It slows down at only 60 or 70 degrees
Why is my laptop thermal throttling at low temperatures like 60c or 70c?
Written by The CommonFixes team · fact checked by CommonFixes review desk
Last updated
Short answer
Real heat throttling on a laptop processor starts around one hundred degrees, so a slowdown at sixty or seventy is almost never heat. What you are seeing is a different limit: the charger cannot supply enough power, the maker has set a low sustained power target, the battery is protecting itself, or a monitoring tool is reading a skin temperature sensor rather than the chip. The quickest thing to try first: find out which limit is actually being hit — Install HWiNFO64, run it in Sensors Only mode and scroll to the section for your processor. Look at the rows that say Thermal Throttling, Power Limit Exceeded and Current Limit Throttling. Whichever one flips to Yes during a game tells you the real cause. A No on the thermal row means heat is not your problem. Most people are done in about 20 minutes.
Full walkthrough below: 6 steps for Windows, rated medium.
Sounds like this
- •Clock speed drops hard while the temperature reads well under eighty
- •Games stutter although the fans are barely working
- •Monitoring tools report a power or current limit rather than a heat limit
Why it happens
Real heat throttling on a laptop processor starts around one hundred degrees, so a slowdown at sixty or seventy is almost never heat. What you are seeing is a different limit: the charger cannot supply enough power, the maker has set a low sustained power target, the battery is protecting itself, or a monitoring tool is reading a skin temperature sensor rather than the chip.
Work through these in order
0% done- 1
Find out which limit is actually being hit
Install HWiNFO64, run it in Sensors Only mode and scroll to the section for your processor. Look at the rows that say Thermal Throttling, Power Limit Exceeded and Current Limit Throttling. Whichever one flips to Yes during a game tells you the real cause. A No on the thermal row means heat is not your problem.
- 2
Plug in the proper charger and use a mains socket
Running on battery or on a low wattage USB-C charger forces the processor into a low power mode that looks exactly like throttling. Use the charger that came with the machine, plugged into a wall socket rather than a hub or a monitor.
- 3
Set the power sliders to full
Open Settings, System, Power and battery, and set Power mode to Best performance. Then open your maker's tool, MyASUS, Lenovo Vantage, Dell Power Manager, Armoury Crate or Omen Gaming Hub, and choose Performance rather than Balanced or Quiet. Silent modes deliberately cap power long before anything gets hot.
- 4
Rule out a battery that limits current
A worn battery makes the board reduce power even on mains, because the peak load is shared between charger and battery. Open Terminal as administrator, run powercfg /batteryreport, open the file it names, and compare full charge capacity with design capacity. Under seventy percent explains a lot of unexplained slowdowns.
- 5
Check the maximum processor state
Open Control Panel, Power Options, Change plan settings, Change advanced power settings, Processor power management. Maximum processor state should be 100 percent on both battery and plugged in. Some laptops ship at 99 percent, which quietly disables turbo speeds.
- 6
Look for a dust blocked heatsink anyway
If the temperature climbs quickly then the clock drops while the reading stays low, the sensor may be far from the hot spot. Clear the vents with compressed air and check that the fans actually spin under load. Cool air over a blocked fin stack does nothing.
If none of that worked
If HWiNFO shows a power limit on a machine that is otherwise healthy, that is the maker's chosen design and cannot be raised safely on most models. Keeping the laptop on a hard surface and using Performance mode is as far as it goes.
Did this fix work for you?
A quick thumbs up helps other readers find the guides that actually work.
Share this fix
Related fixes worth reading
Chosen automatically from the 157 guides on CommonFixes, based on how closely they match this problem.
A new SSD that runs hot
Why does my laptop's new SSD run hotter than the old one?
Battery drains while gaming, even plugged in
Why is my Lenovo laptop plugged in and discharging slowly while gaming?
Plugged in but not charging
My laptop is plugged in and the battery still goes down. What should I check?
The laptop charges very slowly
My laptop takes all day to charge or loses charge while plugged in. Why?
An Asus laptop fan roars with Armoury Crate installed
How do I fix Asus laptop fan running loudly with Armoury Crate installed?
The charger buzzes, hisses or whines
Why does my laptop charger make a buzzing sound?
Still not it? Browse every fix or see more in noise, heat and battery.
Who wrote this and how we checked it
The CommonFixes team
Writer and researcher
We are a small group of people who spend our days repairing laptops and desktops for family, friends and small offices. Every guide here starts with a problem someone actually brought to us, and we only write down the steps that put the machine right.
- Everyday repairs
- Windows and Mac
- Plain language
CommonFixes review desk
Technical editor
Before a guide goes live, a second person walks through it on a real machine and checks each instruction against the maker's own support pages. Anything we cannot confirm is removed rather than guessed at.
- Fact checking
- Safety warnings
- Source links
Sources we checked these steps against
This guide was last updated on 15 August 2026. If a step no longer matches what you see on screen, tell us on the contact page and we will test it again.
A gentle reminder: back up anything you cannot afford to lose before major repairs. If a step ever feels risky, stop and ask a technician. There is no shame in that.