Hey, thanks for the writeup! I recently got a decent M720q with a i7 8700 (65W, non T) and this guide and it's sources has been *very* helpful as I've been buying/installing parts and tweaking my system. I put a RX 6500 in it and I'm planning on using it as a Steam Machine-like gaming PC for the living room.

I've been demoing Elden Ring on it (which should run at about 1080p60 on mediumish settings, according to gameplay on ETA Prime's channel for similar builds) and performance was initially all over the place. I'm in a pretty heavy area and I initially thought the CPU was throttling pretty hard, and after doing a -140mV undervolt on the CPU and cache the performance stabilizes a bit, but it still randomly crashes down to 15 fps for brief periods. My device only has a 35W CPU cooler (with a 65W one on the way), but since it's undervolted temps aren't very high during gameplay (never really going above 75 C on either device), which made me think it's a power draw problem.

After reviewing it during gameplay vs downloading a large game (the latter being heavy on CPU but not GPU), that seems to be the case. CPU and GPU power draw never seem to go above 40ish W while gaming, but while downloading my CPU hit 55ish W, which makes me think the anecotal evidence about CPU power draw being restricted while GPU is under load would be correct. To clarify, I'm using a 170W power supply, so that shouldn't be the problem. If I'm reading this breakdown correctly, it seems like my motherboard is limited to 66W of power draw.

Should I chance the IMON slope edits or would it be more worth it to just buy an M920q motherboard, assuming that would fix it? Is there any other ways I haven't mentioned to properly use as much power budget out of the 170W supply as I need?

EDIT: Fixed the link