enough to be constantly at 120 fps except this is not the case. My game has been running at about 50-65 fps for the past year. It annoys me that I have such a nice laptop yet I can't run this game to perfection. This is because I don't know how to take the best care of my laptop but I honestly don't know where to start to find such information. So overtime my laptop has just gotten worse and worse. It is still good enough to play most games at max fps at 60-144 fps but Escape from Tarkov has been giving me fps problems for the past year I've been playing it. So when I used msi afterburner I set the core clock (MHz) to +150 and the memory clock (MHz) to +350. I did this around noon yesterday and when I opened Tarkov I was able to play on reserve, the most visually demanding map in the map, at a smooth 90-110 fps. I was super happy and I was also able to stream it on discord without any fps drops. Normally when I stream Tarkov on discord my fps drops by 10fps which sucks but at that point it was perfect. I went to do some class work and hours later that day I tried to play Tarkov again. At first my fps was nice but then around 2 minutes into the game it began to tank. And when I say tank I mean tank. It went from 90fps to 60 then to 51 and after a minute at 50ish it dropped to 30fps. My Tarkov has never gone down to fps 30 before. And it stayed there for the rest of the time I spent playing. Whenever I would load into a game, it would start off at 60+fps and then drop and stabilize at 30-40 fps. I have tried to run the game with +0/+0 MHz settings on msi afterburner and it still ends up dropping to 30-40 fps. I have no clue as to why this is happening and I am looking for any advice from anyone who is knowledgeable in this. I am still able to run other games like SW Battlefront 2, max settings at 120fps but Tarkov does not work anymore. The game is unplayable for me in this state and it's upsetting to have a nice laptop yet I can't run a game at all. The msi afterburner most definitely was the cause of this but I am unsure as why. When my Tarkov is running its memory on task manager is 97-99% at around 7000-8000 MB if that could possibly be helpful information. I do not think it went this high before so maybe msi afterburner caused a memory leak, but once again I have no clue. My overall question is seeking help on fixing what happened to my laptop after attempting to overclock it with msi afterburner. As well as seeking out information on how to restore a laptop to its highest potential. If anyone can help me with this I would appreciate it so much. And even if someone cannot fix this exact problem if anyone has any advice in general on how to manage or refix my laptop I would gladly listen to anything. My specs should allow me to play almost every game at max settings, max fps, but this is no longer the case after using my laptop for over a year. I am using the Lenovo Legion y740, 17 inch version Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz 2.21 GHz Installed RAM 16.0 GB System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 with Max-Q Design Windows 10
Overclocking cannot really damage your gpu so it would just crash. Also afterburner can be used as monitoring software so open it up and start by setting your gpu/cpu/ram clocks/temperature osd while gaming. You'll realize whats happens when your framerate starts dropping. Btw how can tarkov be using 99% of the system memory at 8gb when you have 16gb installed?
Thanks for reaching out to help, if I were to open up afterburner and watch it while the framerate drops, what exactly would I be looking for? Should I try to see which graph drops/changes the most in order to identify my problem? Also I never realized that either. I have no idea why tarkov is using 99% at 8gb, is there a way to fix that or check why that is happening? I have 16gb installed yet I never realized 8gb seemed to be the maxed used for my applications. If I were to switch it to use all 16gb my Tarkov would definitely run better. Thanks for bringing that to my attention, and once again would you happen to know how to fix/check that issue?
Upon looking into it, my computer is using all 16gb of ram. I also asked my friend who has 24gb of ram and they showed me their task manager and if you were to add up the system memory, the maximum would be 8000MB just like mine. Is that normal or should mine add up to a maximum of 16gb and should his be 24gb or does the system memory cap out at 8000MB?
Tarkov needs more than 8gb ram maxing it out would explain your fps drops as memory usage gets higher. Make sure you actually have 16gb by bios or some software like cpuz. As for afterburner monitoring you'd be looking clock frequency and temperatures and usage oddities. When framerate drops it will show in some way. Ram maxing out, temps getting high cpu/gpu throttling.
So I decided to do two different tests of my fps in game. The first game, the problem occurred as expected and my fps went from 70fps to 30-40fps for the rest of the game. The second match I did it was at 70fps for longer than normal and then it did occasionally did down to 40fps but it would go back up to 50-60. This was new because before whenever it went down to 30-40 it would never go back up, it would hit 20 at times even. But now in the second test I was able to run around in a game for 15 minutes with the fps ranging from 40-62fps, typically staying around 51-56fps. The pictures I attached are my afterburner graphs for the first game, my fps went down when the GPU usage percent tanked. I don't know what the significance behind this is though. I also downloaded cpuz and it says I have 16gb of ram. I asked two more friends now and they all said their memory also adds up to 8000MB just like mine and they both have 16gb of ram too. So my computer at least recognizes the ram I have in it. They did tell me though that their Tarkov never reaches the level of memory usage my Tarkov does though. They sit around 40-60% memory usage in raid but when I am in my Tarkov hits 99% (when the fps crashes to 30-40) or normally 80% (when the fps does not crash to 30-40). The 80% is still a lot higher than all my friend's amounts though so it could still be a ram problem. It is good news that my Tarkov is able to not be stuck at 30-40 fps now but it still does pretty consistently drop to 40fps, stay there for a bit then go back up to 50ish fps. It hits 60fps+ but it never stays there for longer than 5 seconds. My computer definitely has the specs needed to run this game at 120fps which makes me confused on what the issue is. So as of right now, the problem of staying at 30-40 fps is gone (hopefully it does not return, it could though) but I still am having rough fps in the game. You made note of how Tarkov needs more than 8gb of ram, how would I be able to change such a thing? And what could it mean when the GPU % tanked the moment my fps tanked too? And what should someone do to try to fix their Tarkov fps with a laptop? Also is it bad to overclock a laptop or is that just a thing some people say? Thank you so much for taking the time to help me out, it means a lot and is awesome to have someone trying to assist my problem. If it's possible could I add you on discord or something and pm you rather than this? It would just be easier and more fluid, if that's not possible though I completely understand and I can continue using this site.
