Power Limit and Fan Spike Issue on Acer Nitro 5 (RTX 3060, i5-11400H)

Graphics / Linux Linux
1

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!

2

Hey, did you find any permanent fix to this yet?

3

What solved it was:

  • Resetting the BIOS completely by disconnecting/removing the CMOS battery

  • Booting the laptop again

  • Then enabling the NVIDIA PowerD service (nvidia-powerd)

After doing this, the issue completely disappeared.
Before, the GPU would suddenly drop to around 20W after ~20 minutes of gaming, causing massive performance loss even at low temperatures.

Now the GPU stays stable at around 95W constantly, and I haven’t experienced the problem again since.

So in my case, it seems the issue was related to firmware/BIOS power management combined with NVIDIA power management on Linux.