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#1 2022-03-13 07:43:21

asmoore82
Member
Registered: 2022-02-19
Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Lenovo Legion Y520 running slow and low FPS

I bought a used Lenovo Legion Y520 specifically because it had AMD Radeon hybrid graphics and I had already seen this work brilliantly on Arch Linux on an Acer Nitro.

It arrived, I shrunk the Win11 that was on it to the max - only left it a 30 GB partition - I'm only keeping it in case it's necessary for a firmware or bios update.

I got Arch installed and installed Superposition benchmark, Steam, TF2, Left 4 Dead 2, Project Zomboid. I ran TF2 immediately but didn't join a public game, I just set all the settings to high and 1080p and loaded a local KOTH map and 2 full teams of bots to run around and check the FPS. It was a solid 59-60 FPS - locked to the refresh rate because of the hybrid graphics setup. This was a little over a week ago and have been playing L4D2 and Zomboid on it since. My friends/family have been having 3 and 4 player split-screen sessions of Zomboid and this thing was handling it great. FPS takes a hit on split-screen especially if zoomed out but it still felt great to play, nice and smooth and responsive; staying mostly in the range of 40~60 FPS maybe with the occasional 30.

So last Friday night we got done with a 4 player session of Zomboid - that again felt great and responsive for all 4 players. Afterwards I moved the laptop from the living room TV to a desk to play a little TF2. And that's when performance tanked. As soon as I joined a public server, I was getting only 30 FPS with many dips even lower. So I went back to the old local KOTH test again with bots. And much to my surprise this was now running terribly at 20, 15, or even 10 FPS!

I tried everything to make it run smoothly again just like it did a little over a week before. I tried lowering graphics settings, lowering resolution to 720p, nothing helped. I had run updates a few times over the week but I was also using btrfs snapshots, so I booted back into one of the snapshots and tried again. The problem persisted. I started combing through dmesg and journalctl. I started searching for hybrid graphics known issues and tweaks. The problem persisted. CPU frequency scaling for laptop power saving had given me performance trouble in the past on Ubuntu so I looked into that even though I hadn't installed anything like that on this Arch system. The problem persisted. Finally I gave up and went to bed. The next day we were ready for more Zomboid. I told the story of TF2 woes and that I never got to actually play it, but at least we know Zomboid was fine.

And then Zomboid started having major issues too. Not only was the framerate low, but the smooth feel and responsiveness of the game was completely wrecked. It made absolutely no sense. It was like a completely different and 10 year older laptop in less that 24 hours.

So now we knew there was a general problem beyond just TF2. This made the problem even more vexing and baffling. As I struggled to understand what could've changed when nothing much had changed and I bounced around to other btrfs snapshots, I started to notice a few things. First of all, everything was painfully slow - not just gaming, but booting, rebooting, an extra 2 or 3 second pause on the GRUB screen, an extra delay between the login screen and the panel loading. Another thing I noticed is that the fans on this laptop had gotten noticeably quieter. But I did check that the exhaust was not overly hot. But actually, it was noticeably cooler than usual. It was like all of my testing wasn't taxing the system at all, but at the same time the tests were under-performing. It was like the performance was completely drained at low-level. I started to wonder if my btrfs snapshots were part of the problem, or if the on-the-fly compression was the problem. This is my first full-time btrfs system. So I started planning a grand clean rebuild - with no snapshots, possibly with no compression, possibly not even with btrfs.

I had upgraded the RAM in this system a few days ago. But I ran memtest86 on the new RAM - I always do. And Zomboid had run perfectly well after that. I re-ran memtest86 and found no problems - other than the fact that even loading and running memtest86 was slower. This was something completely outside of any btrfs issue, completely outside of even Linux. I have seen odd problems, like in WiFi chipsets probably with buggy firmware, that were solved by simply dual-booting between windoze and linux. So even tried spinning up the shrunken Win11 system. It too was painfully slow with no explanation and no error messages.

So then it became time to open the case on this thing again - and maybe remove the extra RAM just to see what happens - I'm not really even sure what the plan was at this point. And there it was. There was a tiny piece of broken plastic about 3mm wide. Do you remember when the problem started? When I moved the laptop from the TV to the desk. A tiny piece of loose plastic about 3mm wide had move around inside and gotten wedged in one of the fans. So the system was doing some major hardware/firmware level thermal throttling to prevent overheating - causing all OS's and even GRUB and memtest to run extra slow with no error messages. I removed the tiny plastic piece, carefully looked around for any other debris, and sewed the patient back up. Arch booted right up back to full speed with 60FPS in TF2 at 1080p high settings.

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#2 2022-03-14 05:22:57

asmoore82
Member
Registered: 2022-02-19
Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Lenovo Legion Y520 running slow and low FPS

Here's a pic of the big troublemaker, next to a laptop size SATA drive, a desktop size stick of RAM, and a U.S. penny for comparison:

tiny broken plastic
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ey0ZSb … sp=sharing

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