8104 Overheating

Well I cant say right now. But I get my 8104 on Monday, and I will sure test both with BF2 and HL2 and then post results here..

well, i am experiencing the same problem on stock 8104. I am using the latest hacked version of ati catalyst drivers, although i always had that and this problem seems to be happening recently only.

Both CS2 and BF2 are causing the PC to simply shut down in the middle of gaming... usually after about 10 mins or so (longer if i cold boot the pc and then play a game).

I have been recording cpu temps while gaming and it seems they start around 60C and by the time it shuts down they are on 99c

I suspect this is caused by the buildup of dust inside the machine, which blocks airways and makes it overheat enough for BIOS to kick in and shut down the comp when the CPU temperature becomes critical.

I loved the laptop due to it having x700 on there but seriously, this sucks.

It looks like those pesky engineers at acer didnt allow much leeway when the pc starts overheating.

I will be attempting to upen up the laptop and clean as much as i can + replace any compounds used on heatsinks, i suspect this will be enough to get rid of the problem for a while.

I also tried throttling down CPU cycles to High from Max when gaming but it still shuts down...

Bad design....

I have the 8104 and think it was a bad design to have a single fan and heat pipe servicing the cpu, chipset AND gpu. My system doesn't overhead even after 8 hour sessions of WoW, but I had to undervolt and set the fan to be always on to keep temps reasonable. Undervolting dropped my temps at load by 15 deg C! I am suprised at how hot the Pentium M runs for a lowpower mobile chip. Even my little Dell 1.7Ghz D410 at work is a ballburner.

So far it looks like x700 and higher needs a dedicated cooling system to keep it chilly or run in a larger formfactor laptop to allow for better ventilation.

I noticed mine spontaneously rebooting when MobileMeter reading reaches 66 degrees centigrade while I'm playing games. When running Prime 95 it never goes over 62 degrees so I don't know whether it would reboot if just CPU goes over 66.

I actually took my laptop apart to clean out possible "dust clogging airflow"
Almost no dust inside, but...

X700 did not have any thermal paste or anything at all applied. It barely touched cooling plate. WTF? Bluetooth printed circuit had holes to be fixed in position but no screws in it. Had to put a couple of my own to fix it in place. I'd say this particular laptop was probably assembled "on the lap" That really sucks.

Anyway, I put AS5 on ATI chip, CPU, and 915 chipset so that they all properly exchange heat with cooling assembly. Then put everything together.

While typical reading of MobileMeter before this was around 44-47 degrees, now it shows about 48-52 under same conditions. That tells me ATI chip now gets heat removed properly. We'll see what it'll look like in games.

But overall I'm quite disappointed with the quality of this particular laptop assembly. My TM8003 was top notch.

katorga, which program did you use for undervolting and pushing the fan to the max?

edit
wow i undervolted it now and it doesnt shut down any more! this is great same speed less heat!
i used your setting of 1.164v in rightmark cpu util...

Having this same problem. And I use my 8104 for heavy gaming every night. The problem has arrived after 3 months of use. Has the AS5 (somekind of paste?) removed the whole problem? I'm getting a feeling that now I understand why Acers are so price affordable. Until for a proper solution, I use ATI Tool to lower the X700 output.

Well, it did help for the time being. Although MobileMeter temperature readings on average raised and fan comes on a bit more often than before (not much more though), the heat removal seems to work better and I have not seen shatdowns so far. We'll see how it will be in a month or so.

Note that I have Powerplay setting on maximum for AC. While having spontaneous shutdowns problem, I could totally avoid it by setting Powerplay to Balanced. But then WoW would become jerky to almost unplayable sometimes.

I still have one more thing to check: since memory is located quite close to cooling pipe assembly, I suspect that high temperatures may cause memory to fail and that results into reboot. Gonna try old memory sticks (512+512) if I start seeing shutdowns again. Maybe will try memory test too...

Ok, I experimented quite a bit and the conclusion is that memory has nothing to do with spontaneous shutdown in my case. The problem is in ATI drivers. Catalyst 5.6 works excellent and keeps temperature normal when I'm not gaiming and does not reboot even if it gets to 71 degrees. Catalyst 5.8 and up to 5.10 cause temperature rise about 3-5 degrees on average and are source of shutdowns/reboots . Have not tried Catalyst 5.7 as I don't have a modded version that's working with X700 without any additional tweaking.

So I'm sticking with 5.6 and am very happy now.

This is weird, since I had the newest Catalysts and backed up a bit to the Acer 8104 VGA drivers and STILL have this problem when playing ie. Battlefield 2 longer than half and hour. Did you have the problem with ATI VGA drivers? If not, I'm gonna try the Catalyst 5.6 drivers.

Try shutting down computer, disconnect AC, remove battery. Then put everything back in, boot, go to BIOS, load default settings, then modify settings to your liking and save. That hopefully reset whatever might have stayed "residual" after going back to previous driver. At least, that's what I did "just in case."

