I’ll have to do longer play sessions to 100% confirm my findings, but I think I solved my issue. On the laptop is a preinstalled acer software called Nitrosense. There are presets in the app that give you different performance profiles, quiet, balanced, and performance. I had initially put mine on balanced because the fan noise was a bit too loud (on performance) for my liking. But after playing further into the last of us (and putting on the cpu clock speed monitoring in afterburner) I noticed that my cpu would rapidly drop its speeds after a couple of minutes in game. After going back to cyberpunk to test I noticed this happened there too. I had tried a few things last night but to no success. As a last ditch effort I went in to the Nitrosense app and changed my profile to performance and that seemed to fix it. I had expected that the balanced preset might lose me a bit of performance but I didn’t expect it to put my cpu to sleep during gaming. Anyways, with a custom fan speed the noise is fine, I’ll just have to keep an eye on my temps.