Acer TimelineX 3830/4830/5830 T/G

Yeah, I don't blame Acer solely for that problem. Apple, Sony and Lenove seem to have similar problems. But why are notebooks with such great and obvious problems even sold?

I'm living near Stuttgart in Germany and they wanna build a huge new train station there. But as the people are more and more aware of the risks it might bring, they try to stop it. It's the same thing with the notebooks: they KNOW about the problems, but wanna build and sell it anyway.

The funny thing is: The buyers are always allowed to return it, even months after they bought it, because the notebooks don't have the promised performance. So if we just need a notebook for 2 or 3 months, the 3/4830TG might be the best choice

 

Why not? Acer has already proven that they can make a powerful 13" notebook without throttling problems, why should the successor have those problems?

I'm sure Acer did stress testing on the new, probably cheaper, single fan design and knew that it ran hotter than the old cooling system but deemed it "good enough".

Sure, they're a business and they exist to make money. But when it ultimately hurts the consumer, they deserve to be criticized for it.

 

Acer have proven that they can make an Arrandale 13" notebook that does not throttle which doesn't mean they can do a Sandy Bridge that doesn't.
The variable is not the fan- it's the Sandy Bridge CPU.

It's possible that adding another fan- or seven for that matter- would stop it throttling but that's not a solution of the problem called Sandy Bridge.

Another thing is why Acer and other manufacturers sell notebooks that are in fact malfunctioning. I've warned about buying xx30TG before the issue gets fixed but I got called "paranoid" in return.

So welcome to the club of "you already bought it so there's no reason for us to spend more money fixing this issue"

 

I'd argue that the 3820TG was the only high performance TimelineX with good cooling. Average temps under load with no overclocking were in the 70s, while my 4820TG was running into the 85 to 90 range doing the same thing. The thermal overhead allowed folks to overclock the 3820TG to insane levels really easily. Now, it's not in the same realm as my sons Asus G73SW for cooling. That thing runs amazingly cool for a big fast gaming laptop. But for a thin 13" laptop the 3820TG is quite impressive. Much moreso than most 13" high performance machines are nowadays.

 

You are right that temperatures of CPU and GPU are fine on 3820TG but chassis gets too hot by my standards. That's the problem of all notebooks in Timeline X series. I used to have a notebook like that at one time and I found it very uncomfortable so I'll never give high marks to a notebook that gets hot on the outside, even if components are properly cool.

 

Arrandale didn't magically run cooler than SB. If anything, SB runs cooler because of the more efficient design, so blaming the architecture change doesn't make any sense to me.

And as Bronsky mentioned, the single fan Arrandale 4820tg had throttling issues but the smaller and lighter dual fan 3820tg did not. They both used the same architecture so clearly the extra fan is the variable.

But that's not even my point. My point is that Acer is to blame for using an inadequate cooling system. The extra fan just happens to be a way to make it adequate. If Acer came up with a good single fan system, I'd be happy with it. But they didn't. They used an inferior one and, to me, knowingly making and selling a flawed product is 100% their fault.

 

Sticks & stones mi amigo. If people want to have such faith and trust, despite Acer's past reactions to similar situations, that's their choice. I hope Acer does do something about this.

What I don't quite get is people still buying these (and other manu's) equipment knowing that there is a throttling issue. Bring back the car analogy. It's supposed to put out 350 wheel horsepower, yet people are still buying the car knowing there is an engine flaw and you're only getting 150? Makes no sense.

I'm of your opinion that the architecture should be examined a bit further. Possibly the more aggressive turbo in Sandy Bridge could be the issue? It seems reasonable to wonder if SB gives off more heat than manufacturers were expecting to deal with.

Consumers get what they're given out of the choices provided for them. It's really no more complicated than that. And that said, where is the guy who had a 3830TG but reports NO throttling? More testing + CPUID pics please? What's the manufacturing date as well?

 

We can assume that most (if not all) 38/48/5830TGs have CPU throttling problems at the moment. It seems like the ones who said they have no throttling problems aren't running any tests or benchmarks and are just saying they didn't "notice" throttling in games. I would avoid their comments and not take them seriously.

