8790 Artifacting

Yep, same here. Used to work fine, but now it barely even works. Oh, right mines dead. Yep, but just before it did it showed the same signs as above. Could hardly even play BF 1942 without crashing.

Have you cleaned the unit? Especially under the keyboard. The metal plate under the keyboard on the 8790 serves to help with the cooling of the GPU, as well as other components.

look under peer to peer support for the 8790 for threads about this problem. they would probably help out. i just rma-ed my 8790 for artifacting which was probably similar to yours.

i sent mine back to sager. mine was artifacting without ever going over 52.the normal temp for yours is 62? that seems pretty high to me. you check to make sure the heat sink was clean and the fans werent obstructed? i guess its possible for some computers to run hotter than others but that seems kinda surprising. someone else will be able to advise you better, but to me it seems possible that yours is artifacting because of the heat. does it artifact immediately or after the game runs for a bit?

Might want to get a can of compressed air and blow out the bottom fans (and per G-Omaha's' excellent suggestion- make sure to stick a toothpick in the fan while you're blowing so you don't ruin them).

My personal experience so far, with one of the 8790's from back in the day, is that it took a motherboard replacement from Clevo to get me back running. I'm still artifacting, though, but not as badly. I need to reformat/reinstall and see if I can square away some of the issues- haven't had time to do that lately. Hopefully that will clear things up.

Several other owners of the initial wave of WXGA 8790s seem to be experiencing this issue, so I wouldn't be surprised if you're headed that direction, too. Make sure to clean out the machine first, though. Might be as simple as that.

sorry but... what is artifacting?

Artifacting is when the computer screen flips out, mostly because the GPU gets too hot... I think.

Search FriedToast's review of his 8790 and around the 15-16th page, , and it'll show screenshot's of artifacting.

Mine is not artifacting but the screen brightness keeps flickering between max and the next one down. I read all the treads on this problem but they were some time ago and no-one seemed to have a solution other than turn down the brightness which is un-acceptable. Did anyone ever resolve theirs? Does loosing the screws under the key board help with the flickering?

Other than cleaning out the fans and loosening the screws underneath the keyboard, I don't think you've got any options other than sending it in for service, unfortunately. You've contacted PCT, but you might want to fill out Sager's online service form, too. They are the ones that you'll actually work with, so I'd go that route. PCT will most likely advise you to do the same.

I've started to get SERIOUS artifacting problems with my lappy recently. A month ago a graphical lag problem occurred to me and to some other people, but it stopped at some point and I thought the problem was solved. Now, it doesn't lag anymore but instead artifacts have become really bad. I remember that a couple of months ago artifacts were simply small dots that appeared randomly on the screen and on the textures in games. Now, the dots have become huge triangles that often cover the WHOLE screen and you can't even see the game behind them. In Rome total war, not only the triangles and dots appear, but often big big spots/stains on the screen and the whole system slows down for approximately a second. Then after quitting the game the desktop is covered with "dead pixels" that disappear after a restart.

This situation is unacceptable and I tried to see if the omegadrivers were the problem but the results are the same with every version. The fans are clean, I even unscrewed everything and manually cleaned the fans instead of just blowing compressed air inside. The fan exits are not covered by anything, since I've raised the laptop from the table by 4-5 cm and artifacts appear no matter how hot the lappy is. Crap, I remember playing farcry on max settings and bringing the laptop to horrible temperatures without ANY problems.
I want to know what's going on with the lappy. It's sad that I bought such an expensive product and nobody told me its life expectancy was only 4-5 months.
Right now it works perfectly with everything but 3d games... unfortunately games were the main purpose of the 8790.

Any idea about what I can do? I can't really RMA it because I won't survive without a powerful computer for that long. There must be a way to solve this.

Thx, and sorry for the rant.

strife, i have a northwood, a few weeks ago i started noticing lag in my games and after about 30 mins. of playing my menus on my games began blocking out, with large black boxes on the corners, etc. i'm not sure if this is considered artifacting, but then the black boxes began to affect my game play. my unit had a constant temp of 52C when idling (the fans never shut off). i'm not sure what it was when i played games, got much hotter tho. i replied to another one of your threads telling you to pull the panel off your heatsink and check to make sure there are no clogs. compressed air would not remove my clog from my heatsink. after removing the clog, my temps dropped back down and cycled b/t 40-50C. this helped my games, i stopped noticing the black boxes and it didn't seems to lag anymore. i still notice a little lag in CS:source, but all other games seem to be fine. again i have the northwood, so i hope this will help you out. i'm curious to see what sager says about your problem, i hope this isn't the beginning of a very bad problem. my unit is only 4 months old as well.

It is amazing on how many individuals have had this problem after having the system for a period of time. I too had a problem with artifacting the same as listed above. Everything normal and then suddenly artifacting in all areas of the system (games, surfing, etc). I contacted Hypersonic and they had me return it and replaced the motherboard/video. I ended up getting the new BIOS this way.

But it definitely seems to be a common problem with these systems. How about they replace all 8790s (and GX7's in my case) with the new models. Ok... time to stop dreaming.