A Laptop GPU thermal lesson learned the hard way: Never rely on thermal throttling
Alternative title: The importance of undervolting for lasting a laptop GPU There is a misconception out there about GPU thermal throttling. The fact that "thermal throttling" even exists gives off the impression that the hardware itself has been adequately tuned to protect itself from thermal damage. Nothing can be further from the truth. And this was how I found out the hard way. I bought a Clevo P750TM1-G under Sager brand in 2017. It came with the i7-8700K and the mobile GTX 1070. A year after purchase, when the factory thermal paste has all dried out, I installed The Witcher 3 and decided to see how far I can push this card. TW3 as you may already knew is a GPU-bound game. This was when the first signs of trouble began to appear. At this point, I trusted the GPU to automatically clock down when it hits a safe thermal limit and sustain at that clocked down frequency. It didn't go like that. I turned on supersample resolution for The Witcher 3 and saw that ...