I did try original drivers, they work fine. I also tried drivers on acer-euro FTP for TM8104 that are based off 5.8 (I believe). Shutdowns... I ended up with 5.6 because they are newer than original Acer drivers and work. I used DHZer0 ones from www.driverheaven.net

Besides that, you may have a different issue/cause, damaged/defective memory DIMM for instance...

Ok, Thanks DarthAcer, helpful as always. I will try exactly what you and report the result. Until now I have created a theory that the regular very heavy gaming has diminished or even melted something crucial. It may very well be a driver problem, since the problems arrived after I changed the drivers. Crossing my fingers.

No help from the driver heavens 5.6. I even used pro cleaner to erase all previous drivers. What's with the battery away BIOS reset? Sounds like superstition :-)

My guess is that maybe newer drivers change some setting in the video chip that makes it misbehave. Obviously its done on a low level. Older drivers don't know about this setting or that it might be changed. And it sticks between reboots, hence must be saved in BIOS settings area. Removing AC and battery might help with resetting stuff. Asking main BIOS reload default settings hopefully causes it to call video BIOS to reinitialize too. This all is on the "I have a hunch" level. But it seemed to work for me.

I just recieved my 8104 today. It is acting like it is overheating also. I have the lines which go across the screen. Anybody confirm a fix for this?

All I can say that the with my lappy the overheating (presumably) does not come with any flickering or lines whatsoever. So it could be some else problem. I have to get a new 8104, but have heard horror stories about the finnish acer customer service. I am pretty disappointed to the situation.

I actually called already and asked how does the process go. I explained what is wrong and the guy said: "Laptops then to have overheating problems." Well, ok, they do, but I can't accept a booting lappy.

try reinstalling with the ghost disks, sometimes if it is a driver issue that will fix it. also make sure everythings is updated

and call acer about those lines if the drivers don't fix it

Yeah, Johnny, that's my last hope. I already updated BIOS (had newest version) and overwrote DMI and Checksum and basicly tried to zero everything. The ghost is my last hope.. :-)

It's 2:36 am and I'm disassembling my funking Acer 8104.

How did you disassemled it? How to get the CPU and GPU? I tried from the bottom, and took all the screws off, but the shell did open just a few centimeters. So I was a pussy and reassembled the whole thing, and here I am writing. My aim is to get to the CPU and GPU and check if I could use some "Arctic Silver" or some other stuff prevent the heat generation. I'm not so keen on undervolting, although, it seems interesting and probably is my way out from this hell-hole. Gee, I wish my girlfriend would run as hot as my Acer 8104 every night and then just past out after the best action.

P.S. Note that I don't have problems with running 3Dmark05, since it runs only with ~10 frames the whole time. Then, if I play BF2 or drive GT Legends which obviously throws shitloads of stuff to the screen at high speeds, the shutdowns occur. I hope we can find somekind of a solution to this problem, since it might be your ass next time. I sincerely hope it will not.

Tinkering with electronic is my hobby (I used to have a small business fixing radios, TVs, VCRs, and designed and constructed 144 MHz radios for fun. So I open and look inside every piece of hardware I own at some point (to hell with warranties). I understand that you are in dire need to have your laptop fixed... but if you can do it officially (on warranty), do it that way. What worked for me may not work for you.

Ever since I mentioned that going back to earlier ATI drivers helped, I've found two more "offenders": atheros drivers (I replaced Intel 2915 with Wistron CM9 Wi-Fi based on Atheros chipset, much much better but you have to find drivers that work reliably) and some remnants of latest Audigy 2 ZS notebook beta driver (gotta stick with original drivers from CD).

Now back to disassembling. On the back of laptop there is a screw that's holding the keyboard (right above the memory compartment). Unscrew it. Now you can open display and remove keyboard. There are to latches near the top left and right corners of keyboard. You push latches up (towards display to sink them in case) and pull top of keyboard carefully. Keyboard is connected to the main board so be careful not to tear the ribbon. To unplug it, you need to shift up the latch on the connector on main board and it will release the ribbon. Actually, it's quite well illustrated in this thread:
http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=106939
It also explains the rest. There will be a lot of screws on your desk. Keep 'em organized.

To get to CPU and GPU you need to unscrew main board (what you want to get to is underneath). The screws to undo are marked with white arrows on the board (4 of them if I rememeber correctly). Disconect some wires at HD and at the front on the left before pulling the board. Also, at this point you want antenna disconnected from Wi-Fi card as the cable goes through the hole in main board. You want it pulled out. Also, be careful with the ribbon that connects to touchpad. I could not figure out the latch on the connector so plugging it back in when reassembling was a bit tricky.

To remove heatpipe assembly unscrew 2 screws at the ATI chipset (one end of the assembly), 4 at the CPU (middle) and 3 (I think) at the fan. I kept the fan attached to heatpipe.

That's roughly it. Keep track of screws: some are just very slightly different from others in the batch, you don't want to have problems when putting it all back together.

I don't want to disassemble this laptop ever again. For reference, I disassembled TM8003 completely 3 times, easily.

Whew, that was one of my longest posts....