Acer TimelineX 3830/4830/5830 T/G

how are people playing crysis 2 on this computer? i tried it and couldn't get more than 20 fps on lowest settings (which is high... doesn't seem to be an option for anything lower, even using a 3rd party settings config)

UPDATE on battery wear:

I use my laptop on battery for 2-3 hrs a day, then keep the plugged in the rest of the day. My wear started at 4%, after a discharge (down to hibernation 5%), the wear went up to 5%. Then it dropped down to 4%, then 3%, stayed there for a few days.

Today, the wear was 3% this morning, and just now, it has dropped to 1%...

mmmm my wear is dropping.... and I don't know why.... mmmm


EDIT: Just did a restart. now my wear's down to 0.4%!!

 

I am starting to wonder if the battery wear statistic is working correctly on the batteries that Acer is using. Most software is reading this information directly from a Windows function so if it is screwed up then most software will be screwed up too.

Can someone try to do some battery testing with ThrottleStop if it works on the Acer laptops. Run ThrottleStop and go into the Options window and check Battery Monitoring at the top of the Miscellaneous column. Click on OK to exit the Options window and then go back to the main ThrottleStop screen and click on the battery button a few times.

I get a value that looks like this.



47.26 Wh is the Battery Capacity in Watt hours. On my older laptop, this value never increases so as the battery wears out, the Battery Capacity decreases. I don't use the battery too much so this number tends to be steady for a few days or longer until I am using the battery.

Battery wear percentage should not be decreasing. You shouldn't have 5% wear one day and then a few days later it shouldn't be showing 1%. That's not how batteries degrade when they are being used.

Let me know what this reports. If it seems to be reporting correctly then use your laptop on battery power for a day or two and see how this number changes.

 

i have mine already checked. mine shows 64.56 wh. Batterybar shows 64,562 mwh. so it matches

 

ThrottleStop and Battery Bar are getting data from the same Windows function. Have you ever seen this Battery Capacity number increase from one day to the next? It shouldn't. I'm trying to find out if there are any problems with this number or if there is a problem with the battery wear percentage number.

 

I have never seen the max capacity change, but I have seen my capacity increase as the wear decreases. Lol

 

have you tried other games with the Zalman NC1000? i played crysis 2 before and it seems that the laptop does not throttle at this game. however, i tried other games like witcher 2 and gta iv, these games definitely throttle. i just want to know if Zalman NC1000 is really the cause of lower temperatures, or is it just the unique case of Crysis 2?

 

has anyone tried running linux on these laptops? I'm having some hard time running any version of backtrack =/ apparently due to screen resolution or graphic card issues

 

ThrottleStop Reading: 64.17 Wh
BatteryCare Reading: 64.169 Wh

Last week the wear level was close to 9% and it went down to 2.35%. Now at 3.65%. The battery is Sanyo (Acer 4830TG)

 

It seems that it's not only the Panasonic batteries that show weird numbers (increasing, decreasing...)

I asked several retailers if they could tell me what battery they use in the different timeline models (Sanyo or Panasonic). But they couldn't. They said it was impossible to tell without opening the machine. Acer Support didn't know either... how embarrasing, that not even Acer know what batteries they use in their laptops.

So I guess it's hit or miss when you buy a new timeline.
I'm looking at the 3830T without the nvidia. I can get a good deal if I buy within 1-2 weeks. It comes with the i5. The only thing holding me back is the battery.

I hope it won't heat up as much as my old and now returned 3830TG with nvidia

 

Now try to forget about wear level and keep an eye on this Battery Capacity number. Battery capacity should remain the same or go down. Watch this number for a couple of days and see if it ever goes up. It shouldn't.

If this number is consistent then I'd be trusting it more than the wear percentage statistic. If the initial battery capacity number is wandering all over the place then the calculated wear percentage statistic could be meaningless for these batteries.

 

Problem is it wasn't consistent. Battery capacity went down every day on my old 3830TG, and wear level up ofc.

Hope the model I want won't have this problem

 

2 days now at 0.4% wear 64,562 out of 64800 mwh. throttlestop showing 64.56 wh.

so far so good. i wonder if i have a sanyo battery already. hmmm


also, played bad company 2 for 2 hrs today. the max temps on my cpu was 99C and gpu was 96C

*scared

 

For ThrottleStop I decided to round off 1 digit from the Battery Capacity data so it wouldn't be "too much information" but I think I'll include all 5 digits in the next version since this is useful.

It will be interesting to see what your battery reports when the wear percent increases. The capacity of that battery should be a fixed number at 64,800. If that data is not staying fixed then that would cause an error in the battery wear percent data. It's either that or the battery capacity number is going through cycles where it is decreasing and then increasing. I've never seen that before and that shouldn't be happening. Something's not right with the wear percent number so it will be interesting to watch this data.

99C and 96C are high temps but they are nothing to be scared about. Both of these temps are within the manufacturers specifications. Intel builds a lot of thermal technology into their CPUs to prevent them from being damaged by heat. They automatically reduce their speed and the core voltage to keep the heat from getting completely out of control. As long as the heatsink hasn't fallen off, thermal throttling like this should provide enough cooling and it works incredibly well. If the temperature continues to increase then worst case it will trigger the thermal shutdown feature and the CPU will immediately turn itself and the rest of the computer off.

A long time ago I was curious about how an Intel CPU would handle a worst case scenario. I overclocked my desktop E8400 by 20% and then increased the core voltage to help create some heat and ran Prime95 Small FFTs. Just to make things interesting, I disconnected the CPU fan to see what would happen.

