Acer Travelmate 8005 Lmi - very disappointing :-((

I have a 8006lmi fan runs for about 30secs-45secs max every 5 mins or so after about 2 hours of use doing things that increase the CPU Load such as zipping / dvd playback / gaming....normal browsing decreases this a lot.

Secondly you are running in native Dynamic switching mode for the CPU if you run at Max performance 1.8ghz then the fan will run a lot more.

I use Speedswitch XP to control the cpu speed

Bearing in mind the 1.8 dothan tend to run a bit warmer than the banias.....I think you will find with all dothan 1.8 and above the fan will come on a lot more....it is a lot quieter than the INspiron 8000 series fan tho..

With regard to heat with the laptop!! - Really my inspiron 8600 gets a lot warmer on my lap than the acer and ibm t41 gets warmer........again i am not sure which laptops you are used to using but the acer is one of the coolest i have ever used (And i have used a lot!)

The 3dmark you commented on which drivers was this with. I am hitting 12,000 with the omega drivers and 3500 on 3dmark 03.....

Good luck with finding a quieter notebook with a dothan in it. I think you will struggle.....

I am not sure what you expect performance wise from the 1.8 and radeon 9700 but people with 1.7 banias and radeon 9700's are very happy with their perf.

I am delighted with the 3500 3dmark03 and 25000+ aquamarks on my 8006lmi which is right up there with the sager such as alienware (If you are after a quiet machine you are looking at the wrong type.)

@Ü09
Your 3DMark 2001se score is probably a result of your 9700 mobility being clocked low. If you check it with Everest, Powerstrip, or Radlinker, I bet it's probably clocked at 391.5 MHz core/202.5 MHz memory.

@Dekka
3500 in 3DMark 2003? Wow, that's very high for a Pentium M notebook! Is this at stock settings? Is your 9700 clocked higher than 391.5/202.5, or are you using low quality rendering settings?

Tomasz,

Here is a link to my 8006lmi impressions:

http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=25325

To achieve this I overclocked the 9700 as you can see above I have tried a 30% overclock and it has run stable for constantly looping 3dmark for 2hours.

However I got scared and clocked it back to a 20% overclock. Totally stable run the machine all day everyday like this......

The 2.0ghz Dothan gives some impressive 3dmark CPU and Aquamark CPU Scores about the same as a 3.2ghz P4.

I think you will find the athlon will probably run hotter than the dothan's and therefore give you more noise from the cooling fan

I am not sure why you are so caught up with a out of date 3dmark benchmark anyway.

Why not take a look at aquamark and 3dmark03 results...........

It would seem you havent done your research before you purchased the laptop.....

hi u09

take it from me (an owner of the voodoo m:855 odm, mitac 8335)
this was a fully decked out amd sytem with athlon64 3400+ 9600 128mb and it got like 2601 in 3dmark03... as for noise, it was dead silent..... for every 15 minutes, than a cpu fan would engage to cool the cpu down for about 60 seconds...

i dont know if its because acer doesnt have good thermal designs or if its because of dothan, but my 1.7 banias compal cl56 does not need to engage its fan during general use...

it *does* get warm if i use it over a hour on my lap, but only on the bottom rear part of my laptop... heat builds up because air flow on the bottom is restricted and its not on a flat surface... if i were using it on my deskit does not get warm under genral use

as for trying to compare the centrino system w/ 9700 to the p4 system w/ 9700 (dell 9100 xps) you will see a difference in performance, because for some reason (thermal design, power limitations, cooling, or etc) the p4 systems w/ 9700 are clocked higher

amd64 notebooks (the voodoo m:860) was also reviewed by a member here and he said it was clocked 450core, 200mm default (still not as high as default p4 systems w/ 9700 gpu)

I think one must do some compromises with notebook weight & thickness and its power. Top components do heat a lot and you need a large notebook if you want good cooling systems. I've got Acer Travelmate 800 at work (a year old) and it's got severe heating problems too with Banias 1.3 GHz, Mobility Radeon 9000, and a 4200 rpm hard drive! I was very worried when I saw that they were going to put components, such as MR 9700 and AMD 64, into the same chassis (Travelmate 8000 series and Ferrari 3200).

Btw, there was also a gaming test on a Finnish magazine, in which one computer was Fujitsu Amilo 1840. The test team reported that they couldn't play games on the computer without an external keyboard due to heating problems... So these are very common problems, which people don't just talk about...

3000 Euros? wow, that's very expensive for that laptop, when you can get the 8006 from PCTorque for $2700 more or less... that's about $1000 less or so.

Anyways, sorry to hear about your fan. I guess that's one big advantage of my 8003LMi, it was a whole week before I heard the fan kick in for the first time.

Done some temperature monitoring on the 8006.

Would seem Acer are somewhat over the top with their fan control.

The 1st fan kicks in at 45c and switches off at 41c CPU which is very conservative i would let the fan hold off until 55c before cooling them.

Second fan doesnt kick in until 55c on this machine again a bit early.

Think i might take a look in the machine and see how the cpu is connected to the heatsink....might call for some Arctic silver 5 usually drops the temp about 3-5c on my experience.

The other thing is to find a program such as speedfan or ik8 that can control the acer fans or write one that will control them through ACPI.

Although having said that they do not really bother me at all.

The memory must have been rather expensive: two 1 GB modules. Note that you must factor in duty and shipping. That's why computers are more expensive in Europe than the US.

@Dekka
What tool did you use to overclock your notebook?
Alpinux

I use Radlinker to overclock the radeon 9700.

I found no real advantage speedwise of the latest omegadrivers over the default drivers provided by acer with the 8006.

Thanks for the programname.
Where did you get the omegadrivers from?

Thanks mate.

Ah, didn't catch that at first. Of course, makes sense... $3000 sounds cheap actually in that case :P