Acer TimelineX 3820TG Owners Lounge. Info, benchmarks, tweaks, mods and upgrades

Thank You!
I ve got now 7500
I have HD5650.
How to prevent this error will not occure next time?
I am thinking about install of CCC 10.8

 

Hello fellow 3820TG owners!

Today I installed a Corsair Force 120GB SSD into my 3820TG, very impressive performance overall right out of the box. However, when comparing the SSD performance to reviews and benchmarks on various websites, it seems to perform a bit slower in the 3820TG than in benchmark systems (which are desktop computers).

The drive specs are 285MB/sec read & 275MB/sec write. In reviews it gets around ~260MB/sec respectively, which is to be considered good. I get around 247MB/sec on both read & write (sequentially) in ATTO, but when using CrystalDiskMark or AS SSD to benchmark the drive, it lacks a good 100MB/sec in the write-department, peaking at around 130MB/sec. In these two apps, the sequential read-speed is also down at 200~205MB/sec.

So basically what I would like to know is if the mainboard in the 3820TG is just bottlenecking the SSD, or if I can make any improvements to these strange results with different drivers or something?

Could you other 3820TG + SSD users please post some numbers for me to compare with? It would be really helpful.

PS. I've checked all kinds of SSD-guides and I have also tried switching between three different SATA-drivers for Windows 7 (x64). AHCI, NCQ & TRIM are all activated.

 

So I done OC of GPU to 750/1030, in ATI tool no artifacts,
but still need to get hoe to OC the CPU :-(
I have on SETFSB Asus G73JH -64/760 :-( need to have some possitive values

 

Somewhat off topic: Make that Iridium and HF please. Iridium handsets does have a tendency to malfunction (atleast the rental ones). This summer we have been part of two searches after sailboats that didnt/couldnt communicate back when they was supposed to. Both ended up being fine, but with dead iridiums and out of vhf range. Having backup communication is especially important with your kind of "boat", as i hear they are somewhat prone to sinking

 

The multihuls rarely sink, although they are known to flip over quite a bit.

Bronsky

 

USPS tracking reports that my motherboard arrived in the People's Republic of China on 9-24-10 at 7:51 p.m. I guess Shark Technologies won't have the package until Monday at the earliest. Hopefully, the repairs won't take more than a couple of days to complete. In any event, I should know by the middle of next week if my motherboard can be repaired.

Bronsky

 

True, true. You`ll still be in somewhat of a pickle though. Get your roc and hf set mate, it would be stupid not to have it if you are going annapolis-bermuda (where they have triangles and stuff).

 

I've been looking at pictures of both the 3820TG and 3820T and having not seen either in real life, I don't know if they look the same physically. Is there a difference in lid colour between the two? Juding from the pictures I've seen, it would seem that the 3820T has a black lid and the 3820TG has a grey lid. Is this true?

 

Depends on where you buy it from. All of the original 3820T's and TG's had black metal covers. A month or so after they were released, silver covers started showing up on the 3820TGs.

 

Oh. Thanks for the clarification Bronsky. I prefer the black covers.

 

I take it to uni every day. I ride a bike everywhere, sometimes riding over 30 kms a day, I go from the seaside to almost Edinburgh castle in altitude, and all I can say is that this laptop is just good in weight! I don't take any books with me, I only read PDFs and library books. I will use it with an external NEC monitor with a HDMI - DVI cable, when my parcel arrives. Screen size it the best I found, no too big for lecture theatres, not to small to read books from.

 

Bronsky, you have to admit, nVidia started all these CUDA development years before anyone else was even talking about GPGPU, and they have invested years of development and loads of money in CUDA to polish it to the level where they are. I have been following some GPU based 3D renderer developments, and most of them just cannot make a product which runs on all hardware, because they say that the ATI driver is years behind nVidia's CUDA or OpenCL solution and they just cannot use ATI driver as of now.

 

There are small issues with SSD's and the chipset in your laptop. You can research this and tweak the problem if you need to, but from what I have read you will never really notice the difference.

There are basically two reasons for this. 1) The response time of your SSD is enhancing your performance much more then the throughput. 2) If you place a load on your cpu/chipset and re-run your benchmarks, you will notice it performs better. It's safe to assume that when you need max SSD performance, you are already loading your CPU/chipset (unlike benching the SSD by itself)

 

I just really help mine does not produce the shiftin on external display, because all my fix for the problem as of now is that I use Intel as much as I can.

I have already sent it to Acer and waited 10 days, but they sent it back stating that they cannot see the problem. And no one contacted me at all, asking for detailed explanation of the problem or anything at all.

