Is anyone having good luck with the new bios? - Page 2

I started having this problem as soon as I tried overclocking slightly with the Omega driver, and I can't reset it. Whatever it is, it locks up City of Heroes immediately. I regressed to the Sager driver and this reenables 3D, but as soon as I reinstalled Omega the problem came back. Some kind of persistent GPU setting that the Sager driver temporarily fixes in s/w?

Same problems

Well, folks, my 8790 does the same sort of artifacting, complete with dancing lines. It progressively becomes unreadable, then I have to reboot. AND that's WITHOUT playing any games or anything. I've NEVER overclocked the GPU. It was doing it before I recently installed BIOS v10 and the newest Sager video drivers.

I'm currently having a back and forth with Sager, but I am feeling rather pissed about this. I hope they can offer me a solution that deos not involve shipping things (I am overseas!).

Does anyone else feel that this is rather piss poor for a $4000 computer?

Cheers,

CLC

In addition...

A question for the group: (1) since I can cool the computer for a while and then get the artifacting as soon as I boot up and engage a graphics-intensive task (for example, all I have to do it engage the 'preview' of the Windows 3D Flowerbox screen saver) and (2) because this problem has come about in a gradual manner, do you think that it is, in fact, due to irreversible damage to the GPU caused by chronic overheating (which in turn was caused by an origianlly flawed design)?

I'm not an electrical engineer nor a case designer, but this hypothesis seems reasonable. If this is the case, then I think Sager ought to replace the damaged GPU's free of charge and make sure that adequate cooling allowances are made for each new configuration.

Lastly, can anyone suggest how I might turn down the clock speed on the GPU so I can at least use my system in a bsic way? Would turning down the clock speed get rid of the artifacting in normal applications?

Any comments? Thanks!

CLC

Have you ever cleaned out the machines cooling/exhaust system? If not, that would be a good "first step".

Yes, I've cleaned it out, but maybe I could get some compressed air to do a better job. Is this just a matter of blowing out the fan, or do you have to get inside to do it right?

Since my last post, I've discovered that by using ATITool to turn dwn the clock speeds on the core and the memory I can get rid of the artifacting. This tells me two things. It tells me that (perhaps) the GPU isn't permanently damaged. It also tells me that it's a heat problem. Clearly, these notebooks are badly designed from a cooling perspective. Basically, I can't use the hardware I paid for the way it was designed to be used. That sucks. The good news is I can now play HalfLife and FlightSim the way I used to and they seem to work ok. I just hope and pray that's the end of my problems with this machine. I hope the card doesn't decide to deteriorate further and I hope some of the other problems I read about with the 8790 don't crop up on my unit.

CLC

Does anyone know where the specs of the new BIOS are listed? I sent in my laptop for artifacting and they sent it back with the new BIOS -- which seems to have fixed the problems. But I want to know what else has changed in the BIOS beyond the obvious, which is that the temperature range that triggers the onboard fans has been adjusted. The fans don't stop now when it reaches 35 degrees..

Have been reading a number of complaints regarding heat or cooling issues, but rarely are processor, GPU, drive, or (importantly) ambient temperatures reported.

It seems counterproductive make claims of an issue without providing the data necessary to make a determination as to the cause of a failure. Also, hopefully most users that frequent this forum or any other information portal for nearly any length of time prior to purchase understand that this level of DTR has inherent thermal concerns (even at complete basic stock settings), and if said concerns not addressed and cared for properly by the end-user can and often will directly lead to hardware issues of some kind - up to and including complete component failure.

Tim,

You should read the forums more carefully. There are quite a few substantiated posts listing temperature measurements. These readings seem high.

But you are correct, a rigorous quantitative analysis has not been carried out. However, sometimes the weight of anecdotal evidence amounts to clear empirical data strongly suggesting a particular trend. Such is the case here.

What is often counterproductive are comments that seem to be aimed at making a counterpoint for the sake of making a counterpoint.

Anyone who's read through this forum in some detail can see that there are serious problems with the 8790 and the business response from the seller is to abdicate responsibility.

CLC

The irony of the above statement was far, far too blatant not to point out (hint: no "i" exists in my username). Will respectfully and wholeheartedly disagree. It is absolutely impossible for strictly an end-user to make such a claim with any degree of statistical credibility.

The truth of the above statement can be shown evident with a simple question: how many NP8790 (or equivalent) units have been sold worldwide? While the answer to such may be difficult to attain, an answer does exists somewhere, and in fact the precise figure is not required to illustrate the following point. Though it is likely a tired example, let us assume a reasonable number of total D870P units sold: 25,000. We'll also make a few more reasonable assumptions: the total number of complaints related to hardware issues due to a design flaw (casting aside failures due solely to an alternate manufacturer's product, such as an optical drive, memory, etc) in any forum or portal to be 375, and that number represents only 15% of all users experiencing an issue - or that a total of 2,500 units actually experience a true hardware failure issue. That would translate to a failure rate of 10%, which is actually VERY low in comparison to the entire consumer-grade mobile machine market (feel free to look up the market statistics should there be any doubt).

As to address the original point in my prior post, a total of one user in this thread posted any kind of thermal readings (khu, and that was to mention when the fans turned off, and not an under-load temperature). As far as other threads are concerned (again, irony here, as it is rather likely I've read a few more than you), a majority of users simply do not include enough data to ascertain any sort of conclusion as to the state of their machine experiencing a problem (and instead offer complaints more along the lines of, "I was playing Game X for two hours, and my machine simply turned off. Why?").

I will however say there are undoubtedly NP8790 units that DO have outright hardware failures. All products have a failure rate, and unfortunately no DTR line of this nature is an exception. In fact, hopefully an end-user is educated enough to know that is precisely one of the tradeoffs for squeezing so much high end (typically desktop grade) technology into such a small package.

Quoted for accuracy. Especially:

And your point is??

If your speaking to me, my point is nothing, the quoted poster made the point.

At this point, can one be expected to do anything but laugh? It's sadly comical - almost morbidly so.

As stated in the now (thankfully) deleted thread, I hold absolutely no ill will toward skrumcd, and wish him much luck and success with his/her present or future machine.

Dunno why you would have to publicly announce your laughing [asumption]but in an effort to belittle me[/assumption]. But do what pleases you. Thanks for laughing at me bro, whatever your intention, you can obviously tell by this post that it definatelly made me feel good, and I can tell you that if I am to expect responses like that, well,

I thought it better to delete that thread.