Acer Aspire 5740G Owners Lounge

As far as I know I have the latest chipset drivers, though I'm not sure what exactly I should look at to confirm the driver version in the device manager. I do remember that when I installed the chipset drivers that I downloaded from Acer's site, the installation finished in a split second, without any sort of progress bar or anything. Is that normal?

 

I have excatly the same as him, WD Scorpio blue 500gb sata. I also haven't messed with the BIOS settings, As far I can see there isn't much options to change anything around. Which sucks.

What games are you having freeze on? I will download an ISO and play the game and see if I get the same problem as you do.

Intel(R) 5 Series 4 Port SATA AHCI Controller Version 9.6.0.1014, My model of this laptop is 5740G / 5340 series.

On another notice, Has anyone considered installing an OS onto an external harddrive and played a game on it?

I know the problem isnt windows 7 because I made a partition and installed Vista but still getting the same problem, I haven't formatted and done a fresh install on this laptop, Instead I just removed all that crap from add/remove. I don't think it would have anything to do with the freezes.

On the drivermax website, Everything is updated apart from wireless and ethernet,

Has anyone tried to play games on windows mode? What you do is load up task bar next to the game and check the CPU percent. I played Command and Conquer Renegade while having this up. Everytime the game freeze my CPU percent drops to 2% When the game is back to normal it goes back to average 20% running fine, It freezes every 30 sec's or so.

 

Update, I am going to buy an external portable harddrive and install an OS on it and try Renegade today, I will get back to you people later on today. If I am still getting the freezes or not.

 

Wrong place downloading Drivers from Acer is as updated as using an Abacus in a Math Class.

 

weinter, Where would you recommed downloading? drivers?

 

Always download from manufacturer's website or from the second post of the thread which I keep updated with hard-to-find drivers.
CPU goes down because the game freezes, not the other way around- I suppose.
If the WD HDD is the problem you should remove it and test the notebook with another drive- adding an external drive will not help it it's the WD that freezes the system.
BTW I don't have the problem and my HDD is Hitachi HTS545050B9A300
Anyone with th WD HDD and without the freeze-problem?

 

Mine is WD HDD too and I too face the problem of freezing while gaming but it happens occasionally only.

But I've noticed that the HDD activity LED lights up for as long as the freezing occurs. Looks like something is accessing the hdd (can't be antivirus as I make sure to disable it).

 

I’d recommend you buy notebook SATA drive and an external enclosure so if it turns out to be WD-related problem you could swap them and run system of the new drive and WD in an external enclosure as a backup/storage drive.

I'm gonna ask again- anyone with WD drive and no freezing problems?
Anyone with the freezing problem and non-WD drive?

 

Hi, Ok I am going to PC world.

I will buy a new hard drive 2.5" and test it out.

It's really pissing me off with the freeze's I am getting grrr! Overall the laptop is amazing but very very slight little problem £600 for the spec's of the laptop is seriously worth the money.

Is there any particular hard drive that I need to get? What about the hard drive called Tech Guys? I think its a crap one... But hey it's PC World rofl.

 

Please keep us updated. If a new drive is the only way to fix the issue, then I guess that is what I will have to do as well.

EDIT: I don't suppose since the laptop is still under warranty that Acer would be able to provide a new HDD, would they? After all the problem is no fault of our own.

 

Things to know

Consumer grade (i.e. non server) HDD's will go offline if they are detecting errors to try to recover or remap the sectors. This should be a very rare or 1 off event. If not there is a problem with the HDD

Have you looked at the SMART status of the drive in SIW or similar and/or run the makers free disk diagnostics yet

Is powersaving enabled on the HDD ?

Intel chipset drivers are not like VIA ones. Intel often simply installs an inf file so the OS can 'see' the devices and then installs/gets the drivers itself later

 

WD HDD here, 640Gb, not freezing what so ever.

 

Just bought tech guy hard drive 5400 rpm

Let you know in next few hours. If the hard drive is faulty I am sure there will be a new update driver for it.

 

Windows power-saving features have nothing to do with the problem it seems. It has already been tested and the problem persist even with spin-down set to "never"
That said there are some features of the HDD that windows does not control directly or does not allow the user to control like Power Management, Advanced Power Management or Interface Power Management.
It's enough that either there's less-than-perfect firmware on 500GB WD drive or certain settings of BIOS or Windows do not work well with certain settings implemented in this particular WD drive.

 

I found this review of the 500GB HD on New Egg:

"Cons: The hard drive parks the read/write heads constantly. This is the loud "click" noise everyone is speaking about, I am unsure of the idle time before this happens but all of these WD drives have very aggressive head parking, including the black models. At least with the 2.5 inch models, unsure about the 3.5

Whenever the read/write heads park the drive freezes, if you are playing a game or doing anything you will experience a one second freeze or so while the heads move back into position. (I am unsure if the freezing was JUST my specific drive, it may have been slightly defective.)

