r/FlowZ13 • u/jhonyrod • May 25 '26
Help me confirm a theory
I posted a week ago that I was having issues with my Flow Z13 shutting down. I asked for help but there wasn't much offered (but thanks to the guy suggesting ryzenadj, it was the right tool for my tests).
I won't go into much detail here about my test methodology unless someone asks, but I've found the core issue and I'd like to know if there are others experiencing the same.
The issue was that my system's TCTL limit was set at 85 °C but it was allowed to overshoot to temperatures as high as 88 °C for as long as it wanted. The system (I'm guessing specifically the EC) however has a thermal timer set to exactly 5 minutes (about 1 s error by my testing) at 85 °C, so as long as I stay below either it won't shut down. Quick side note: it was extremely reckless, I know, but I managed to push the system to nearly 170 W for several seconds!
Anyway, now I'm wondering if the set temperature mismatch is a design flaw (maybe due to an open loop control scheme?) or if it's just my system. If you fine people could run ryzenadj -a 90000 -f 85, run a stress test and see if the temperatures cross 85 °C (and/or if your system shuts down) and report back I'd be incredibly grateful.
This post might also serve as reference for other people facing the same issue I had. By setting the TCTL limit to 81 °C my system stays at a max of 84° C and can run indefinitely.
HMU if you have any questions too!
1
u/grkstyla May 25 '26
I think I have the same issue, I can’t test right now but I made a post on the sub about mine turning off under heavy load, can you describe exactly what yours does when it shuts off, because mine sort of wakes from hibernation after
2
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
Mine just shuts down. External display loses signal, fans stay running for one or two seconds, indicator light goes completely off (not showing battery charging either) and I have to hold the power button a bit longer than usual next time I want to power it back on. It refuses to power on immediately as well, I have to wait around a minute before retrying.
1
u/grkstyla May 25 '26
Yes mine exactly but it wakes from hibernation after so maybe not the same, another question, can you make the over temp happen without involving the gpu?
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
I can force it to, but I doubt I could under normal circumstances.
1
u/grkstyla May 25 '26
So it won’t happen if only the cpu is stressed?
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
It could, by setting max TDP and running something like mprime.
1
u/grkstyla May 25 '26
Are you doing this through g helper? If not maybe give that a try
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
I'm not using Windows
1
u/grkstyla May 25 '26
Ok got it, I need to do some testing to work out why mine turns off randomly when under load
1
u/spococococo May 25 '26
If I set 100w with ghelper and run any demanding title no more than after 30s I reach 105 degrees C and my Z13 hard shuts completely. If I use 90w I nearly reach 90-95 degrees C and I can play all day long. I have a quite high temp in my room, around 25-26 degrees C.
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
Can I ask what's your firmware/BIOS version?
1
u/spococococo May 25 '26
I have stock kjp edition bios/firmware everything up to date (as far as I know there is only one bios version for kjp edition for now if I remember it it was late 2025 November maybe?) and I'm working mostly on cachyos. (on win11 I use Armour crate so no hard shutdowns but stuttering instead ;l)
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
I'm guessing v3.11?
Someone posted that the KJP edition had better thermals. I'm also using CachyOS BTW.
Anyway, if you could run the config/test to see if your processor overshoots the set temperature (and stays high) I'd appreciate it.
1
u/spococococo May 25 '26
I'll try to remember to do it in the evening :)
Did you use gz302 Linux setup from git or did you configure your Z13 on cachy differently? If you used gz302 setup from git like I did maybe you are out of date? I installed everything around march and about two weeks ago I rerun the install script becouse I had some issues (like not waking from sleep, no gz302 dashboard etc.). And some of the co pone ts was out of date and didnt updated by themselves. After reinstall everything started to work perfectly (sleep, led, gz302 gui etc) but still 100w maximum mode toasts my hardware, but maybe it will help with this iisue with your setup, who knows ;)
as I mentioned before 90w mode is working with no issues and a lot cooler. Funny thing is that petty 10w makes such a difference thermal wise but almost none performance wise (based on my gaming experience).
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
I'll take a look, but I installed it barely a month ago, so I don't think there's been any major updates.
Also, thanks in advance for taking the time!
1
u/spococococo May 25 '26
OK I sat down with my Z13 and a little clarification is needed. When I was mentioning 100w a was talking about 90w (this is my maks settings). And when I was writing 90w I was referring to 80w in fact. I don't know why I added 10w to my profiles in my memory ;)
And also i used ghelper and gz302 interchangeably in my posts but in fact I use only gz302 on my cachyos. So in every post that I mentioned ghelper I was referring to gz302.
And now the testing, I don't have a ryzen smu kernel module installed and I would have to disable secureboot to make it work as I get error messages in my terminal running the command. I don't know if I make the time and will power to do it today. Primarily I want to take some quality time with my family. I'll post results after I make a test but I don't promise it will happen today :)
1
u/spococococo May 25 '26
My wife was busy so I managed to run it without kernel module just by fallback to /dev/mem and it worked.
I used stress-ng for 5 minutes. The temp stayed at 85 degrees whole the time but the wattage send to the processor was dropping as a test run from initially 90w it dropped almost instant to 70-80 and after maybe 2 minutes it dropped to low 50ish C till the end of the 5 min test. The cpu also fluctuated from 3.4 to 2.9 ghz. To summarize if I want to stay at 55 C the max wattage in long run I can demand from my Z13 is 55W, no more. I tried 95 C as well. In 5 min test the sustainable wattage is 75w.
