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

Interesting; there's a few on eBay but they're all mostly for the US keyboard version. I guess I'll get one when the US 3820tg keyboard replacements pop up on eBay.

 

Two day before sending out my little buddy to the service center, it still saved the day for my friends making a short movie for a local festival.

First, it was the only computer that could encode the movie into h264 before the given deadline, when overclocked my computer was about 2.5x times faster than the Dell M1710 XPS the project was cut on. Later, in the movie theatre, it was the only computer what could play the 1080p h264 stream without any problem on the digital cinema projector. It was so much fun, running into the projection room an connecting my 3820TG to a Panasonic DW10000 projector costing $75,000 USD. Playing the movie using DXVA in Media Player Classic Homecinema was smooth and the colors were beautiful (using ATI card and HDMI of course).

 

Fixed my graphic glitches in Mafia II. I installed the Acer 10.x driver and all good. Seems that 10.7 and 10.8 are bugged for the game. The darkness after exiting the game issue is still there

 

Thanks Bronsky, that's good to know. No 3820 replacement keyboards anywhere I can see so far, but it's a pretty annoying problem so I'm gonna try a 3810 keyboard for now and maybe switch later. Also can't wait to put an SSD in this thing

Cheers, Nir

 

Ok, I seem to have been able to reproduce my garbled screen problem.

Only seems to happen when the computer is left idle and not doing anything for a while. The screen will become a garbled mess of random colors and then go straight to blanking out followed up with freezing that only a hard reboot can fix.

I'm not sure whats wrong, but I'm starting to think I have a defective laptop.

Looks like I'll have a story to tell on how well PCHome handles returns/exchanges.

 

So it doesnt come with the 5650 outside of US?

 

Could you run ATITool in artifact scanning mode for 24 hours? Try OCCT GPU normal and GPU memory mode for a few hours too! Be careful, it stresses the GPU a lot, think about good cooling before.

But for me, your description seems 99% sure to be a defective GPU. I would guess, it doesn't happen on Intel, does it?

 

For really old school trackpad, you can uninstall the Synaptics driver. Or switch off all functions manually.

 

Check for overscan in CCC. The stock 10.6 driver does not do it for me.

 

1. Clean install (do ABR backup first, but if you missed it, I can send you 3820TG activation, as all of them has the same data)
2. Use newest drivers from Acer.
3. Don't install _any_ app, except for Launch Manager
4. I wrote a little guide a few pages back for getting longer battery life. Basically it's true for general windows performance too.

 

I would try leaving the laptop connected to a wired network and pinging the computer, or maybe Remote Desktopping into it. Maybe its on, just the screen is blank.

 

No joy here with SetFSB. For some reason I can't seem to find a clockgen that gives anything that looks normal when I do a "getfsb".

When my new keyboard arrives (can't stand the Canadian bilinual KB), I may yank the laptop apart again to see if I can find the clock chip... Should have done that yesterday...

Anyone know if the clock chip is on the top or bottom of the motherboard?

 

I am quite sure it's not possible over normal VGA, the max supported is QXGA what is 2048x1536. It's not even supported over normal DVI, it needs dual-link DVI. Even for DisplayPort > DVI or HDMI, it needs a $100 active conversion unit.

 

10.8 is broken for our machine, not recommended. You can either just use stock 10.6 Acer, it's fine for me. Or 10.7a by: 10.6 > discreet > 10.7a > switchable.

Not need for intel!

 

Computer runs fine until suddenly garbled screen followed by freezing. =(

 

You can find your PLL through disgnostics. Not that it will help much. I know of at least one Staples 3820TG that is OC'ed to 3.0ghz. I could ask what clockgen setting they use. Your ideal clockgen might not look right on first blush, you have to play with the slides until you can get an idea if the ratios in the gen are similar to the ideal settings on your unit. You have to be patient and take your time in a methodical fashion. I would not start ripping crap apart just yet.

 

The 3820TG doesn't have DisplayPort though. If it did we'd be all set, because the 3008WFP supports it.

the 2048x1536 "max" resolution over VGA is at 85Hz I believe. I think if you lower the refresh rate to 60Hz there may be enough bandwidth to push 2560x1600. I tried last night on a Vostro 3400, but I can't find a way to get Windows 7 to allow custom resolutions. There's normally an option in the nVidia Control Panel, but it doesn't seem to be there in the latest version.