Other Thoughts: There is a utility to change the idle time before the heads park by WD that is not available for download on their site anymore, do some searching if you want it. It can help you with the performance issues if you have them with the aggressive head parking/power saving that's built in. Although this MAY void your warranty, I am unsure. Do some searching.

This drive would have been perfect if the drive didn't go insane with parking the heads. It was doing this about 67 times an hour. This worried me about the lifespan of the drive and caused me to return it (The freezing contributed also). "

And I found this utility, but it supposedly isn't designed for our version: WD Support > Downloads > SATA & SAS > WD RE2-GP.

 

I'd try it (after backing up the data).
I don't think it's risky- these things either work or they don't- if they don't the settings just remain unchanged- that's all.
I did the similar thing with Automatic Acoustic Management and tried to change this parking-head setting on my old HD- neither worked but it didn't damage the disk or anything.

BTW Could any of you guys with the freeze-problem and WD 500GB HDD could post full SMART status (form HD Tune Health tab for example)

 

Just downloaded HD Tune...the health tab is blank atm. What do I need to do?

 

That's weird- if the HDD is chosen and nothing is showing :/
You may try Everest, SpeedFan, HWinfo32 or trial of full version of HD Tune.
Basically anything showing full SMART status with the actual numbers/data.

 

I found this thread, which may or may not be useful for us with the freezing problem: http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell/168425-clicking-noise-issue-resolved.html.

I am running QuietHDD from the last page of that thread, and I haven't heard my drive heads park since, but I still need to test whether in makes a difference when playing a game.

 

Seriously considering getting this laptop with the i5 520M in it but would like to kno if the radeon 5650 in it is a ddr3 or gddr3?

 

No way to know. GPU-Z shows GDDR3 but that doesn't mean anything. I strongly suspect all 5650 use DDR3 as proven by notebookcheck crew disassembly of 5650 equipped Compal.
In theory GDDR3 should be faster but since this Compal aka Devil Tech is confirmed to have DDR3 and is not slower than the rest of 5650 equipped notebooks we can assume all are DDR3. It's just cheaper.

 

I'm afraid I have the same issue with my Gateway NV59 . Some games I've tried stutter.

 

WD 500GB drive?
Could you post full SMART status with all the data?

 

I have attached 2 files to the post. I'm afraid I don't have account on imageshack or a similar service.

 

I am typing this on my iPhone as I am at my mother in law house, Just a small update, I played Renegade for a hour with no freeze or stuttering at all. But I am not 100% confirmed because 1 hour is too short, I need to play at least 2/3 hours then I'll know for sure but it's looking good so far.

Tech guy internal 2.5" hdd and I installed win 7 pro anytime upgrade to win 7 ultimate got drivers from acer website and remaining drivers from cd

updated bios then reboot then update graphic reboot then installed 10 others along with win updates, no problem
playing Renegade so far running smoothly not had FPS freeze or stuttering yet but however I will update after I play 2/3 or 4 hours of gaming and let you know!.

Seems the problem lies with WD Scorpio blue HDD, So what do you suggest what we do with the hard drive? I'm going to follow downloads intruction and make Scorpio blue hdd into an external hdd. I really can't be bothered taking laptop back for them to send it away for weeks, Not worth the hassle!

 

Thanks Ray but the screen doesn’t contain the most important thing the data column.
What I need looks like this:

HD Tune Pro: Hitachi HTS545050B9A Health

ID Current Worst ThresholdData Status
(01) Raw Read Error Rate 100 100 62 0 ok
(02) Throughput Performance 100 100 40 0 ok
(03) Spin Up Time 138 138 33 2 ok
(04) Start/Stop Count 100 100 0 164 ok
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 5 0 ok
(07) Seek Error Rate 100 100 67 0 ok
(08) Seek Time Performance 100 100 40 0 ok
(09) Power On Hours Count 99 99 0 749 ok
(0A) Spin Retry Count 100 100 60 0 ok
(0C) Power Cycle Count 100 100 0 145 ok
(BF) G-sense Error Rate 100 100 0 0 ok
(C0) Power Off Retract Count 100 100 0 15 ok
(C1) Load Cycle Count 100 100 0 5538 ok
(C2) Temperature 134 134 0 1179689 ok
(C4) Reallocated Event Count 100 100 0 0 ok
(C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 0 ok
(C6) Offline Uncorrectable 100 100 0 0 ok
(C7) Ultra DMA CRC Error Count 200 200 0 0 ok
(DF) Load/Unload Retry Count 100 100 0 0 ok

Health Status : ok

I need only two parameters that are shown in bold (load cycle count may be called load/unload count or similarly)
Now the maths- my drive has been running for 749 hours total and has parked the heads 5538 times meaning it does it every 487 seconds (approx 8 minutes) on average.
If WD drives tend to park their heads more often it would show on SMART status- also any other potential problems would be pretty obvious.
I just need few people posting full SMART status of the 500GB WD drive to confirm that we're not barking at the wrong tree.