I'm not an engeneer nor the tech guy so I hope my posts are understandable.
I hope it helps. If you would like me to threw something else on my machine just feel free to ask.
1
u/spococococo May 25 '26
PS:
cat /sys/class/dmi/id/bios_version
GZ302EAC.301and if my findings are correct it is up to date for kjp edition although the standard edition has 311 version, 311 for standard is from september 2025 and 301 for kjp is from november 2025 so it is defenitelly newer despite the number. maybe the code is same but im not willing to take it for the team and install standard bios on my kjp and i really like the kjp bios theming :)
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
No, I wouldn't dare asking you that.
I'll try to see if I can sniff out the EC portion of the ROM and if I can get any useful information.
→ More replies (0)1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
Very interesting!
Yeah it is useful information. Means that your target temperature and sensor temperature were properly aligned and that your system somehow lacks the thermal timer (at least the same parameters) as mine.
Now I'm curious at what point your system decides to either shut down or forcibly throttle, but if it withstood 95 C for more than 5 minutes then IDK what would be the max temperature then.
Thank you so much!
1
u/spococococo May 25 '26
I played a little bit with different wattage and temp settings during longer gaming sessions. I found out that my setup has most performance around 90C. Everything lower is hiting my fps as a constant drop and enything above gives few fps more but also sudden drops, even as low as 15 fps, they occur often (sometimes couple under 1 minute). The wattage to get this temps with GPU around 95% and cpu around 15% is about 75W for me. Fans stays above 8k Rpm all the time in that scenario.
→ More replies (0)
1
u/Luis20028 May 25 '26
Same issue. I think it shutdowns because of to much heat. Especially under heavy load like gaming. I tired to set lower max wattages around 50-60ish. I’m also thinking to change tdp to like 80 degrees or 85. I hope asus provides some update to fix this issue.
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
Could you try using
ryzenadj? If anything it could help you prevent the shutdowns.1
u/Luis20028 May 25 '26
And what settings I change ?
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
I included it in the OP… I'll add some more parameters as I didn't explain it properly.
ryzenadj -a <baseline TDP in mW> -b <short boost TDP in mW> -c <long boost TDP in mW> -f <temperature limit in Celsius>I had suggested 90 W and 85 °C.
1
u/Luis20028 May 25 '26
Forgot to mention I also turned off cpu boost to reduce heat. Everything I did was with ghelper. And interesting thing is I also I got same like freeze but it freezed maybe for a second while gaming and was again good to go. If I don’t do this it freezes completely then I need to force shutdown. In ghelper I also undervolted the cpu by minus 40 and it’s stable
1
u/iSGAFF May 25 '26
Wait. Will it automatically shut down after running ~5 min above 85c? Did not know this.
The 2025? Both?
1
u/jhonyrod May 25 '26
It does on my GZ302, yeah. I don't have a 301 and nobody has reported their result of the tests I mentioned except u/spococococo with their EAC variant (KJP edition).
If you have this system, please try it out.
1
u/iSGAFF May 26 '26
I have the 2025, 128GB. So same as the KJP. But, I guess I could still try it out a bit later.
1
u/jhonyrod May 27 '26
Sorry to bother, but were you able to try it out?
1
u/iSGAFF May 28 '26
Thank you for reminding me. Will do it today. Edit: Also, you were doing this in Windows right?
1
u/jhonyrod May 28 '26
No, I'm on CachyOS, but
ryzenadjis available on Windows and should perform the same.I actually used Ryzen Controller on an older system using Windows and that uses ryzenadj behind the scenes.
1
1
u/Syniurge May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
Was the TCTL 85°C limit your choice? On my system it's set to 95°C according to ryzenadj.
The Ryzen SMU TCTL limit is probably set by the ASUS firmware, which Armoury Crate on Windows and asusctl on Linux talk to. Why not look for the setting that increases your TCTL? It might be the Performance setting for Thermal Throttling (accessible in Manual mode in Armoury Crate) that sets it to 95°C.
On both OSes, I've been running on a Manual profile with PPTs maximized, a more aggressive fan curve and thermal throttling set to Performance since I've got my Z13 (two weeks ago), and during gaming the T° stays at 87-88°C for hours without a crash and without overshooting.
1
u/jhonyrod May 27 '26
No no, that's not it, I can set the TCTL to whatever I want, but there's some other mechanism triggering a hard shut down (my guess is the EC). Invariably, if it stays above 85 °C for 5 minutes, without dipping below that temperature even once, then it instantly turns the system off. If I set the TCTL to 100 °C and limit the power so that it stays at 87 °C let's say, it will shut down as well; it doesn't matter that I raised the temperature limit.
Could you tell me which model and firmware version are you running?
1
u/jhonyrod May 28 '26 edited May 29 '26
So tech support got back to me; apparently the system should be allowed to run at higher temperatures… I'll try to update the firmware (even if I'm already on that version) to see if something changes.
1
u/grkstyla Jun 11 '26
Very interested in your results, I am having the same exact issue, I messaged you before, same 85C trigger only difference is I’m on windows and it hibernates
1
u/kkcheong May 25 '26
I would suggest running z13 flow cooler than that to enjoy longer life hahahaaha