AMD A12-9720p

[Aztexx]

This is a question concerning a friend's laptop that he is having issues with. I want to check the hardware side of things before troubleshooting other things.
He has a newer laptop using the AMD A12-9720p CPU/GPU combo. About 3 weeks ago he was able to play with a friend and I for a total of 3 person Netplay smash bros.
He had some thermal throttling about 20-30min of playing which caused the FPS to drop, but dolphin never crashed.
~
I recommended him to purchase a cooling fan for his laptop and see if the thermal throttling would be resolved.
Skip to today, he has the new cooling fan and we've been testing for the past several hours and his dolphin will completely crash within a minute of any netplay game.
His graphics have no enhancements, all 1x resolution
The troubleshooting steps I've taken:
-Ethernet connection
-AC power is plugged in
-High performance mode in power settings
-Cleared graphics cache
-Tried re-downloading the emulator
-Running emulator in compatibility

Any other thoughts? What's odd to me is that only several weeks ago, he was able to play for extended periods of time, with FPS drops, but never crashing
Thanks for the time,
Aztexx

[Helios]

unfortunately that APU is not a Ryzen-based APU so performance / watt is going to be pretty abysmal no matter what you do.

I'm guessing that the cooling solution was just barely keeping up until something subtle changed and now it can't.

[JonnyH]

Crashing shouldn't be an issue with thermal throttling - that's the whole point of the throttling. Unless there's something wrong with the hardware or cooling that means that the throttling can't "keep up" - but that would likely require a rather extreme level of cooling failure (like having the heatsink completely removed).

First off, make sure you're all using the latest dev version of dolphin - and *exactly* the same version is needed for everyone trying to use netplay. There's been a lot of fixes since the 5.0 stable, it may be one of those solves this issue.

Is the crash in-game (IE the game crashes in dolphin, so dolphin itself reports an error), or is dolphin itself crashing? (normally shown by windows popping up a "application has stopped working" dialog). If it's the second, it would probably be useful to try to see where it crashed - possibly getting a backtrace?

And for throttling, often laptops get somewhat clogged with dust when they age - reducing the heatsink performance. It may be worth trying to look how to disassemble that particular model (often not too hard, just a couple of screws) and clean out any dust that's got stuck in there. That willl likely make a bigger difference than any additional external fan.

[Aztexx]

Crashing shouldn't be an issue with thermal throttling - that's the whole point of the throttling. Unless there's something wrong with the hardware or cooling that means that the throttling can't "keep up" - but that would likely require a rather extreme level of cooling failure (like having the heatsink completely removed).

First off, make sure you're all using the latest dev version of dolphin - and *exactly* the same version is needed for everyone trying to use netplay. There's been a lot of fixes since the 5.0 stable, it may be one of those solves this issue.

Is the crash in-game (IE the game crashes in dolphin, so dolphin itself reports an error), or is dolphin itself crashing? (normally shown by windows popping up a "application has stopped working" dialog). If it's the second, it would probably be useful to try to see where it crashed - possibly getting a backtrace?

And for throttling, often laptops get somewhat clogged with dust when they age - reducing the heatsink performance. It may be worth trying to look how to disassemble that particular model (often not too hard, just a couple of screws) and clean out any dust that's got stuck in there. That willl likely make a bigger difference than any additional external fan.

That was my thought as well as far as the throttling goes. His laptop was purchased less than 6 months ago so I don't believe it's a build up of dust.
~
I will have him try the latest build of dolphin and I will try the same
Thanks for the help

[JonnyH]

That was my thought as well as far as the throttling goes. His laptop was purchased less than 6 months ago so I don't believe it's a build up of dust.
~
I will have him try the latest build of dolphin and I will try the same
Thanks for the help

Most of the time, crashes that take down the whole system are either hardware or driver issues.

Make sure you have the latest drivers for everything - that may require you to go to vendor's sites directly (IE amd.com for the GPU driver) - as many times windows update ships old drivers, or drivers missing functionality you might want.

[Aztexx]

Most of the time, crashes that take down the whole system are either hardware or driver issues.

Make sure you have the latest drivers for everything - that may require you to go to vendor's sites directly (IE amd.com for the GPU driver) - as many times windows update ships old drivers, or drivers missing functionality you might want.

That actually makes alot of sense. I feel like Dolphin wouldn't be an issue as that hasn't changed. Windows update is a very common variable that updates and changes all the time. I'll look into the driver solution
Thank you