My laptop is a very flawed product.

Biggest issues being:

  1. Poor battery life
  2. Extreme CPU throttling
  3. Frequent blue-screens

I had found that during heavy CPU workload the machine would throttle down to 0.8GHz. Essentially unusable. One link I noticed was that this happened much easier if the machine was charging. The charger included with the machine boasts fast charging with 150W of power. During searches I saw one reddit comment explaining:

“I swapped out the power brick that came with the Spectre and used a USB-C power adaptor … Now, it doesn’t throttle at all.”

I decided to try and do the same. I picked the Satechi Type-C 75W which would deliver 60W to the laptop, with the remaining 15W available to it’s USB ports for phones etc. I picked up a 2M Nimaso USB-C cable to use with this.

So far my experiences are:

  1. Much less heat and fan noise when charging laptop
  2. Charging is noticeably slower
  3. Can now run tasks such as prime95 or Handbrake for long periods and the CPU will remain above 3GHz
  4. During combined prime95 and Furmark run the battery does lose charge faster than the charger can top it up. CPU settles in at 2.2-2.4GHz during this workload.

To see if it helped with the blue-screens and lockups during gaming or video editing I also did a full reinstall of Windows. Since doing this I have not had any issues in short testing. I still need to use the machine more and test things like video editing before I am satisfied this issue has been solved.