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

Hi. I have a problem with my acer 3820.

When I boot up the computer or I wake it up from sleep, the fans and the lights on the board turn on, but the screen remain completely black. It's not an error screen. It just seems to not receive any signal whatsoever.

I know that the computer is working well because I can hear the windows boot screen sound. However there is nothing on the laptop screen at all.

I tried pressing f5 f6 + fn but it doesn't work. I also tried rebooting the computer. Nothing changes.

I used to have this problem before if I woke the laptop from sleep using the power button. All I did then was to put it back to sleep using fn+f4 then reawake it with a press on the keyboard. That would boot up the screen.

However this does not work anymore. I have no idea what is going on or how to solve this.

Basically, the laptop works fine, but the screen gets no signal.

Do I have to send it to repair?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

Completely turn off computer. Turn it on and immediately close the lid. Wait until it goes into Standby, open lid and press power button. That helped me.

Have you tried the power drain?
1. Remove battery and disconnect AC.
2. Press and hold power button for 30sec.
3. Press and hold power button for 1 minute.
4. Put battery and AC back and turn it on.

 

I tried both solutions. Doesn't seem to change anything.

Thanks anyway.

 

Took me some time to update the driver for the sound card (not from Acer site of course) and it seems to have resolved the problem.

OOPS... Never mind!

 

Has anyone noticed the Intel HD graphics not working with youtube ?

Whenever I have my laptop unplugged I can't get videos on youtube to work. They get all garbled up like the driver isn't able to read flash (or whatever youtube uses).

I have the stock Intel HD x.3000 driver and whenever I try to install the latest driver from Intel, it says not compatible and contact Acer.

Any help?

 

What are the stock clocks of the ATI 5650 in the 3820tg?

 

I'm not sure anyone has a 3820TG with the 5650 in their hands yet, but if Acer follows suit on the 3820 like they did with the 4820 and 5820 they'll be at 550MHz, which is the stock for 5650. Also likely unlocked and easily overclockable to 650 and a bump from a 7700 3dMark06 to 8600. My laptop (4820TG w 5650 and i5 460M) is completely stable at 650MHz core and 900MHz memory clock, which is what let me hit 8600. Some folks have overclocked their GPU and CPUs enough to approach 3dMark06 scores of 10,000. But I'd start worrying about heat at those numbrers.

 

Theres a hotfix here You cannot make a computer that is running Windows 7 shut down or sleep but obviously thats no good to you if you cant see! Did you have it connected to a projector? Try pressing windows + p then press lest twice and then enter. Or try fn + f5. Sometimes when I have had the laptop connected to an external screen it doesnt reset properly. Though a restart always fixes it? Actually do you even see a bios? Because if you dont see that it must be something more serious....
You should try hooking it up to an external monitor and see if you get anything

 

Sadly, I am experiencing a Similar problem as of today. I put my computer in standby with lid open last night and came to find it frozen this morning. The power button would not bring it out of sleep and no other key combos would work. I had to hold the power key to turn off the machine. Anyone know what to do?

 

I'd say just turn it off at night. Personally I turn it off when I'm not using it for a few hours. If you "need" to have it on all night maybe you should have considered a desktop?

 

Thanks Sxooter. With your overclock vs stock clocks, what is the average FPS you gain in most games?

 

I can see via external monitors, and the computer is working fine. However I can't see anything on the laptop screen itself at all (not even a flash), including the BIOS.

I don't think the laptop has received any physical impact of any sort as far as I know of. There is no visible damage at all on the laptop or the screen.

 

I'd try to return it if I was you...sounds like a serious enough problem....though it could be something as simple as the laptop cable coming loose....still wouldnt go opening it up as I guess you're under warranty

 

I'd say it was the hard drive freezing....what hard drive are you using?

 

Just so you guys know, the Cendirect 3820TG has only ATI 5470, they lied about it having 5650.

Deltido here who just received the laptop confirmed it; him and several others who ordered it will be painstakingly returning it.

If it looks too good to be true, 9/10 times it is, quite a shame though.

 

I bought the 3820tg-3022 with ATI 5470 i5 430M, 4GB at Staples Canada on sale for $599 minus $50 coupon.

$550 is a good deal I think. I don't play too many games.

 

Yep, yours has a better CPU and a weaker GPU, fair trade if you aren't too into gaming.

 

Yes. Switchable graphics make it difficult to update video card driver so you can't even update to the latest version.