 

So its the ratios that are the key, not the stated values?

I'm very new to OCing... This is all terra incognita for me.

 

Then this is going to like trying to read Martian for awhile. If the basic clockgens worked for you, all you would have to do is move a single slide until your core got unstable and then leave it there. No such luck for you and I. It took me the better part of 2 weeks to figure out that our units are OCable and then to select the right clockgen for my unit.

The good news is that your unit is OCable. You have a staples unit right? And you checked for the "0" in bit 6, byte 09h? So now, the hard part is finding a decent clockgen to start with.

If you want, I have a thread that I have been using for OC issues. http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/513560-possibly-overclocking-unclockable-3820tg.html There are less posts and we can exchange information without overloading this thread. I'll send a message to the guy that has OC'd his staples unit and see what he did. Once I find out which def he used, I'll post his data on that thread and let you know on here that's it's posted and we can use that thread from that point on. Lets take it one step at a time.

Bronsky

 

I'm planning on getting one of these and kinda deciding on if I should OC it or not, how has OCing the 3820TG affected its battery life?

 

This time I completely uninstalled all the ATI and drivers and did this:

Set Switchable

Install ATI-VGA

Set Discrete

Install ATI-10.8 Catalyst

Set Switchable, reinstall ATI 10.8 Catalyst if the drivers didn't stick (I needed to do this for some reason)

I get lower drain on integrated now, and good performance in med/high in SC2 on 768 res. Battery life in integrated even managed to hit ~7hrs with low settings and wifi on, doing chats and surfing

 

Proud owner of a i5 460 3820tg! Just bought it at a tech market in Shanghai, China. 6200RMB = 900 USD

 

Everyone keeps talkign about the intel 6200 and how it's a better card than the atheros ,

but i am not so sure anymore..


I set up my NAS today ds210+ synology, and i was testing out wifi speeds

the 3820tg vs hp envy with the intel 6200 n

router dlink dir 655, only N clients, and AES encryption wpa on.

from the same location in the house kitchen

Intel 6200 - gets 2-3mb ( copy from hp to nas )
atheros in the acer gets 5-7mb

Closer to the router

Intel 6200 gets 5-8mb

Atheros gets about 10-17 ( goes up and down but remains steady between those )

running in a NAS environment the atheros seems so much better even at further distance, and my kitchen to the router is fairly far!!!

just a heads up for people running out to buy the intel card

 

Looks like the crazy, haphazard marketing strategies we have been seeing from Acer over the past 6 months are taking their toll. The company that was promising to take HP's #1 slot in total computer units sold seems to have fallen quite short of that goal. Instead of making a run at HP, Acer has fallen back into third place behind Dell with sales decreasing nearly 7% in Q2 over Q1. Hopefully, this will motivate Acer to start listening to its potential markets a bit more.

Bronsky

 

That was roughly the same way I installed them as well.
Cat 10.8 working great and switching back and forth fine, with similar excellent battery life when switched to Intel.
ATi no longer listed the older drivers, so went with 10.8 and happy I did. Zero issues or problems.

Device manager shows
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5600/5700 Series 8.762.0.0 8/3/2010
Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator HD 8.713.3.3000 4/20/2010
(when switched to Intel card for power saving, only Intel shows up in device manager)

In and out of Hybernate correctly sticks with what you are using, unless you switch power mode while hybernating, such as running on batteries, hybernate, then plug in AC before coming out of hybernate. In that case it seemed to switch to ATi and a reboot was required before switching would work again.

 

Congratulations, I think you're the first one with the i5-460m

Would you mind to tell us your BIOS version? This could clarify if we need an update to use the new cpus in our "old" models

I can confirm this... didn't test the hibernate stuff, but I've got no problems with 10.8 regarding power, switching, external screens...

 

singapore is already selling it for quite some time ago.

 

Yes, I know... but I think he's the first one who mentioned here that he's gotten one...

 

Nice.

