An idea about the 9860 booting/rebooting issues

(NOTE: I apologize if this is not the correct category to place this in. However, at this time, it seems to be the most appropriate. Please correct me if I am wrong.)

It has been shown that heat is the nemesis of computer hardware. Although heat is a ubiquitous issue among many different types of computer hardware, this seems to be a specifically difficult issue with laptops. Due to size constraints, all of the laptop components must be designed uncomfortably close to one another and with smaller/unique heat spreader designs.

This leads me to the reason I drafted this post: I have recently been wondering what could be causing these boot failure/rebooting issues on the 9860 and I have come up with an idea which is, at best, crudely formed. My proposition is: Could these issues be directly related to a ‘thermal leak’ of some sort from the CPU and/or HDD into the North and South bridges? The issues, as far as I’ve read on the forums, seem to be somewhat tangentially related (i.e. most can’t boot, and seem to have some sort of motherboard component fail). One post specifically sights a failure of the PCI Bridge and the others seem to be centric to the graphics card and/or RAM. My though is that this design layout may exposes the 915P + ICH6 to an excessive amount of heat and thus causes these types of failures. This problem however doesn’t seem to be a problem with all 9860 models and so I’m not sure how to quantify this possible cause in any general sense. Is it possible that there is a possible future failure(s) that may occur with most/all of these? Is there a way to measure the temperature of the 915P + ICH6 via software? Does any of this make sense? Am I rambling on and misconstruing the problem? I’m not sure but I would like to find out what the issue at hand is and resolve it.

Lastly, is there any difference between the desktop 915P + ICH6 chipsets and the ones used on the 9860 motherboard? If so, what?

Thank you for reading and please respond if you have any clarifications/insight/etc. to add.

-- Jon

I suppose that I also shall do some experimentation once I receive my 9860, which will hopefully be within a week or so. Does anyone know if there is any more extensive documentation about the specific implementation of the 915p + ICH6 chips in the 9860, namely, if there are any technical documents describing the motherboard in the 9860?

Syn: Does mobmeter monitor any of the other motherboard sensors (assuming there are others on this board) other than HDD and CPU temperatures? I have only used it briefly and do not recall. If it does, what do the other sensors report? Also, what does you HDD, and if there is a means to check, GPU, report temperature wise?

The fact that most people, who do not have problems with their new laptops, also do not go in search of groups such at Notebook Forums is a good point to recall. The statistics for satisfied customers, with an eye on the 9860, are most likely in PCTorque/Sager's favor and most of the people who we hear from either adore their new Sager laptops or become frustrated with various issues and abhor the laptop, although the latter is not often the case due to the good work of PCTorque, Sager, and the members here. There really is not much middle ground unfortunately. However, there are a few people here who I have read about (Zypherys, Profiler, Mycues1882, Kenny3651, etc) who all seem to have had these rather severe failures which all have this subtle synergetic [sic, pardon the pun Synergi ] connection between them. Having encountered these sorts of issues in the past, I can empathize with them about how frustrating a quandary like this can be and thus wish to be a service in specific as well as in general to fix these problem. This in fact seems to be a fundamental motive in many of those who post avidly here. In any case, I hope this can be resolved even if it is only one person having one small issue.

-- Jon

That too is one of the issues I have been wondering about. The desktop 915p (if I recall correctly) has been purported to support the em64 processors, and it would be quite nice if the 9860 also incorporated that support. As far as I know, the 915p on the laptop is the same as the desktop and thus should have the same compatibility built in. However, one will never know until the processors become available. Besides that, my question was about the topography of the motherboard in the 9860. Based on Adam’s pictures in the official 9860 review, there is a hefty heat spreader that is at the viewer’s bottom right of this image: http://notebookforums.com/attachment...achmentid=2875 which may or may not conduct heat past the north/south bridges of this laptop. Once again, I feel somewhat restricted in my ability to formulate probable theories because I do not yet have mine. Anyway, I was wondering if there is any sort of service guide/technical reference about this specific motherboard that would tell me threshold temperatures, the layout, etc. Maybe I’ll just make my own