 

so are you saying I have to accept the fact that youtube doesnt work?

 

Oh wow! got a link??? the best staples sale I saw for that model was 699. for 599 with a coupon (grabbed online I assume?) it would be an amazing suggestion for my friend, who doesn't game.

 

I got a 3820TG-7360 today at Visions Electronics in Calgary for $668. They have stores all over Western Canada. You can order online too:

http://www.visions.ca/Catalogue/Cate...productId=7160

They seem to have plenty of stock and you get air miles too.

 

Did you already try disabling hardware acceleration?

Right click the Flash video, go to Settings..., under the Display tab, uncheck "Enable hardware acceleration".

Alternative is to update your driver to the 8.741.1.6 ones instead of the 8.713.3.3000 ones. You can find the 8.741.1.6 drivers here. I think Acer made a mistake in updating the 3820T section (and a couple others) with this updated driver but not the 3820TG section. However, this driver (with its corresponding 8.15.10.2125 Intel GMA HD driver) will cause crashing while on integrated mode in IE9/Firefox 4 beta if GPU acceleration is enabled.

I just spent several hours messing with my drivers (with plenty of failures) to get it so that I can view all Flash content with hardware acceleration enabled and also use IE9/Firefox 4 beta without crashing on the integrated graphics. I would not recommend doing what I did, but I ended up manually getting the Intel GMA HD driver (8.15.10.2189) from the latest HP ENVY 14 graphics driver to install alongside the 8.741.1.6 Acer driver package, all while retaining the ability to switch graphics. Once I was able to do that, now I can use IE9/Firefox 4 beta's GPU acceleration and Flash hardware acceleration on both discrete/integrated modes without any issues. However, I really don't know if it's safe to do what I did... *crosses fingers*

 

The only one I've really compared is Crysis where I went from about 24 or 25 fps with gamer settings to 30fps with gamer settings at the overclock that got me to 8600 3DMark06 score.

Basically before overclocking I was running mainstream gfx on crysis to get decent framerate, something like 34 or something. I could get 40 something overclocked at mainstream. Going to gamer setting (3rd of 4 settings) was possible because of the overclock, because at around 24fps things start to look non-fluid to me.

 

Anyone has any suggestion on this one? I am now pretty sure that it's not a sound card issue, as I changed the driver several times, once to the latest version and once back to the default and the problem stayed. I also connected my external Creative X-Fi 5.1 USB sound card to it, and the problem seemed to stay: Instead of stuttering, the sound would just broke for like 1/10th of a second.

So I am pretty sure it's something with the hard drive. Somebody suggested uninstalling the Intel (R) storage driver. I did and the problem stayed.

Too bad that it has been 5 days I have had this baby and it has been perfect except for this really annoying issue. And in trying to resolve this problem I am becoming an expert on computer hardware. I don't like this problem going on unresolved forever on my computer. So I am thinking about returning it, despite how great it has been.

BTW, it seems a lot of fellows here has upgraded their 3820TG to a SSD and never had this problem. Is it worth it to upgrade to an 120G SSD? 120G seems to be an awkward size as it might be a little bit too small, while 160G too expensive.

 

Thanks for sharing that...I would've never come up with your driver combination lol...

BTW I'm using the latest flash player update.

I tried to play a few other flash videos and they worked fine with original settings. Maybe it was just a bad encode that I was having trouble with.

 

The issue comes and goes on mine. I have an SSD on the way so I'll let ya know in a few days. Someone here mentioned that an SSD didn't fix it though.

 

hello,
I've installed the last ATI mobile drivers from AMD's website. Now I cannot change the brightness of the screen, however if I switch to Intel driver I can do it.

Do you have any idea to solve the problem with the ATI card? It's quite inconvenient to switch all the time to adjust brightness.

Thanks

 

Hi everybody,
I just recently bought the Australian version of the 3820TG (Which comes with a Core i5 480M, the 5650, and 750GB HDD), and I've found the thread really helpful with getting started, so I thought I'd say thanks! I'd also like to ask if anyone else is experiencing issues playing Black Ops? At first I had what appeared to be artifacts, but what turned out to be a rendering bug which was swiftly eliminated by disabling shadows, but the graphic drivers still seem to crash and then recover every 10 to 15 minutes. Any other game works 100%, just not Black Ops, which is frustrating. I haven't OCed anything, and I've even updated to the BETA 11.1 drivers to see if they would help, but no dice. So if anyone can help that would be fantastic.