 

Sorry, I do mathematics... Generally I would understand you, but not for this. I would get your point, when for example you add film-like random grain to a highly compressed MPEG source, making it look more natural, because instead of looking at artificial blocks of MPEG compression artifacts, you look at some more natural grain, and you don't notice the blocks that much. But not for VGA over DVI, never.

OK a real world example. My father got head-ache and eye-strain no matter what I have done with his computer, VGA cable and his LCD monitor. The picture looked really nice to me, I calibrated it with a test pattern, and I did not see anything weird. But he really suffered, and only at that computer. The solution was to use DVI cable, and his problem just vanished. Neither do I or anyone else have seen any difference, but for him, the DVI cable meant a way more relaxed experience.

 

It's not really the backlight. It's a bit shifting in blue-yellow range too. Very similar to white balance. I do feel it's a graphic card problem, or why else would it only happen on ATI?

 

Did you do clean install of Windows 7, or you used some hard drive cloning tool? Maybe you are not 4K aligned.

 

If you have G73 clockgen, you just click GetFSB, move the slider (there is only one), and click SetFSB. No -64 or 760, just something in the range of about 130...170.

 

Besides the discrete graphics on the 3820TG, is there anything else that's different between the 3820T and 3820TG?

Also, will the 3820T be quieter since it doesn't have the discrete graphics card? Or does the Optimus technology shut down the discrete graphics card on the 3820TG which means both will use the same amount of power, thereby dissipating the same amount of heat?

 

@ liquidkaos - Thanks for the information!

@ zsero - Yes, it's a clean install. I've also confirmed that Win 7 detected the drive as a SSD right from the start.

 

There is no Optimus, since that is a nVidia-technology. But yes, you can completely shut down the Radeon to make the laptop use the integrated GPU only. The Radeon fan also shuts down, so it should be just like the "T" I guess.

 

Hi guys!(sziasztok) I have just got laptop since 2 months without any issue so far.. Few days ago i experienced the same like the guy, who posted video to youtube about wlan issue. (WLAN dissapiering, and lagging, crackling sound on movie, music etc...) YouTube - Acer Aspire Timeline 3820TG WLAN issue. Faulty hardware?

At the begining of video u can hear crackling, lagging sound during the game. I have the same issue, but it comes when i lift my laptop, or take it in my hand. At the end its gonna crash completely. I have already tried to reinstall, but still have the issue. May i should send it back to acer? But what issue description? They will send me back with no repair, because this issue comes randomly.

Please help me!Thanks

 

I'm afraid the only option You've left is to send it to Acer's repair center, to have the WLAN card examined. BTW what card do You have - Broadcom or Atheros?
If they fail to deal with Your issue - as they did with Zsero's brightness shifting -, You can change the mini card see if that gets things straight.

 

The problem is that now I have to start watching for a 13.3", 3.9 lb dual cooling Fermi based ultralight notebook. Chances are pretty slim I think.

Bronsky

 

Is the bclk/cpu overclocked?

 

Have a look at the Travelmate Timeline X series, but the have no dual fan.

 

For those of you who imported your 3820TG, what did you do with regards to warranty? As I understand, Acer only has International Traveler's Warranty, which only applies if the claimant is a bona fide traveler:

Acer Service & Support

So, for those of you who've had to make warranty claims on your imported 3820TG, how did you go about it? Did you send the product back to the country you imported it from?

 

Travelmate GPU is too anemic. Plus, the dual fan is one of the primary reasons I love the Acer. Everytime I take the dam thing apart, I marvel at the cooling system. It is an engineering masterpiece.

My satelite image editing really needs a GPU as powerful as the HD 5650. It would be nice to be able to use that same power to aid in large modeling simulations in Matlab. Then I would not have to push (OC) the I5-540M as hard. I had been hoping that AMD would spend the R&D to push its Stream technology far enough that it is a real competitor with CUDA but NVIDIA is uniquily focused on parallel computing, mostly due to the intense competition from Intel and the specter of Sandybridge ultralight units.

My unit is fine for now, but ... .

Bronsky

 

... the mainboard takes a journey to china and is just eating rice and sushi.

 

Bankergolfer was able to register his PCHome unit with Acer NorthAmercia and they recognized his warranty here. You should search it in this thread. When I was trying to get a replacement speaker for my German unit, they recognized my warranty as a travlers warranty. I would go with the registration and full warranty here in NA.

Bronsky

 

Bronsky, I am no expert, but have you tried using the parallel toolbox in Matlab? With a 2C/4T cpu, surely that would help?.....unless your work requires some serious parallel processing.

 

Thanks. I am in Austraila and not sure if Acer Australia will do the same.

 

Yes we use it. We run very complex simulations and speed is the issue. Unlike my coworkers, I am doing it on a small 13.3" consumer notebook that is tweaked to its maximum.

