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

Finally got my 3820tg from ncix! I was surprised to see the fedex guy since i ordered it on the 22nd and received it on the 23rd!
screen seems to be fine for now

 

any of you ever encountered this?

I am running on battery.. no AC (i'm dead sure of this)... yet Win7 says it am not.


what happened this morning prior to this...
1. Took out battery, plug in AC and boot up notebook from Hibernation
2. Hibernate notebook, pull out AC, plug back Battery in
3. Boot up notebook running on battery


interestingly... the laptop did put itself into PowerSaving mode (the P light is on)... lol...

Rebooting fixed the problem. still odd though...

 

thanks for the heads up buy if I get one it will be the one from tiger direct because it has the 9-cell battery... apparently

 

That's very good score. My 5650 highest is at 760/1100, but have not test with 1.05 voltage. Anyway, it looks like 5650 only has 2 voltage settings: 0.9/1.0V according to the BIOS dump.

 

I am planning to be a 9 cell battery

7800mah 9 cell replacement Acer Aspire 3820T battery

Anyone tried buying battery from this online store???
is it trust worthy ???

 

damnit I dont know if I should wait for the new Acer or just get this one. Need one for Spring semester, my current one is too big.

 

Doesn't look good to me.. The original Acer 9cell battery is 9900mAh.

 

if spring semester starts in January, I would wait for CES to see what is available. The 6000 series units should start to appear in the us and Canada after the holidays. I would consider one of them. Dualcore Sandybridge units won't be announced until February and probably won't appear in North America until Q2. Even worse, it's possible that the new ultrathin 13" designs will not have dedicated GPU's. If that's the case, you may want to get a 3820TG before they sell-out and the TimelineX series is discontinued for good.

Bronsky

 

Do you mean the TLX series with ATi 5000 GPUs will be discontinued in a month or so?
Also, how do you think the new ones with 6000 GPUs will be priced in retrospect with the older ones which most of the guys here have?

Right now the i3/5650 3820TG is priced at 670~700$ in Canada, while the i5/5650 5820TG is priced at 800~900$. I will be buying a 5820TG in 2 weeks, but if retailers will be discontinuing them and carrying the newer series with similar pricing in a month I might as well wait. But if its 2 months or more then nah.

 

What we have seen since the rollout of TimelineX series was that new CPUs would just show up unannounced. We assumed that Acer's demand for parts made it necessary to feed new components directly into the production line. With the availability of the 6000 series, inventory is being replaced with these new units. We will probably still see a couple more shipments of the 5650 model at best. We will probably also see the 380 and the 480m.

I would guess that those will be the last shipments of TimelineX models sent to the distributors. By February, Sandy Bridge units will begin production.If Acer decides to make the new 13.3" model without a dedicated graphics card, you'll be glad you own a 3820TG. They will quickly become even harder to get.

Bronsky

 

I see, Bronsky.

How might I make sure (as much as possible) that I will catch the "unannounced" upgraded TimelineX train once it rolls by Canada? I'd really hope to buy a 5820TG with the 480M i5, and 6550.

 

The only way is to wait and hope.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Bronsky

 

I today noticed a COM port which is named: "HUAWEI Mobile Connect - 3G GPS Interface". What? EM770W has GPS?

Huawei site says:
* HSPA Embedded Module
* HSPA/UMTS 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100MHz
* HSUPA: 5.76Mbps (UL) / HSDPA: 7.2Mbps (DL)
* UMTS: 384kbps (DL/UL) / EDGE: 236.8kpbs (DL/UL)
* Windows 2000 / XP / Vista / 7

Nothing about GPS. Has anyone more info about that GPS? Also found by google the following:

Enabling/disabling the GPS part of a Huawei EM770W

Interesting.. Does it have a GPS and how to get it working?

 

Ok. I did connect to control inteface said that at command and then Earth Bridge started to get data.

Code:

$GPGSV,1,1,00*79
$GPGGA,,,,,,0,,,,,,,,*66
$GPRMC,,V,,,,,,,,,,N*53
$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*1E
$GPVTG,,T,,M,,N,,K*4E

Unfortunately I'm inside with tovel on and it's 00:41 here and outside is -23,5 °C. So not going outside to try to get signal

 

Thanks Bronsky, I will wait for CES.

 

Eh I might just pull the trigger on the i5 460M + 5650... mainly because I have a gut feeling that Canadian Acer won't update inventory as fast as other countries, and it'll be even slower to update inventory in retailers selling the TimelineX's. I'd rather not wait until February or something for that. i5 480M is only marginally better than i5 460M, and 6550 is more power-hungry than 5650 in exchange for the slight increase in graphics power.