Cheers

EDIT: I've also noticed you guys reporting that your cards appear as 6650 as of recent times, yet mine now appears as Radeon 5600/5700 series, which is odd. Latest BIOS is installed (1.19).

 

I had the same issue. It works again when you use the ATI drivers on Acer's site. If I switch to discrete in the BIOS, I lose that functionality as well.

My annoyances are:

Screen flickering at low intensity (I thought I had solved that with a paramater in the settings but it came back)

Irregular noise from the FAN. It`s like sometimes, the air runs into some obstruction and the sound pitch changes. Once you know it's there, it gets annoying.

 

Im prestiege 4 in Black Ops. Does it happen in single player mode as well? My game stops responding in multiplayer and I have to control del alt out of it, its the only game I play that has any problems what so ever(this is on the laptop in my sig I got month ago). From the people I have talked to about 90% of them have issues with the game doing what its not suppose to from errors or it not responding. Your drivers have nothing to do with why its happening, its just not properly coded is all.

 

I've lost my patience. Why bother with a multimedia laptop that can not even play video/audio smoothly?

Tried any suggestion I can found online, including:

Use quietHDD, upgrade sound card drivers, downgrade to original sound card drivers, upgrade all drivers, downgrade to all original drivers, uninstall Intel (R) storage drive, reinstall Intel (R) storage drive, disable virtual memory, and completely restore the system to original status.

Spent 20+ hours on it and the issue never went away. Plan to return the laptop today. Good that I did not buy from Canada computers so I don't have to pay any restocking fee.

 

Hey folks, I too have this Acer with but with i5 430M 2.27Ghz only and the rest you know what is
I wanna update the system. I'm planning to buy 2x4GB DDR3 1333Mhz Corsair, and 60GB SSD Force Corsair, to speed up the system lil'bit.
What will you say, is my choice correct? And is there really point to update the RAM? And are the 60GB be too small for win7, photoshop, internet?
I found that the laptop support max 1066Mhz, will it run the Corsair on lower state - 1060mhz?
I really miss Usb3.0 or mainly eSata Can you get eSata cable somehow out, to replace the SD reader or any USB?! Or if we just had expressport it would be awesome...

btw. I am really glad that i found this forum Chears

 

Hey all,

I've been following this thread for a few months now and I ended up getting a 3820TG as a Christmas gift to myself. So far I haven't had a single issue with it, until last night/this morning.

I usually leave it hooked up to an external monitor through HDMI, and I had my audio going out through HDMI and into the monitor so I could use the speakers there... No problem so far.

Well, last night I disconnected my 3820TG from the external monitor and used it as a proper notebook for the first time since I'd hooked it up to the monitor, and again, no problems there... everything was working fine.

This morning however, after reconnecting the HDMI cable, I'm not getting any audio through my monitor. If I switch the output device in Win 7 from Realtek Digital Output to the notebook speakers, it works fine, and if I hook my Logitech G35 USB Headphones up, it works fine.

It should be noted that there is sound metering on the mixer, so I'm assuming the audio device is working the way it's supposed to, I'm just not getting any sound from it.

Is there a setting or something I should be looking for, or even a function key on the notebook itself?

(This is my first Windows headache since coming back to Windows after owning a Mac for 8 years, and it's really frustrating!)

Thanks!

 

Hey 60GB will be very very small. Think abot, that you should only use 80-90% of the SSD space.
The Ram will work at the 1033 frequency.

To mod an Sata Port from the chipset to the outside we need a schematic of the board first.

 

It's likely you're running on the ATI5650 when it works and Intel when it doesn't. Try making sure you're on the ATI high powered GPU and see if it works.

 

I checked and I was still running on the 5650, but I switched to the Intel GPU and then switched back, and I guess I wasn't using Realtek HD Audio as an output after all.

When I switched back, my ATI HDMI output came back as an option, and now everything is good!

Thanks!

 

hi guys!!!
i'm new in this forum, and i'm writing from italy, so forgive my english!!
BTW, i'm seriously thinking to buy the 3820tg (from CU of course)
but i'm not very convinced about the absence of ODD, how can i play my favourite games without a dvd player??? a solution would be an external drive but it's not so comfortable don't you??
NODVD patches are not so great, and doesn't work well every time..
when i'll have it in my hands i'll need some help to OC the cpu, i've no confidence with SETFSB and i haven't understood the procedure so well..
is that the right thread for my questions???
thank you very much!!