Furthermore, I believe the Sandy Bridge CPUs and the laptop cooling solutions are "both" the culprits of the CPU throttling problem. I remember reading that the TJunction of the Sandy Bridge CPUs were much lower than the Arrandale counterparts and that TurboBoost could be generating too much heat. Also, that the cooling solutions on many laptops for Sandy Bridge were probably tested to be "sufficient enough" to cool the Sandy Bridge CPUs during normal usage, but were not thoroughly tested with the TJunction limitation or TurboBoost of the CPUs.

I'm going to use the 4820TG as an example. The Core i3 on the 4820TG had a TJunction of 90C and throttled at 85-86C. The Core i5 had no throttling problems with a much higher TJunction headroom of 105C, but often reached 90+ C. The Core i7 started to throttle or shutdown the 4820TG when TurboBoost started to kick in. The cooling solution, TJunction of the CPU, and TurboBoost all played a factor in CPU throttling.

The 3820TG may not have a "ground-breaking" cooling solution compared to much larger laptops, but the dual-fan cooling solution really did keep the throtting problem in check for such a tiny & thin laptop.

Obviously, somebody messed up at Intel or Acer. Just my point of view, no need to argue over this.

 

The turbo boost does create even more heat, that's correct. But even without turbo boost the 3830TG throttles. If the notebook would run with turbo boost disabled, there would be no possibility to return the machine, because it clearly says "up to". The 2,3Ghz should work no matter what, though - but they aren't.

It's like the case with the Playstation 3, providing a Linux-friendly system. As this functionality was locked in a later firmware, people could return the device and get their money back.

It's not about "state of the art"-design, it's just about working and not working. If it doesn't work, I'll return it. Once, twice.. and get my money back at the third time

 

I'd like to see what other laptops suffer from the throttling issue.

On the other hand, Acer did fit in a much more powerful GPU, the GT540M (35W TDP) in the x830TG, over the previous one, ATI Mobility 5650 (5~10W TDP). And you're pointing finger at Intel?

 

Here is my 3830tg running prime95, furmark burn in, cpu-z and realtemp.
I set throttlestop as described in posts above and with these settings I can run crysis 2, a very graphics intensive game, without any glitches. If I run with Nvidia GPU selectively, I will get overheating and shutdown after about 5min of play (I believe its from overheating but have not verified)

 

The easiest way to run any game with the Nvidia, is to set the max multiplier in ThrottleStop to x18, disable turbo boost, but enable power saver. This should work without any overheating and at an acceptable speed (At least it worked the last two weeks for me).

Lifting the notebook one or two inches above the desk allows for a multiplier of x19/20, a good cooling pad should help to reach x21/22. In no case, x23 did work for me.

If the core i5 reaches 100°C, it simply shuts down your system.

 

From the reviews I've been reading on notebookcheck it seems a LOT of them are. Asus G73SW G74SX, Lenovo X220, and many more. It seems a lot of folks buy powerful machines then never actually push them very hard so most folks don't notice. Also a lot of the machines that throttle do so more reasonably than the 3830TG does.

According to this page the power draw on the 5650 is 15 to 19W. Still way less than the GT540M. Why would Acer try to stuff a 15 to 20% faster card (max) into a machine with only one fan? The single fan 4820TG had a hard enough time running at full throttle with a < 20W GPU. Going to a 35W one just seems pretty dumb.

 

Other laptops that suffer from throttling issues have been mentioned at various stages in this very thread- these include at least two models from HP and another one or two from Lenovo. Add Asus G74SX, MSI GT780R, Apple-MacBook Pro 13", Alienware-M14x, and probably few others... and then blame Acer

ATI HD5650 is rated 15-19W not 5-10W and according to some reports that includes only the core while nVidia does also include memory to its TDP calculation. On top of that TDP has always been calculated in different manner by ATI, nVidia, Intel and AMD. GT 540M is hardly the hottest card in the rooster
So yes I'm pointing my finger at Intel.

EDIT: I've wasted my time, Sxooter beat me to it

 

As far as I've gathered, doesn't seem the G73SW or G74SX overheat much (people think having a 80C GPU means the computer is overheating). But those two are gaming laptops, and they do tend to get overheated when played for an extensive amount of time.

EDIT: I've spent some time reading the notebookcheck's G73SW review, and it did mentioin CPU throttling. However it is more likely due to ASUS's own TDP max limitation for their cooling system. In the review, the CPU began the throttle at 59C, which not only is significantly lower than what the CPU can take (Tjunction is 100C, Tcase would be around 80~90C), it is also lower than the same CPU in other laptop models can go.

