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Hi everyone,
I’m facing a strange issue with my Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-57) laptop, which has an i5-11400H and an RTX 3060 Laptop GPU.
No matter which Linux distribution I use — Debian, Arch Linux, Fedora, etc. — the exact same problem occurs.
When I start a game, everything works fine: according to nvidia-smi, the GPU power usage stays around 10W/80W, performance is stable, and temperatures are perfectly normal.
However, after about 20 minutes of gameplay, the fans suddenly ramp up to full speed, and GPU power drops sharply to 8W/20W.
At that point, performance tanks as if the GPU gets power-limited or throttled, even though the temperature is only around 50°C.
I’ve tried multiple distributions and several driver versions (both proprietary and open-source), but the behavior remains identical.
Has anyone experienced something similar or knows what could be causing this sudden 20W power cap?
Could it be related to power management, ACPI, firmware, or something specific to Acer laptops?
Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions!
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