Acer 8103 crash when running games

[cDR]

Hey all,

I recently bought an Acer 8103 laptop. It has a X700 Mobility Radeon card with 128MiB dedicated video memory and a Intel Centrino Processor running at 1.8Ghz. I have upgraded the total memory to 1.2GiB.

I bought the laptop for gaming mostly, the performance is great! But unfortunately I get random blue screens/crashes after playing for a while. So I reduced the detail and resolution a bit, but that doesn't seem to solve anything. I installed the latest Catalyst 5.8 mobility drivers and even tried the modified ones. I also tweaked some unneeded AGP direct3d settings (as found on the forum here)

Is there anyone here with the same laptop (series) that has, or doesn't have, the same problem? I play World of Warcraft and Battle Field 2, both of these games are not playable for more than 1/2 hour max.

[DarthAcer]

Well, I've tried latest Catalyst too and several versions prior to that. My observation is that Cat 5.7 and 5.8 are bad for TM810x's health. X700 runs hotter and I experienced random shutdowns/bluescreen after 30-60 minutes of WoW. Unless I put POWERPLAY setting into 'Balance' for the AC profile. But then, in some situations, WoW slows down to a crawl.

So I gave up, downloaded ATI driver for Ferrary 4000 series from Acer FTP site ftp://ftp.acer-euro.com/notebook/, installed it (after rigorous cleanup of previously installed drivers with DriverCleaner), and haven't had a single problem ever since. Seems like Acer does have good quality control on drivers they release :bouncy:

Judging from the file versions and some numbers in INF files, this is roughly based on Cat 5.2.

That's my experience. YMMV

[Wiz33]

DId the Ferrari driver require any modding to be used in a 9100 series?

[DarthAcer]

DId the Ferrari driver require any modding to be used in a 9100 series?

8100 series, I assume. Yes, it did. X700 there was listed with SUBSYS id that is different on Ferrari and Travelmate. I modified ini/inf files so that wherever it had device id 5653 and subsys, I removed subsys.

[cdd543]

I had an 8103 that crashed(turned off) during gaming. I rma'd it back to newegg and my replacement has been flawless. i did reformat and have 2 gig ram. I am running 5.8 wthout issue.

[skruer]

How do you mod the Ferrari inf files ? I have the same laptop as you and it crashes during gaming.

[DarthAcer]

I described what I did to mod Ferrari drivers in the post above. If that's not enough information for you, you are probably not ready to do manual modding yourself yet. I'm not good at writing tutorials. Search www.driverheaven.net or just Google for tutorials on ATI driver modding if you want to attempt one.

But my point was that with minimal modding effort the Ferrari ATI driver can be adapted for 8104 and it (driver) is good enough in most cases (unless you need all the fixes ATI made in the latest drivers). If you check the thread on Cat 5.8, it appears ATI mobile video drivers work well for many people; maybe it will work for you too. :cheers:

[skruer]

First thanks for your ideas! :) Secoundly it's sad you can't write a tutorial! I tried to search but didn't find anything usefull. So I then turned my attention to your secound suggestion; i checked the thread on Cat 5.8 drivers and tried to download the ATI mobile video drivers and this is what I did:

I un-installed my ATi drivers og everything related to it. After that I did a run with Driver Cleaner.
Then I made a reboot.
Installed the ATI mobility 5.8 drivers and made another reboot.
I didn't change anything in the properties of the driver, so I started up NFS underground 2 and played for about 2 minutes then the computer crashed and I had to boot it up again.

Now I am thinking of modding the Ferrari ATi driver, but need to find a tutorial on that, so if you got a link, it would be appreciated :)

Other than that I haven't got a clue whatelse to do.

[wombatten]

I have upgraded the total memory to 1.2GiB.


Isn't that a strange amount of memory? 1GB + 256MB? Have you tried to remove the small stick and see if that works better?

[Ransomed1]

Agreed. Try running with just 1 gig of RAM and see how that goes.

DarthAcer, I'm curious as to what your 3dmark scores are with those Ferrari drivers. You're the first one I've seen running them on the 8100. I'm sure you're very satisfied with the performance, but I'm just curious as to what you get right now.

Also, I'm one of those who's running the newest 5.8 mobility catalyst drivers without a single flaw in performance.

-Ransom

[DarthAcer]

DarthAcer, I'm curious as to what your 3dmark scores are with those Ferrari drivers.

No idea about scores. I customarily run 3dmark when I first got the laptop but I don't even remember that score. Evere since then I have no intention to install 3dmark on any of my computers again. It's just not worth it to me.
World of Warcraft runs fine, so does Dungeon Siege II, and Cinema 4D has no issues too. That's all I care about now :)

[cDR]

Thanks for all the replies; I have removed the 256MiB module and things seem to run better now.

I'm running latest official 5.8 catalyst mobility drivers from ATI. There is a tool at www.driverheaven.net/patje/ that enables you to modify drivers for a laptop. I have tried all but the official ones seem to run the best here. I also disabled the ATI A.I. function in the control panel.

I found this nice thread about World of Warcraft; http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-tech-support-en&t=139877&p=1&tmp=1 (scroll down).

It seems that some video-functions cause trouble on some cards (ATI?) Disabling them helped me a lot here. :awdance:

Still it would be nice to see the temperature of the GPU.

[zaphod78]

Thanks for all the replies; I have removed the 256MiB module and things seem to run better now.



I wish I could've caught this thread earlier, I could've saved you a lot of trouble.

Chipsets which are capable of accessing memory in parallel (like the i915 the TravelMate 810x) need to have very similar, preferably the same, RAM in both slots. Matching density is a must.