Anandtech did a review on G73SW, and they found no CPU throttling at all. They even said the cooling system can theoretically take a 480M or a 6870M.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4207/asus-g73sw-third-times-the-charm/5

EDIT 2: Furthermore, this is notebookcheck's assessment on G74SX's throttling, which is very similar to my speculation.

Also, if it is indeed true that 5650 is only 15~19W TDP, GT540M's thermal requirement is still at twice the amount at 35W.

Notice the 4 laptops you mentioned, 3 of them are full fledged gaming laptops, and 1 made by Apple (which primarily uses the aluminum case for heat dissipation).

Like I said, GT540M requires about twice the amount of cooling capacity than the HD5650.

x820TG => 35W CPU + 19W GPU
x830TG => 35W CPU + 35W GPU with the same form factor.

You do the math.

 

omg... what an awesome suggestion. Everything runs flawlessly now. no stuttering at all with power saver enabled. can run at 21x with Nvidia without even a laptop cooler. Now to buy one of those and will be all set.

 

Read the review of the G74SX-3DE. It apparently suffered from very bad throttling. Again the issue is that apparently SB chips are throttling, as a class, a lot earlier in the temperature envelope than Arrandales did, and they're throttling a lot harder. I think it's only when running both CPU and GPU full throttle, so it's possible it's a third temp sensor that detects something like ambient heat around the southbridge chip or something like that that's clocking things down. If that's the case, running throttlestop might be running that part hotter than it was designed for. Who knows? My kid games on his i5 equipped 4820TG all the time with no noticeable throttling. it sits on a flat surface and gets rather warm, but it doesn't ever just shut down or start stuttering. My machine will throttle to 2.4GHz when running hard on both CPU and GPU as I know it runs a little hotter than his. But it's not enough to notice in a game.

 

I did, and the throttling only rears its ugly head under synthetic benchmarks, and not during actual gaming. I've also quoted a section from the review in my previous post, which I shall repost again.

Therefore, G74SX "throttling" was intentional, not by Intel, but set up by ASUS to protect the hardware under the duress of synthetic benchmarks. However, during normal usage, or even prolonged demanding gaming, the laptop shows no sign of throttling.

Furthermore, you said the SNB was designed to throttle much earlier than the Arrandales. However this is untrue as well. According to NBC's M14X, their i7 2630QM ran all the way up to 95C with sporadic throttling.

The i7-2720QM in the Schenker XMG P501 also showed no sign of throttling when being stressed to 85C.

As you can see, the new SNB CPU has approximately the same temperature as the Arrandale in which they start throttling.

In your daughter's case, the 4820TG has an Arrandale and a HD5650, which has a combined TDP of 35W+19W = 54W. The x830TG has a SNB, which has the same TDP as the Arrandale, and the Nvidia GT540M. Their combined TDP is 35W+35W = 70W. How is it possible for Acer to stick a CPU+GPU package that has 70W TDP into the x820TG form factor, without considering the ramification?

The bottom line is, Acer x830TG is rather a poorly designed package that focused way too much on delivering the best hardware configuration at the lowest price. But of course, the cost has to be paid one way or another, and poor thermal dissipation and severe CPU throttling is one of the price of owning a x830TG.

 

Thank you for your pic gruvytune. However, as shown in CPUZ and on Real Temp, your CPU is throttling to 1.9 Ghz. I was under the impression that you weren't experiencing throttling at all, including w/o Throttlestop. I must have misread your post, sorry.

All this throttling makes me think the Asus U36SD is either going to be a miserable fail, or a superb win. It's known for being hot in Arrandale form, it's only 3/4" thin at its thickest point with a GT520 and magnesium chassis so I'm basically expecting a a full core exit into the table. I really hope I'm wrong cause there's not much left to choose from at this point.

Edit: also, the u36sd is supposedly available with an i5 OR an i7! gonna be a good show.

Oh, and to figure out if the GT540 is what's pushing the temps over the edge, can't the stress testing be done with the GPU disabled in BIOS?

 

I disabled both GPU and turbo boost with my 3830TG and it overheated after a couple of minutes as well. x23 is just too much for the cooling system to handle.

gruvytune: I use x27 and an alarm profile with x17, which works very well for me. My suggestion with x18 should be "bullet-proof" without too much settings.