Btw the 6550's people are getting so far ARE DDR3 and not GDDR5, am I right? If they are GDDR5 it might change my mind entirely still .

 

If they had GDDR5 I would tell you to wait also. Thats the only thing holding this thing back from being a desktop replacement for me.

I'm pretty sure it is only a 55mhz boost difference between 6550 and 5650.

 

Yeah if it's just DDR3, I doubt the 6550 is a higher binned chip compared to the 5650, since the 6570 is the rebranded 5730. This means 6550 will receive similar OC capabilities compared to 5650, maybe a bit more as it consumes more power and is higher-volted afaik.

I'm sure I've seen a person or two who received the 6550 version of TimelineX (or have ordered it), could you guys enlighten us as to if it's DDR3 or 5?

 

Anyone spot a 3820TG boxing day sale yet??? NCIX.com(might be hard to get into, it was just posted and servers are overloading) has their boxing day sales up but I didn't see a 3820TG :-(
Did see this Gateway Intel i3 370 4GB 750GB GeForce 420 15.6N for $549.99cdn though which could be a little bit of competition for what I buy. I hate the 15" screen though and want something smaller.

Please post if you come across a 3820TG sale even if you have one already.

 

Doesn't seem like its getting boxing day love Damarious. Besides, I've just skimmed through NCIX's boxing day sale list, it's a bit of a fail sale. No good deals with laptops at all. Even pricematches lower the prices lower than what they're offering today.

You'd be better off just pricematching MemoryExpress's 669$ 3820TG price @ NCIX.

Anyway that Gateway is good for the price, but it's still far off in power compared to the 3820TG, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, much MUCH far off in build quality. One buys the TImelineX's because they're Acer's ace laptops.

 

Thanks jerg. I think i'll avoide boxing day sales this year. Plans are to get a 3820TG and a perc5 card with 3 2TB drives for my home setup. Doesn't look look RAID worthy 2TB drives will have any sales so I guess I'm not really out much.

Anyone order a 9cell from Germany before? About how much was it? I want a 9cell and choices are:

Price match with memexpress then order a 9cell from Germany or,

Buy at tigerdirect for an extra $100 to get the 9cell version

I have family in Germany but even if they pick it up and ship it, it could be expensive.

 

Considering buying a 3820t in the next week or so, it's either something from the TimelineX series or an Inspiron 14r.

Is the only difference between the t and tg that the TG has a dedicated GPU?

 

memoryexpress is 649 now!!!! it's boxing day sales!!!!!

DAMN the price is falling!!!!!! i bought it 699

 

Hot damn that's just ridiculously cheap. I'd pull the trigger if only I like 13.3'' screens more than 15.6'' screens... imo Damarius you should lol. That's a lot of savings.

 

Hello,

merry christmas everyone. A couple of days ago i bought ssd disk ocz vertex 2 60gb for my 3820tg. Correct me if i'm wrong but as you said mouting ssd shouldnt harm battery lifetime or extend it a little bit. In my case i have 4h in power saving mode with wifi on and lowest brightness of display. Using WD Scorpio Blue 500gb it was >6h on the same settings. Isn't it normal? I have win 7 professional x64 fully optimized for ssd as ocz forums says. I installed latest drivers from acer's site (vga ati 8.741.1.6) and newest firmware (1.24) available on ocz's forum. Could you give me any advice? Thx in advance.

Greets

 

@rx78 thanks for the heads up

@jerg you said go for it, but I'm not sure which option you were referring too lol. $649 is cheap but how much is it to ship a battery over from Germany?

As far as I know SSD's are suppose to "increase" battery life. Sounds like you do have an issue there. hopefully someone can help, or tell me I'm wrong. Goodluck.


Merry Christmas all.

 

Can you not find anyone selling a 9cell on Ebay or Amazon?

 

Maybe you are using Hibernation. Hibernation is broken on the 3820TG, it works, but battery life is worse compared to when it's booted from a shut down.

There is no way a Vertex 2 can use more power than a HDD. There must be a problem elsewhere.

 

Hi everyone! I'm looking into buying the 3820tg configuration available at memoryexpress before the sale ends. Just a quick question (hopefully it hasn't been answered before).

How well does the battery perform under "mobile settings?" Basically i'm a university student and I need to be able to go to class, use wifi, and take notes in class. But I don't really need it to be at full brightness or have the 5650 running while i'm at school.

While I doubt I'll reach the 8 hours acer is boasting, I saw the notebookcheck review on the i5+5650 model @ only 4 hrs of battery life with WLAN, which might be a bit low for me. Does anyone with the i3+5650 combo have any insights into their battery life with the 6 cell battery? Should I spend almost $150 Canadian to just get a 9 cell instead of a 6 cell?

Thank you in advance!