 

I've got it down to the HDD or 5650. It "could" be the cpu but I doubt it.

I don't think it's the sound card because I stream music from NAS while I game and when the game freezes the music still plays fine. The music would freeze too if it was a sound card issue. Like I said before, watching performance monitor I found the HDD spikes and I think it's related to the HDD (or at least I pray it's the HDD and NOT the 5650 faltering). We might have bad HDDs but even after buying new ones these 3820TGs are still amazing deals.


EDIT: Welcome Fab

 

Just a note, don't overclock the CPU if you want a high framerate. Both together don't work.

 

I haven't actually tried playing single player after disabling shadows, I'll give it a shot today. A possibility could be that I'm a bit more lucky and instead of having to end the process, it just recovers itself? regardless, it's annoying because I always get killed when it happens, and given that I can play BF:BC2 on Ultra without AA at around 30-45FPS, what's the point in playing black ops when it's going to freeze every 10 minutes

 

well my BO randomly does it every 10 to 20 hours or so. Mind you this is coming from a laptop that used to Blue screen of death on me hundreads and hundreads of times over the course of a few years. Some things are worse then others, this is just a hicup compared to that travesty although its annoying none the less. I can garintee you though that it wont happen in Single player...Im almost sure of it. Your thing sounds different though then my thing, what does your thin do exatly? What do you mean by " the graphics drivers crash every 10 minutes or so?"

 

I'm assuming the graphics driver is crashing, but basically, the game freezes, (both the visual and audio side of things), and then about 20 seconds later it seems to 'alt-tab' out of the game to the desktop and back again, with the back-light for the screen going on and off a couple of times, and then the game comes back as nothing ever happened. The FPS doesn't drop during gameplay either, but like I said in the first post, random boxes were being drawn in the game, and they weren't artifacts as they had shadows, disabling shadows removed them, but the crashing still occurred. I also returned the laptop the first time I got it because it was getting BSOD's along the lines of "The Display driver could not be recovered and timed out" on virtually any game and artifacts were all over the place. With the replacement, however, only Black Ops crashes, and gets the aforementioned glitch with shadows enabled.

EDIT: So I played Singleplayer, and the same thing happens, except this time it actually just BSOD'd, saying that "Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed." The laptop also heated up to the point where the keys on my keyboard were starting to get very very warm! Battlefield still works though, so it's definitely something specific to Black Ops...

 

Hi again,
Yesterday i've reinstalled W7HP x64 to my 3820TG, but i have some troubles with the VGA drivers. I installed stock ATI VGA from acer website, then tried to install the newest intel driver from their website, but the installer doesn't even start. the Intel drivesr from the acer download page install sucessfully, then after switching the VGA to discrete, and booting in W7 i've instaled the .12 catalyst. from this point, windows WEI crashes while testing the VGA.

Looking the previous post, there is something definately wrong with these drivers.

 

Thanks for the answer, if you press ctrl + x the windows mobility panel opens and it is possible to adjust the brightness. My screen is flickering too, what parameter did you change in your settings?

 

Just opened this up yesterday and tested it out. i3 370m, 5650. After playing bad company 2 for 40 minutes, my temps where

CPU: max 76
GPU: Max 88

Oh yeah, no OC'ing or anything. Does the GPU temp seem a little high?

 

The max temp on the I3-370M is 90C so you are still 14C under it after a couple of hours of playing BC2. BC2 requires a lot of power. I woujld not be too concerned about those temps. The I3 has no turbo mode so you are using it at max clock speed the entire time you're playing. Just look at the 88C on your GPU. That is an indication of how hard the game has made your system work.

Bronsky

 

ok cool thanks. yeah was mostly worried about the gpu temp, but if thats fine, then im not really worried. I thought most people gpus maxed out at like 80-85? I'll prolly put thermal paste on later when the warranties up.

 

Acer's factory paste is sometimes uneavenly applied. On my unit (originally the same configuration as yours) IC Diamond 7 brought temps down 10C. Well worth the effort. If your GPU is overheating, it will shut down. You could try a burn test like Intelburntest to see if your GPU will shut down under stress.

Bronsky

 

so I updated to the newer acer driver, and it gave me this score

Result (7437)

I saw scores of like 9000 around here, is mine lower because of my cpu?

and thanks bronsky, in advance

 

@zulu2k
You haven't overclocked, have you?
Scores of over 8K are always with OCed GPU.