A real alternative to the 3830TG would be the above mentioned LG P420, which is available in Germany at least. It has some Macbook Non-Pro design and uses a 14 inch display in a 13,3 inch case.

Video of P420: http://youtu.be/mvdOWbJP-dM

 

But the vga card is only 520... I'm thinking of the upcoming LG P330: real 13" with a 555 GT

 

For those of you in Canada, this might be an option to the Timeline 4830TG.
The Gateway ID series 14" I5-2410M CPU and GT 540M GPU. $799 list.

Hopefully, it doesn't have the throttling problems of its Timeline bretheren.

Bronsky

 

Hi Everyone,

I recently got the Acer as3830tg and I LOVE it! It's so fast and perfect for my needs. I've been reading many of these posts and was a bit worried about the throttling issue. After testing the GPU with the Great Gatsby game
The Great Gatsby - For Nes I successfully played the game for 8 hours with Nvidia turned on and DID NOT experience any overheating or throttling issues. So I guess I got lucky and got a gem.

 

I'm sorry but did you really expect throttling to appear while playing this game?
Throttling appears when you put heavy load on GPU and CPU.

 

I hope you are joking. You're playing a NES imported, flash game... I smell a troll.

 

Be nice, it could just as easily be an honest post from a newbie. But yeah, that games not gonna cause much stress on a 3830TG.

 

A Core i5-2410M has an Intel rated speed of 2300 MHz. Anytime it drops down below that speed when the CPU is loaded, that's throttling. A properly designed laptop should have no problem running at its Intel rated speed when fully loaded but too many manufacturers are cutting corners. If that same CPU is properly cooled, even when fully loaded, it will be using Turbo Boost and should be running at close to 2700 MHz so that gives you some idea about how much performance is being lost due to inadequate design.

Intel sets the thermal throttling temperature to 100C for most of these Sandy Bridge CPUs and then sets the thermal shutdown temperature to 25C to 30C higher than the throttling temperature to prevent any false trips. They have been doing this with all of their Core 2 and Core i CPUs for years. A Sandy Bridge CPU should not be doing a thermal shutdown until it hits 130C. If the CPU is throttling before 100C or shutting down before 130C, you can't blame that on Intel.

It's the guys writing the Acer bios that have decided to come up with their own specifications and override what Intel feels is safe.



Setting the thermal throttling or thermal trip temperature too low will interfere with how Intel engineered their CPUs to operate. The thermal management capabilities built into every Intel CPU are second to none so there is no need for any laptop manufacturer to create their own.

When the Alienware M14x, M17x-R3 or M18x is plugged in and fully loaded, they are not having a problem running at their rated speed so the problem is not an inherent defect in Sandy Bridge. The real problem is that many laptop manufacturers are not providing adequate cooling or power and then dream up throttling schemes after the fact to try to cover things up and hope that the typical consumer won't notice.

unif2: Are you one of the Acer design engineers? If they are doing their 3D game testing by playing Flash games, that would explain why they keep producing so many throttling laptops.
Real games have become very demanding on the CPU and GPU simultaneously and it takes a well designed laptop to handle that kind of load.

 

Any idea where this is for sale at?

 

Well I got curious about all this throttling talk re sandybridge and did a brief test on my Vaio SB i5-2520, AMD 6630 with prime95 and furmark. Measuring temps and cpu with cpu-z, real temp and cpuid hardware monitor. Laptop was on a glass table in 21C room.

This should probably belong in the SB thread, but as there's no talk of throttling there, and people are wondering whether it's a sandybridge thing over here, I've posted in this thread.

I took a whole bunch of screenshots as I went along but forgot that on windows printscreen only copies the cap to the clipboard and doesnt save them all, so I've only got the last cap I took just before I stopped the test.


I only ran the test for just over half an hour cos I got bored watching it and didn't know how to log the data.

So I started with prime 95, temps went from low mid 50s quickly to around 85 and stayed there while cpu speed fluctuated between 2.9 and 3 Ghz. Gpu temp also rose from low 50 to low 60s. Ten minutes later this was the same, so I started furmark.

