Blade 2014 runs perfectly on battery, overheats horribly when plugged in

So here's the story. I've pretty much accepted the fact that my Blade (plugged in and sat on Zalman NC3000) if sufficiently stressed (World of Tanks patch 9.0; EverQuest Next: Landmark beta) was running CPU temps around 91-93C (with GPU around 75-80C).

But yesterday at work I tried to overheat it on purpose to show my colleagues how the fans work under full load. I didn't have the power brick with me, so I used it on battery and set to the high performance profile. To my huge surprise it refused to go beyond 85C, for an hour of running the two titles mentioned above (well, WoT was updated to 9.1 by that time), without the cooling pad. And yet there was no noticeable performance difference compared to running when plugged in (I was still getting 30-40 fps in Landmark). I changed the graphics settings to "High" in Landmark (this launches my temps into around 95C instantly when plugged in, so I don't use it normally) and still got the same 85C @ ~20FPS while on battery. The GPU at the same time was a bit hotter, up to 85C, while plugged in it's normally in high 70's.

This is the complete opposite of my previous experience with Clevo W230ST where the rapidly discharging (and heating) battery would actually cause +5-10C while on battery compared to plugged in.

TLDR:
- Plugged in: CPU 89-95C, GPU 75-80C
- On battery: CPU up to 85C, up to 85C
- No noticeable difference in frame rates in the two games I currently play.

So now obviously I want to replicate the on-battery behavior for when I'm plugged in (because the performance is roughly the same, and the CPU temp is 5-10C lower; GPU is actually higher but still manageable).

Looking into power profile settings in Windows didn't help much -- the settings between plugged in and battery are identical as far as I can tell.

So my question is: which utilities should I use and what parameters should I look at in order to tweak my power/performance while plugged in to match what's happening on battery?

 

Make a power plan, set the Cpu max speed to 99%, this will disable turbo and worked brilliantly for my blade, should get cpu down to the 80's. Otherwise Intel xtu is good if you need a tad more Cpu speed but less heat, just drop the multipliers down from 32 to 30 and undervolt dynamic about -50 to -100 depending on what's stable. Guess the extra heat comes from the massive power draw of the 100w gpu which would cause the charging circuit and battery in the laptop to generate quite. Bit of heat, do you notice the palmrest is hotter when plugged in?, cause that's where the battery is.

 

The few times I used it without an external keyboard it actually seemed cooler when plugged in. When on battery, the laptop is almost evenly warm (except the no-touch zone near the screen, ofc), but while plugged in the lower 1/3 is noticeably cooler.

 

This is the type of behavior that I would expect given that the default power settings in windows are for active cooling on a/c and passive cooling on battery. This doesn't necessarily mean there's any difference actually implemented by Razer, but if there is, it means that the fan curve is less aggressive on battery (to save power), meaning the metal case of the laptop will have to act as a heat sink instead of the fans cooling the internal components (up to a certain point, obviously).

 

Interesting topic for me because battery performance (not battery life) has always been important to me and one of the reasons I got a 2013&14 blade.
If you pull up CPU and/or GPU-z, you see it "slightly" down clocks both. Ever so slightly, but still enough to game at decent settings. Most other gaming laptops drastically down clock on battery, making gaming impossible on a plane, long trip in the car, sitting outside on a nice day etc. Some SLI systems taking it so far they disable one GPU!
This is normal behavior for the blade, and be thankful it's still very playable on battery.

 

Point is, I want to replicate that same behavior for when it's plugged in. Because as it is, on battery it's as fast as on wall power (no noticeable performance reduction), but 10C cooler at the same time.

I'm looking for the most likely parameters that need to be tweaked to match the "on battery" mode performance/heat-wise. I know setting max CPU to 99% would probably do the trick, but I want to try and match the on-battery settings as close as possible.

 

Im having the same issue.. my laptop gets pretty hot while charging.

 

I had just the opposite experience. I was gaming on the Nvidia chip and everything was fine. I stepped away from my laptop for a few minutes and when I came back it was noticeably hotter. I was curious why this was so warm when I wasn't doing anything to stress the computer.

I tabbed out of the game to see that I was running on battery. After plugged in, everything cooled back down to my expected level.

 

On battery the CPU will downclock significantly, probably 1.2GHz max. GPU will downclock core and vRAM an appreciable amount as well. Depending on the games you play, it may not make a noticeable difference in performance. Grab ahold of Intel XTU and nVidiaInspector and tweak to your heart's content... It's nothing unique to Razer, just common among Intel/nVidia setups.

 

don't be too worried about thermal loads less than or around 100degrees c. over the life of your notebook 100degrees celsius is perfectly fine for cpu/gpu.

 

I actually settled for the 99% setting in the power profile. The 2.2GHz cap is barely noticeable, and both CPU and GPU are now stable at ~85C, and the fan is barely ever heard. I guess I'm too lazy to do finer tuning when a simple tweak works good enough. Otherwise I would've kept the W230ST...