Bizarre Lenovo Legion T5 Tower Performance / Hardware Issues

devnull

System https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/Legion_T5_26ARA8?M=90UY0042UK

Unfortunately over a little while I am starting to see some strange issues with the machine which seem to suggest some faults. They are intermittent which is making it hard to get them resolved.

I have installed logging software on the GPU, CPU and am recording all temps on all places on the system that have sensors that report it. I am not seeing any heat related issues or any kind of throttling.

Ethernet Card Issue
The first issue that happens is that the Ethernet card doesn't appear in Windows around 90% of the time. However this does not appear to be a pure hardware issue, because every time a big windows update is installed or if I repair/update the Realtek Driver, the Ethernet comes back on the next reboot and works normally. If the computer is left alone for a while or rebooted again. it will again stop working.

I've since disabled all Power saving options on the Ethernet Card in Windows and in Device Manager and this now has stopped the card from dropping off when the machine is on or sleeping. However the issue with the Ethernet Card not showing following a reboot always occurs. Again reinstalling the drivers and rebooting will bring it back, until the following reboot.

Performance Issues / Freezing
Struggling to pin down what is causing this, but basically over the last weeks I'm starting to get games hard freeze on me and games giving errors saying that the GPU ran out of memory space on games that the machine used to handle perfectly well. This is almost always followed by a full system freeze and sometimes output to both screens being cut. Sometimes it will come back after 5 seconds, sometimes it needs a restart.

Should the issue with a game causing the system to freeze occur and it need to be restarted, on the next reboot the Bluetooth, Ethernet and all the back USB ports will not work and are not even showing in device manager.. Running a Lenovo hardware check via Lenovo Vantage will flag up a motherboard failure and ask me to RMA the machine. The machine will generally be very poorly performing and have problems opening up tabs in Chrome and I wouldn't be even able to get Task Manager open.

A full power off makes all of the dead devices start working again (apart from Ethernet, see above), and running the Lenovo Hardware check again tells m there is no longer anything wrong with my motherboard.

Steps Performed:
I have been looking at monitoring software on the GPU, both the Nvidia one and some third party software, and I am not seeing the high GPU RAM usage or high GPU temp usage on games that would suggest that these errors are genuine. In addition I'm getting these errors on some games even when running them at 720p and very low settings, in some cases for games I was previously able to run at 1440p with higher settings. The errors that the game run out of VRAM will still continue, even in games where 75% of it is free when getting that message.

My next thought was CPU, but the CPU usage of some of these games wasn't that high either, but just for kicks I put all the fans up to ridiculous levels to the point where the CPU was idling at less than 30c and under huge load it wasn't going above 72c. I tried disabling PBO and capping the temp to something smaller and that does not make any difference. I tried restoring defaults in the BIOS and every setting under the sun and that makes no difference either.

I have then looked at the SSD, I have moved the games with the issues to the other SSD that I have and also enlarged the swap file on the relevant drives to see if that is a problem, that makes no difference.

I've swapped out the 16GB RAM with 32GB of known good RAM and this has also not made any difference at all.

I have reinstalled Windows 11 completely from scratch, updated to the latest BIOS version, this has not made any difference.

Anyone have any ideas?

Flinty997

Have you had any power cuts. Sometimes this can spike a motherboard and cause issues with the motherboard.

I would remove or disable everything in the machine to the minimum it will boot with. Then add each think back one by one.

devnull

No power cuts i am aware of.

Tried already doing that as process of elimination but hasn't shown anything up.

ThThe only things i haven't swapped out are the Motherboard and power supply at this point along with the GPU. I tried a Ryzen 7600 in there too without much difference.

z80CPU

It has an Nvidia 4060

Have you tried the studio driver instead of the game driver or visa versa? You do know that studio driver and game driver for this graphic card are two separate drivers?

Try each and see how you get in

devnull

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123020672#Comment_123020672

Which has worked flawlessly for the last 11 months until recently. I know people don't like the 4060 here, but it's not the fact the card is underpowered that is causing this, because the it's happening on games using settings even an old 1060 can play without crashing.

I have tried various combinations of drivers without luck.

There's one strange thing I found on the Lenovo website though.

There are many different variants of this generation of the Lenovo T5 Tower I am using of many different configurations and part combinations, however with my particular model only, there is a version with a completely identical specification. The only difference is the model number and the release date is a few months later than I bought mine.

It makes you wonder if they found something and reissued a new hardware version.

I've logged a ticket with Lenovo support and we'll see what happens.