 

I filled a form online at the WD Customer Service system. Let's see what happens in the next days.

EDIT: Sorry about that downloads. I forgot the window had a scrollbar.

 

We're still not there
The program you used doesn't show the actual raw data- all I know is that your load/unload parameter went down to 197 (probably from 200) but I do not know how many load/unload events have been performed.
Could you possibly give HD Tune a try. Sorry to bother you- but I just need to bother someone to get the data. I promise I will bother other users too

 

Sorry, but I'll have to do it later.

I'm at work and the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics didn't took much time. Back to infamous PHP scripting .

 

I'm quite the noob with notebooks. This is my first ever notebook. I know this is a pretty ignorant question but I've never had to overclock anything that I've owned before computer/pc wise.

Where do I start? Any proffered programs, etc?

I looked through your post but only to find some information and benchmarks on the performance that an overclocked GPU will give you.

Any help would be very much appreciated! I'm just trying to find everything to boost the gaming performance. (Anything, little tips or tricks even)

Thanks in advance.

 

You missed this application in the first post. You type in the values and press "set clocks".
Keep in mind that the values you set are going to stick until system restart so, Power Play will not kick in after you are finished gaming. You need to launch AMD GPU Clock again and use "restore default clocks" to lest the card downclock itself to 2D clocks.
As for how much can you OC- it's mostly trial and error- you can safely assume that core will go above 600MHz and memory close to 900MHz- higher than that if you are lucky.
On an unrelated note- if you haven't updated BIOS to version at least 1.16 do so to avoid battery problems.

 

Ah... As far as I'm aware my notebook only has the Intel HD Accelerator chip and does not have the HD 5870 card. Or are they the same thing?

I'm downloading the 1.16 BIOS update regardless, though.

 

Hi

Another update, I have played 4 hours of gaming (Renegade). I can say I haven't been getting the freeze as I was.

Let me explain.

WD HDD, I get fps freeze ie every 30 seconds or less plus stuttering for about 5 seconds while my FPS dropped 60 to 5 FPS

So I went and purchased a new HDD Tech Guy 250gb 5400 rpm.

I updated all the drivers, Installed the game (Renegade) played it for 4 hours straight.

The FPS does freeze but every couple of mins and it freeze for like a second and FPS drops 60 to 40 then back up to 60.

So a little bit of a tweak will run very very smoothly, I am going to disable event log and try the gaming tommorow as I read here that people is having stuttering playing GTA and removing event log in service tab helped. So it's worth a try.

Very very very little freeze, So I am happy now. If anyone wants, I can make a video of the gaming little freeze and upload it here.

 

I have downloaded the GPU Clock tool, What do I set engine as? So I can set memory at about 600?

 

If you do not have an ATI card (5470 or 5650, not 5870 unfortunately) there's no overclocking for you.

What you are looking at is 100MHz core and 150MHz memory- these are 2D clocks. The moment you run a game these change to 550MHz core and 750MHz memory (these are values for HD5650) so setting memory to 600MHz is underclocking not overclocking. You have to go higher than 550/750 to make it overclocking

 

I have 5470 graphic card, Can I use the overclocking feature.

So you are saying for the laptop set to 100 engine and 150 memory then while I'm in a game ( Renegade ) then alt and tab to windows and run the clocks again to engine 550 and 750 memory?

Is that correct?

 

Nope. First of all I gave you default clocks for HD5650 not HD5470- yours default 3D clocks are 750MHz core and 800MHz memory.
First you launch AMD GPU Clock set the desired clocks and press "set clocks" (you may close AMD GPU Clock at that point or leave it running- it's not required though). Now you launch the game and play to your heart's content.
After you've finished you launch AMD GPU Clock again and use "restore default clocks" to bring back the 2D clocks. You gotta go through this procedure every time you decide you want to play a game with the card OCed.

 

Ahh, Now I get you. Cheers for clearing that up.

 

Catalyst 10.4 Performance Test (performed because I was bored )

All tests performed with 670/900 overclocking (the same as initial tests in the original post)

3DMark06
1280x800




Compared to 8365 with 10.3 preview. Basically no change- the benchmark is obsolete anyway but I can't run 3DMark Vantage because of the unsupported resolution.

