GTX 1650 Super intermittent lag problem in one game

[Ludmilla]

Ok so I have been having a weird issue for about a year with the cheaply made HP OEM 1650S in my gaming rig (or shall I say, gaming rustbucket). In one game in particular, specifically "The Suicide of Rachel Foster", the GPU runs it smoothly for a few seconds then suddenly lags for a second and switches into perfcap reason idle (when running properly it shows it is power cause well power limit of course) and then returns to normal repeats this over and over so much it is unbearable to play. I tried installing drivers straight from Nvidia after this first happened, no fix. New thermal paste TWICE (first time I put MX-6 which rapidly pumped out and caused an overheating problem I recently fixed with GC Extreme paste) cause the stock stuff both dried out and pumped off the chip die in less than 3 years of use. Disabled the overclock on the core and memory. No dice. Fresh Windows 10 LTSC install last summer after Win11 finally gave me the last instability straw when it rendered itself almost fully useless due to breaking ExplorerPatcher... STILL DOES THE SAME THING. It did it on one or two occasions in other games but never again, it doesn't do it in Furmark, and consistently does it past certain low resolutions in the affected game. I am at a loss. Only indicator of trouble is the combination of that idle-dip that causes the lag and the fact that if the heat on the back of the GPU is anything to go by when looked at through my FLIR camera, two of the memory chips are running quite a bit hotter than the others. Also, the PCB is slightly heat warped cause the original paste was garbage even when new and I didn't change it until I couldn't game throttle-free in a warm-ish room even with the temp limit increased to 87C so the board took over the role of heatsink and mildly cooked cause of that garbage HP paste. Anyone have an idea of what could be wrong? I know I can just play this game on my much more powerful laptop but it's annoying that my desktop can't do it and I really don't wanna put money into this rust bucket unless something breaks fully before I can afford to build a proper rig.

Edit: current area of suspicion is that VRAM that's running hot, if my electrical engineering background is worth anything that indicates some kind of chip degradation problem likely due to the heatsink only being made to cool the GPU.

[K4sum1]

If the VRAM was running too hot, I'd assume it would show in more games. If it was unstable, you'd see artifacts, not lagging. You could probably get some thermal pads for VRAM, and heatsinks for back VRAM if there is any and see what happens. Should be like $10 at most from like AliExpress.

[Ludmilla]

If the VRAM was running too hot, I'd assume it would show in more games. If it was unstable, you'd see artifacts, not lagging. You could probably get some thermal pads for VRAM, and heatsinks for back VRAM if there is any and see what happens. Should be like $10 at most from like AliExpress.

Yeah I have thermal pads, when I have a day or two completely free I will have to grab a bunch of VRAM test tools and see if it survives everything. If it has problems I go to the trouble of putting on fresh pads and dealing with that messy thick performance paste again. I have seen many cases (mainly in VRM circuitry and not memory) where degraded chips appear to work but the ones in worse condition will heat up more than the others under the same usage which is likely the case anyhow with how cheaply this card is made, but that shouldn't cause one game to not function correctly. I really have no other explanation for what could be causing this behavior other than degradation-induced latency spikes or something else cursed. But then again, why one specific game? Other games with the same engine work fine too. I have had two or three instances of brief artifacting in the past. I am not gonna exclude the motherboard entirely, that thing is a whole separate can of garbage (front USB is unreliable, history of BIOS bugs, SATA ports that almost destroyed a $130 SSD...). As mentioned in another thread I will build an entirely new machine when I have the money, the CPU is anyway a bit dated for some of my more intense tasks too alongside all these hardware problems.

[K4sum1]

Hmm, ok. I would be curious what happens if you isolate the GPU in like a separate system, if you have one.

[Ludmilla]

Hmm, ok. I would be curious what happens if you isolate the GPU in like a separate system, if you have one.

Wish I had another system. No money for more computers much less space in my electronics-overfilled dorm room lol. Just a gaming laptop and this trashfire HP desktop. When I do have another system I will definitely see if it shows the same behavior.