 

hey guys i'm having a small problem with playing counter-strike 1.6.. i just can't figure out, why do i have only like 20-30fps with that powerfull cpu and ram.. i have old pc and it can run cs for 100fps without any problems.. thank you for advice
ps i got 3820T model

 

I just got the 3820TG. Is there any of making a keyboard shortcut or something on the quick launch bar to switch between Intel and ATI graphics?

Thanks.

 

If you have the 3820 T and not 3820 TG, then you only have integrated graphics which would explain the weaker performance compared to a desktop with a probably more powerful video card.

 

Hey guys, my 3820 is running between 54-71 degrees while idling

any tips for getting this down? its making a lot of noise when it gets up around 71.

 

You still checking out this thread?
Return it ASAP.
That looks like graphical artifacts to me which probably means you have a defective gpu or something is causing it to overheat.

Sorry but that seems like the best thing to do. If for some reason you can not RMA... well I guess then you could first try underclocking the gpu and see if that helps for the short term.

I believe so.

 

Hey guys, I just bought my acer 3820tg-7360 and the ati 5650 driver wont stop crashing, I'm always getting the error when I'm playing games: display driver amd has stopped responding and has successfully recovered from windows. I got the latest catalyst driver 10.12 and I just uninstalled the driver and did a driver sweeper and reinstalled it and I'm still getting the same error. In Furmark I get max temp 70C on stock clock and P95 I get 72C max. Has anybody had that issue before, should I rma it??
All the games run perfectly on the laptop but the only problem is that the driver crashes after every 5min.

 

Go back to the acer driver. If you still have problems RMA it. If not, stop using drivers not designed for the Acer.

 

I've seen on other forums that the latest drivers have been causing a few issues with a lot of ATI users... Try rolling back a release or 2, I bet it'll work then.

EDIT: Never mind. I just noticed bronsky posted. listen to bronsky. I don't actually own the laptop yet, I'm just telling you what I've read on other forums but bronsky knows a fair bit about the laptops so his advice will likely work a lot better then mine.

 

I tried using the driver on the acer website but still the same problem...

 

But considering CS 1.6 runs on the HL1 engine, which is from 1998, it should not be that slow. Even on integrated graphics, it should be wayyyy higher.

 

It still should only be around 30fps with low settings.
I tried running cs1.6 on an Eee pc and it ran pretty crappy.

 

IT WORKS! It's always nice to find features of your laptop which you didn't even know to have. Now the question is that how ease that use as
Acer's Mobile Connect doesn't have GPS in it. The program would be kind
of simple as it would just need to talk to command com port and send two commands. One to active and other to deactivate. GPS seems to go off after sleep.

Does anyone know softwares that would do that simple job or is there newer huawei mobile partner/connection manager that would have GPS in it?

Here's what I got when I was in car:

Code:

$GPGSV,3,1,11,09,69,202,,04,16,116,,13,07,331,19,05,30,052,28*7F
$GPGSV,3,2,11,12,49,248,,32,07,016,,16,48,286,33,30,55,217,33*79
$GPGSV,3,3,11,06,18,277,18,21,60,189,32,29,47,109,28*43
$GPGGA,074944.0,6141.267190,N,02716.083351,E,1,07,1.9,113.5,M,,,,*0B
$GPRMC,074944.0,A,6141.267190,N,02716.083351,E,18.9,104.3,261210,,,A*53
$GPGSA,A,3,05,06,13,16,21,29,30,,,,,,6.1,1.9,5.7*32
$GPVTG,104.3,T,,M,18.9,N,35.0,K*60

 

Hi everyone,
Ive been reading through this forum for the last month and i finally got my 3820TG(-7360) with i3-370m and HD5650 from LU computers all the way in Canada (I'm In Australia.)

So far it has been perfect! The screen looks fantastic and i have a fresh install of windows 7 64bit ultimate + a US BL Keyboard on the way.

My only problem is I cant find the parts of this 850 page thread which cover overclocking and which values need to be changed in setFSB also has anyone figured out how to overclock the GPU so that it does not revert when the computer is turned off?
If you could link me to the posts i would be very grateful

Cheers,
Tom

 

yep i know, but in fact the graphic card in desktop is even slower (its 4500GMA).. and i just dont think that i3 cpu and 4GB isnt capable of running the game for 100fps..

 

Setting Haddrive Power Management (harddrive clicking solution)

I had a really annoying clicking sound coming from the brand new haddrive (WD5000BEVT) (head is being parked every 10 seconds and harddrive spins up/down) due to aggressive power-saving. I looked at different settings in Windows and haven't found anything that could be affecting the drive. So I came to the conclusion that it is the drive itself.

hdparm.exe is a command line utility used to set and view hard disk hardware parameters (such as cache, sleep mode, power management). hdparm can be used to set the haddrive power management to a less aggressive mode. It is not permanent, so you will have to set it again every time you restart your computer.