5 minutes of that and the gpu temps were 70s and climbing and cpu was creeping up to high 80s and finally to 93-95. It was at this point that I noticed something strange. The cpu multiplier remained at 29 or 30, but every now and again dropped dramatically to 8 (800Mhz)! But only very briefly, 1, 1.5 seconds or so and then straight back up to 29 or 30... this carried on for a while but when I came back 15 minutes later, the cpu multiplier had dropped to 26,27 sometimes 28 and was stable. It didn't drop to 8 anymore just stayed at that level. I left it for another 10 minutes or so before I got bored and turned furmark off, cpu multiplier went straight back to 29, 30 but the cpu temp didn't change much.

So I don't know how that compares to the acer throttling, it's slightly strange behaviour that jump from 30 to 8 multiplier, seems uneccessary as the "turbo boost" is all bonus really, it could just slow down to 25 couldn't it? I thought it might be a glitch in the cpu-z software because once or twice it gave me a cpu speed of 4Ghz, which would be great if it was true!

I guess I need to run a longer test but hopefully there is a way of logging all that info (temps and cpu speed) in a reasonably easy to read format?

To be fair, no it couldn't. But anyway it's called humour, not being a troll!

 

Interesting information. There is a good discussion on using Everest demo to record benckmark date in the early parts of the 4820TG thread. Aylafan, can probably point you to the post. You can even graph the data with Excel. Intelburntest is a decent option to Furmark but either will give you a decent test. I would run a baseline stress test for a few hours.

It's just been anounced. I would guess you'll see it at NCIX and Canadacomputers when it starts to ship.

Bronsky

 

Here are my instructions on how to do logging in Everest.
Here is the post.

 

Just got my 3830TG back from ACSC (Acer Customer Service Center), they replaced the battery with Sanyo (previously Panasonic), the Battery Wear is 2% and the estimated lifetime is 7 hours 21 minutes. The BIOS is v1.05 with new Acer logo

Hey! Now the fan turned off! I don't know why.. the room is 22-24C

Why the Acer eRecovery always shows "Reboot needed" in the Restore section, even after a reboot?
Pressing Alt+F10 or F10 during the BIOS only brings up Windows Bootloader with default text which I don't understand
Any solution to restore the system?

EDIT

This is the conversation in Facebook:

 

To restore from DVD, you'll need a completely free harddisk or the recovery will not start. You can wipe it clear by using a Linux like gparted, which runs from CD.

Recovery without DVD is not possible. If you didn't make one, just download Windows 7 from the Microsoft Homepage and use your serial from below the notebook to install.

 

for me, be aware i talk about 3820tg so it could be different, anyway i erased my hd, keeping only the recovery partition, then boot, press fn+f10 and then recovery works

 

Thanks, I'll give it a go when I have some time next week.

 

@ptrkhh

Did you tell them to use Sanyo instead of Panasonic? Wish I could do the same...

 

Yes, I did.. I didn't tell them to replace with Sanyo, I told to replace with anything but Panasonic

 

As you can overclock 2410m, multiplier more of x23? x29 or x31?

 

Turbo Boost overclocks to x29 when only a single core is used.

 

to ptrkhh: Hi, I bought my Acer Aspire 5830TG with battery Sanyo.
I bought my new notebook 08.05.2011 and now i has battery decreas 5%.

when i buy 08.05.2011 notebook - battery wear 2%,
after one month +-08.06.2011 - battery wear 4%
and now 09.07.2011 is battery wear 5% (100% is 63203mWh from original 66600mWh)

 

please inform me after 1 -2 weak of usage did your battery wear increase dramaticly or still below 5 %

 

When I took from the ACSC, the Battery Wear is 2%, after draining it completely, the Battery Wear is 0,6%.

 

how to drain your batery completely ? u can using it only until 7 %

 

The calibration section explains how to discharge fully:


BatteryCare - Proper laptop battery usage guide

 

is there any proper reviews on any of these? really interested in buying one of them. concerns atm: how bad is the throttle, the battery wear

 

The one at notebookcheck is pretty good: 3820TG review.

Throttling is pretty bad with the current BIOS settings, but can be managed to get reasonable performance from the core i5 CPU via throttlestop.

 

That's the 3820tg review. Here's the 3830tg review.

 

Sorry fat fingers. so used to typing 3820...

 

thanks guys.

anyone have personal experience

 

would the 4830t on Amazon.com: Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4830T-6642 14-Inch Laptop (Cobalt Blue Aluminum): Computer & Accessories


would be able to run games such as sc2? atm im using mbp13 and i can only run it on low
or would the 3830 be a better alternative, though i fear throttling :/