My computer is an Asus Zenbook Pro UX501JW. It has an i7 4720HQ @ 2.60GHz, a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 2047MB, and 16.0GB of RAM Dual-Channel DDR3.
I know that using a thin notebook to play games is not the best thing to do due to overheating, but I didn't really have much choice. What happened is that my computer used to run games like Rainbow Six Siege and DotA 2 with high quality graphics at a pretty good frame rate for a notebook (60~90 FPS). After a year, I cannot run Overwatch and CSGO without frame rate drops, and Rainbow six siege will barely run at 40 FPS (at best).
I've cleaned the machine, removing all the dust and changing the thermal paste. I've also made a clean windows 10 install to see if I could get a better performance, but I didn't see any expressive improvement on the computer at all.
One of the things that I have noticed is that I cannot hear the cooling fans when I'm playing video games (which I remember hearing before), so I decided that I would try to manually change its speed. After some research, I found out some softwares that people recommended for cooler speed control (Speedfan and MSI Afterburner), but neither allowed me to change the fan speed, nor I could find any options to do it in the BIOS.
When I'm playing a game or browsing the web without an external cooling device, the motherboard and CPU temperature will be around 80º Celcius (176 ºF), while the graphics card will always be between 70~80 ºC (158~176 ºF) if I am playing something.
What could be the reason of this performance drop ? Could it be damaged hardware ? If so, how could I test and confirm it ?