Step 1.
Download and save the file to C:\Utils\hdparm.exe (choose your own location). hdparm v6.9-20070516 OR hdparm Setup.

Step 2.
Create an empty text file hdd_make_quiet.txt with the following text:

Code:

@echo on
C:\Windows\system32\hdparm.exe -B 254 /dev/sda
C:\Windows\system32\hdparm.exe -S 5 /dev/sda
pause

Explanation:
@echo on - tells Windows to print all the commands and information that are being executed (that black box with text)
C:\Windows\system32\hdparm.exe - is where hdparm.exe is located.
/dev/sda - is the location/name of your haddrive. This is a Linux utility originally, so think of it this way: sd = sata drive OR hd = IDE haddrive. That is followed by a = harddrive1, b = harddrive2, etc.
_____ -B - option to set Advanced Power Management Setting
________ 254 - number representing the power management setting (1-255). 1 is the most aggressive one and 255 disables power management. You can experiment here by setting it to different values. I found 254 works best for my drive (it stops clicking, and still does some power management).
_____ -S - sets standby (spindown) timeout
_______ 5 - number representing timeout (1 = 5sec). 5 = 25sec.
pause - tells Windows to keep the commandline open so that you can see the result of your executed commands. If it wasn't there, the window would just close.
You can see other available options by running hdparm.exe with no arguments.

Step 3.
Save the hdd_make_quiet.txt file, and change the file extension from .txt to .bat.

Step 4.
Right click on hdd_make_quiet.bat and select "Run as Administrator". You should see something like this if all is well:

Code:

C:\Windows\system32>C:\Windows\system32\hdparm.exe -B 254 /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xFE (254)

C:\Windows\system32>C:\Windows\system32\hdparm.exe -S 5 /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 setting standby to 5 (25 seconds)

C:\Windows\system32>pause
Press any key to continue . . .

If it were to fail it would give you an error message. If you run it without Administrator privileges you will get something like this:

Code:

C:\Users\Admin>hdparm.exe -B 254 /dev/sda
/dev/sda: Permission denied

Step 5.
Once you made sure the script works fine, you can edit the file again and remove pause from the file.

Step 6.
You can automate the process with Task Manager to run hdparm.exe automatically every time the computer boots, wakes-up from standby, etc.

Instructions are for Ubuntu/Debian
The above instructions are for Windows. If you use Linux, you can do the following:
1. Find the location of your harddrive. You can use sudo fdisk -l (Note: it is L not i). You might need to install fdisk, so you can do "sudo apt-get install fdisk".
2. Make sure you have hdparm installed by simply running it in terminal with no arguments. If it isn't installed, install via "sudo apt-get install hdparm"
3. There are two way to do this step. One is to make changes to the hdparm configure file (not described here, google for it) and another is to add it to the autorun.
In terminal:

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

Then add the following two lines BEFORE exit 0

Code:

hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
hdparm -S 5 /dev/sda

(See the explanation about these commands above in the Windows guide).
Save and close.
Now every time you restart your computer it should automatically set the correct power management options!

Hope this helps!

 

I have Acer 3820TG-3022 (i5-430M ATI 5470) and I have just replaced the stock thermal paste with Arctic Silver 5 (AS5). With laptop on my bed, surfing the web (on battery, ATI graphics OFF) for 2hours my fans turned on for a total of 1 minute! The silence was totally worth it! CPU temp stays around 40-42C.

Also, I have reinstalled Windows and I can't seem to get brightness controls to work with Graphics set to Discrete in the BIOS. I tried with both Acer drivers and ones from AMD website and it doesn't work with either. It works fine if graphics are on Switchable and running on ATI via the "Configure Switchable Graphics".

Does anyone else have this problem or a solution?

 

cs 1.6 runs great on my Aspire One and should run great on your EEE pc as well..., high settings in XP. I'll do some research on it, but in the meantime, assume that a game made for windows 98 is bound to have problems running on windows 7...

 

What FPS do you consider great?
And it should work fine in win7. I played hl1 in win7.

 

Have you tried the driver that is for the ATI 6xxx series that is on Acer's site?

It works fine for me with my 5650 on a fresh windows 7 install

 

a question,

Memoryexpress is selling 4gb pc8500 ddr3 for 39 each
i bought two,
but really, do i need 8 gb?

currently i have the page file disable with 4gb, it looks ok.
but will i need more then 4gb on my 3820tg?

i use it for gaming only

 

Can anyone reccommend a good set of RAM (8 GB) ?