I'm perefectly happy with the Atheros too (please don't judge me).

Right now I'm a floor away from the router, getting full strength of the signal, utilizing all of the bandwith, all in all, no complaints here.

 

The thing that first drew me to the 3820TG was its obvious multimedia potential. My work has evolved over the years to rely heavily on the presentation of various media. I knew when I first saw the specs and size of the 3820TG, that it would be perfect. Your story really drives this fact home.

BTW, is your friend an X-rated film maker?

Bronsky

 

SetFSB, SetFSB, SetFSB please! Could you download the shareware version and select Asus G73 profile and push GetFSB? I almost bought one, I am curious how well they can overclock.

 

Yes, in the projector room, they tried to use various Macs with VLC, which all suffered from gamma correction problems or they were not fast enough for 1080p. That happens when Steve Jobs doesn't like Bluray... I've just plugged in my Acer costing 2 or 3 times less than any of the macs in there, and it played it smoothly at 5% CPU usage (I love MPC-HC). And I have to say that this card (HD5650) played the HD material in a better quality than anything I have seen before. I knew that ATI put so much effort into home-theatre part of their products, and that it requires a stronger 5... series card, but I was really surprised when I saw what it can do on the big screen.

And no, it was a film about a guy building it's own bike for a bike film festival...

 

From the Dell U2711 user manual:
Documentation

 

The Source

 

Hey guys, I've been out all day so I haven't had much time to play with the laptop, but I'll try to help in any way possible. WEI is 5.5, because I only have 2GB of RAM. It's really weird how notebooks here only have 2GB of RAM standard, and I haven't gone out to buy another stick yet. Processor got a 6.8 rating.
Bios version is 1.13, which I believe is the newest one on the acer support site right? No need to update the bios for people looking to upgrade their processors.

I'm kinda busy with work at the moment, but I'll try SetFSB when I get some time, I've been meaning to try and overclock this baby too.

One question, how do I tell which LCD panel I have? It's been working very well, no screen flicker or pixelization issues.

Oh yeah, used Vistalizator to change from Windows 7 Chinese to English, worked like a charm.

 

Thanks

Select your screen from the device manager, goto details and select the hardware id property.

 

LGD023F, is this a new one?

 

It's not the first LG we've seen. There have been two others. You're the first to get an LG who likes his display.

Bronsky

 

Yes the last guy on an LG said it was average. But the screens here seem to be random. Like the clock gens. Must depend on stocks and build date. But LG screen should be better than AUO I would think. I've had two different AUO screens and both good in my books.

 

What marketing LOL? I've only seen magazine inserts so far from Acer, and bad ones at that.

Haven't seen any TV or radio spots from Acer.

 

hey guys, can anyone with 1-.7 or 10.8 ccc tell me if it has overdrive tab like the desktop ccc

with 2 external monitors 1080 and 1200 is it normal to be around 70c all the time?
one running flash streaming and the other running programming stuff.
can the unit take 70c to 80c almost all day (some days) lol
thanks

 

74C is the normal operating temp of my HD 5650 GPU under load.

 

No Overdrive tab on 10.7 and 10.8.

Just use the AMD tool.

 

sorry Bronsky i should have said CPU temp
edit thanks Nick
edit thanks Bronsky

 

Since the 5820TG thread seems to be dead I'll post this question here. I downloaded and installed the "VGA_AMD_8.713.3.3000_W7x64_A" driver which had a selectable "PX Profile Update" option during install. I assume it has to do with power saving (PowerXpress) but I'm wondering if I would lose whatever functionality it brings if I install the 10.8 drivers over the drivers from Acer. AFAIK the drivers from ATI don't have this option.

 

LOL my CPU runs as high as 91C at 3.3 ghz under load. The temps do not creep higher until I OC the GPU as well, then they go up to 93C and stay pegged there.

Bronsky

 

I mean more basic marketing ... like offering the product for sale where the demand is.

Bronsky

 

Guys, I'm thinking about getting last drivers. Which one you reccomend, 10.7 or 10.8?

 

I just rolled mine back to 10.7.

 

what is the problem with the 10.8 drivers?
I currently have theese installed on my 3820tg.
Kevin