Bronsky

 

this might be a silly question, but when i hit fn + f4 to put my computer to sleep, it seems to sleep right away and to wake it up I hit any button...But if i leave it for too long (not sure exact time but i left it asleep over night) and I check it the next morning, it seems to have shut off (i need to push the power button to turn it back on instead of just any key and also all the indicator lights were off). I tried to look under power options but couldn`t find a solution...is this normal?

btw batteries were not dead either thanks!

 

Just a minor bump in the road.

 

I can see both of them in device manager. Atheros PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet.... and Broadcom 802.11n....

The sound issue (whole laptop slowing down) comes definitly when i lift up my laptop or when i want to close the screen or when i hold it in my hand ( the whole case tenses so i think this is some contact issue:S

Anyway i'm in Belgium in Erasmus so this is my only laptop to work, wouldnt be good send it to acer for weeks:S

 

No everything is deafult.

 

The laptop changes the sleep modes.

The first one with the quick wake up is the standby mode. The data is hold into the ram and all the others parts of the laptop are going to a deep sleep mode. (Little power consum for the ram)

The second is in german called "Ruhezustand" and puts all the data from the ram to the hdd and switch of all the hardware. (No power consum)

In the poweroption you can change the delay time to change from standby to the "Ruhezustand".

 

Replace the unit.

I think the PCB of the mainboard is miss manufactured and under stress the electrical specification are missed.

You are the 3 -5 person, who reports the problem in this direction.

 

Sorry, this is not possible. This isn't the days of Windows 95 with sub 75hz CRT monitors giving people headaches. It's VGA & DVI. VGA does not cause headaches. VGA @ 60hz on LCD is rock solid and looks basically identical to DVI.

 

Its wierd, because it worked well for 2 months... so i have to send it back to acer?

Is there anyone who had same problem and managed to solve it?


Here is my video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM5Xiu6z0Yk

from 0:18 you can hear it. When i put it down its ok.

 

My next computer (as soon as I get back my motherboard and reassemble my unit that is )



Looks like the perfect field notebook. And the best thing is that I can't take it apart and modify it. This looks like the perfect compliment to the 3820TG. Runs Windows 7, has multitouch for causal use and can use a digital pen for precise imput.

Bronsky

 

Hmm, this really puzzles me, I think I've tried everything, but I get the same scores everytime. Anyone?

 

Why would you think it's not the age of Windows 95? VGA is a standard and it has not changed since the last 23 years! It is analogue, and the picture depends on the video cards + the monitors circuits. On many monitors you can not see checkerboard patterns without having dizzyness, it depends on the video card's DAC, on the cable, on the monitor's circuits, the monitors OSD settings, on radio interference, on basically everything. Yes, having a NEC or an EIZO helps a lot, but not even on them the picture is identical to pure digital data.

It's all just the polished VGA drivers and Windows 7 like operation systems which make you feel it has changed, but VGA is just a loosy old standard from 1987!

 

Ok so I've been travel around Belgium with my 3820TG. The notebook been great, expect for the most important think. The 6200 wifi card i have is a hunk of crap for a wifi card. Anything 2 bars or lower = a timed out trying to connect attempt. So annoying. My cellphone connects just fine. 6200 wifi can't do it. I have to connect a power source then it works sometimes...

Can anyone recommend a wifi card? I think i will try the Atheros again. My itel also connects at horrible link rates like 6-10 mbps. if the signal is 2 bars or less.

Also might be able to get a i5 580m for 200 bucks. So I might get one and try to overclock it to high 3.x ghz

 

just got a i5-460m model, and plan on OCing. Donated to setFSB guy, how long does it normally take to get the key?

What programs do you recommend for testing purposes?

 

Between less than 1 hour till 24 hours. He just has to check his mails.

 

VGA might be a standard from 1987, but DVI is from 1994. We aren't talking a real serious evolution. When it comes to computers, DVI is only marginally better then VGA. I can easily agree with you that DVI is a newer, superior technology to VGA - but I cannot see how a VGA cable on an LCD screen can cause headaches. Unless maybe the LCD had a seriously bad conversion circuitry and the VGA cable was long, thin and of poor quality.

I have a triple monitor setup at work with two DVI and one VGA all going to the same panels. There is visible no difference on any of the panels! (Acer 22" LCDs) -- And I am one of those guys that are prone to issues with flickering CRTs at 70hz and less.

 

I am actually really happy with my Atheros. My friends Macbook Pro 13 has to try many times even to see one specific network, and has absolutely no chance of connecting, whereas my 3820TG gets 2-3 bar signal, and can connect without a problem.

 

Took 10 minutes for me.