STALKER Call Of Pripyat
1280x720 DX11



No performance improvements advertised for this game in the release notes however the average framerate goes up by 2fps for day, night and rain scenarios and 1fps for sun shafts compared to 10.3 preview.

GTA IV Liberty City Stories

Graphics Settings
Video Mode: 1366 x 768 (60 Hz)
Texture Quality: High
Shadow Quality: Off
Reflection Resolution: Medium
Water Quality: High
Texture Filter Quality: Tri-Linear
Night Shadows: Off
View Distance: 24
Detail Distance: 36

The lost and Damned

Catalyst 10.3 WHQL on average 37fps
Catalyst 10.4 WHQL on average 41fps

Nice gain!

Ballad of Gay Tony

Catalyst 10.3 WHQL on average 32fps
Catalyst 10.4 WHQL on average 33fps

Hard to expect anything more from this as this benchmarks has at least 10 explosions in it- not something you can really optimise.

Heaven Benchmark 2.0 DX11
Same performance as with 10.3 WHQL- meaning this


Additional feature is the Video Converter that is now also available via CCC in advanced view (used to be accessible from basic view only)

 

Hi I have Aspire 5740G notebook about two months now and it runs all games nice so far.About these freezing problems in the games,I had one too in Fallout 3 Game of The Year Edition.I was losing hope,that i bought this game and won't be able to play.I started playing F3 and it started crashing. sometimes within five minutes,sometimes within 15.That was so annoying,but i find solution.Turns out the game can't handle 4 cores and i5 processor have a dual core that acts like a quad core.So i opened the fallout.ini file in: My Documents\My Games\Fallout3 and there was the line bUseThreadedAI=0
changed it to bUseThreadedAI=1 and added another line after it and inserted iNumHWThreads=2.This limited the game to 2 cores and prevented the engine bug from causing the game to freeze.I hope that will helps,if you want to play best rpg (of course it's only my opinion on this notebook.

 

What is the name of your harddrive?

I did set affrinity to one dual core on the game.exe process bar in task manager but it didn't even help one bit, I replaced harddisk now the game runs great!

 

So switching in a new HDD completely fixed the problem, or is there still some remnant of the freezing?

 

Well, I was getting very very bad freeze and stuttering so
I swapped hard drive now my game is running smooth but I get little freeze for under a sec then back to normal quickly so switching hard drive fixed 95% of the freeze and stuttering, if you are a gamer then I advise you to switch hard drive, Its worth it, especially for me, Renegade is a 2003 game built for Win XP so that's probably why I'm getting very little freeze it doesn't affect my game play at all and it's very playable. I am sure the newest games will run
just perfect and playable, it wouldn't hurt to swap harddrive

 

Tnx, Downloads,for these performance tests you doing.I have exactly the same Aspire model like you 5740G-434G50Mn and for me interesting to see,what this notebook is capable of.Listen, maybe you played Metro 2033,coz I heard that Radeon 5xxx series cards are broken in this game under DX11.Even ati hd 5850 has problems to run it!

 

Is it possible to undervolt this CPU? With the program in the tutorial?

RMark CPU something?

 

I haven't played it but the game is really poorly optimized. DX11 is not really very demanding not to mention Metro 2033 doesn't look so great that it would make up for the terrible performance. And I'm afraid you are right- even desktop HD5890 has problems with it.

No not really. Seems new core i3/5/7 are built in a way that makes them and them only capable of changing voltage. There's a post or a thread about it on RMClock forum if I'm not mistaken.


I'm asking for the third time for full SMART data from anyone with WD 500GB drive to see if load/unload count is unreasonably high. Could anyone provide it? It's not that I really need it- mine works fine- I would like to be sure that freezing is caused by HDD not something else (and to confirm that before everybody starts spending money on new HDDs)

 

I have the 640Gb WD. Is it useful?

 

I have a Hitachi HTS545050B9A300. I have freezing problems albeit of a little different kind. And this happens only with Need For Speed Most Wanted, and moreover it started happening recently (It never used to happen earlier, used to run smooth as butter).
In the game, the view seems to jerk forward every few seconds. But the frame rate remains constantly above 55fps. Can't exactly call that stuttering, right?
I tried the "Set affinity" to set it one core (CPU 0), but the problem persists. Also tried to run it in compatibility for Win 2000. No use. I also uninstalled my ATI drivers completely, cleaned, and reinstalled them, but to no avail.

 

WD 640GB supposedly doesn't cause any problems but there's no such thing as too much data for comparison So if it's wouldn't cause too much fuss...
But I need it with the raw value, not just status, that's why I mentioned HD Tune.

That has happened during a review of some other racing game too. But that's not the same problem (luckily for you) Have you tried reinstalling the game?

 

Ok, so I just installed HD Tune, where do I get the info you need?