Guess what happened? Nothing too exciting. It ran for 3 hours without a single error in Prime95. The whole time it was constantly bouncing off the built in Intel thermal throttle temperature and this was enough to keep it from ever over heating. It performed flawlessly just like your 99C CPU was doing today. This throttling is happening hundreds of times a second within the CPU so as to maintain maximum performance. The temperature graph was mostly a straight line as it rapidly throttled and went back to full speed over and over again to keep the CPU at what Intel considers to be a safe temperature.

http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/276/hote8400fw5.png

Excessive voltage probably damages more CPUs than heat does.

 

Note that design capacity should stay fixed, and current capacity should slowly decline as the battery wears. My guess is that these batteries, when new, are just not that good at estimating their remaining capacity and as they charge and discharge a few times will get better calibrated. I've certainly seen that in the past with my other laptops.

 

@unclewebb

i'm used to my old envy 15 maxing out at 70C for the gpu with a 20% overclock

although the temps on this thing are very similar to what i had to deal with using the dell xps m1330.

 

Wear level can be easily calculated. It is just
(Designed capacity - Current capacity)/Designed capacity * 100%.

(64800-62381)/64800*100%=3,733% in my case. Designed capacity is fixed while current capacity changes from day to day. Like others reported it can both increase and decrease.

 

! Forum ate my post.


Basically I asked: Any solutions yet? I can't get rivatuner to edit anything, CPU utility doesn't recognize the i5 core, there's a bios which unlocks options but doesn't actually do anything... the only thing to do is use throttle-stop and set up alarm profiles to control the temp?

 

I played bc2 last night for about an hour with the U1, high-medium settings 1600x900(on monitor) I reached max 78c with throttlestop, down about 10 degrees from normal. Stayed around 75 for a while. Fps were solid. TF2 maxed at 77c with high settings.
I put the multiplier up to 20 for a few minutes and temps only got up to 79c in bc2. I'm going to do some more research with Portal 2 and Heroes of Newerth(if I can get it working) and I'll keep everyone posted.

I also played BC2 with DirectX 11 and the graphics were pretty sweet but temps got up to ~96c even with throttlestop at 18x.

 

Linux doesn't support Optimus so far. It works with 2D-Intel only (while the Nvidia is enabled and drains your battery).

 

Haha my wear is now down to 0%!!!

throttlestop: 64.90 wh
batterybar: 64,897 mwh

i think i'm winning at this game ;p

i use my laptop on battery for about 2-3 hours in the morning, then leave it more or less plugged in the rest of the day.

 

Yikes! The M1330 was a nightmare because of the heat issues.

Bronsky

 

yea... that whole heatsink not actually touching the cpu so dell had to use a foampad... *facepalm


Battery wear update:
I'm now up to 1.7% wear...

 

Battery update: Wear level is now up to 9.8% which is a bit irritating, however in my attempt to run the battery down as much as possible windows was preventing me from getting below 3-4% before it would hibernate, therefore I plugged in the power adapter turned the system back on then unplugged the adapter. The system booted back up and ran with battery at 0%.

Now the reported designed capacity of the battery is 64,800 and with 9.8% wear that brought the capacity down to 58,450. Then using the batterybar power consumption to estimate "0% life" gives:

(64,800 mWh - 58,450 mWh) / 13,200 mW * 60 = 28.8 minutes

After allowing the system to run till it powered off it ran for about 26 minutes which as you can see is close to the estimated "0% life" so it would appear that something is wrong with the batteries % and wear reporting.

For reference this is with a Panasonic battery.

 

So, after 1 hour of crisis 2 I checked my log. Once CPU temperature goes above 90 the multiplier goes down to 8 until temp drops to 80. My temps peaked at 99C, yikes. Will try disabling turbo and see how that helps.

Not using any cooling hardware, btw.

edit: this was with profile 1 with turbo, profile 2 @ x 20.

I am going to try profile 1 no turbo (x23), profile 2 x19 and see how temps are.

After another hour of playing Crysis 2, temps held steady at 92 and 83 for CPU/GPU respectively. Throttlestop had switched to profile 2 (x19) and had been using it constantly. My guess is if it works for Crysis 2 on these settings, it will work for any other game.

edit2: apparently not. CPU went down to x8 as at x19 the temperature of both CPU/GPU steadily crept up. It only hit x8 for a short time, but I will do more testing to see if I can find some multipliers that can be used steadily.

 

EDIT:
and now a few hours later... i'm down to 0.1% wear... loll

what settings are you playing crysis 2 at? i tried the game, and the settings didn't let me go below high. i was getting 20 fps in the opening scene...

i tried a 3rd party settings config tool, and the lowest settings gave me the same result...

 

I didn't use a FPS measuring tool, but my eyes tell me between 30-55. I went down from native resolution to 12xx x 720 or something. I played on "high" which is their lowest level, actually. They just think it's cute to rename them.

 

yea i did the same. the lowest setting was high. fraps was telling me 20 fps...

would u mind turning on fraps and trying it real quick?

 

np, I'll do it now

high 30's to low 50's in most scenes, the lowest it got was 28 for a couple seconds during some explosion-heavy cutscenes/scripted events. This is on x18, the max CPU temp was 93 (GPU 87 which is ok), but it's still a little high for my taste. No throttling detected, but I'll move profile 2 to x17 just to be safe.

If you're going to be gaming with stock hardware I'd say profile 1 @ x23 no turbo and profile 2 x17 are your best best.

Just did 2 hours L4D 2, held steady at 94-95c. I might go out and buy a fan-base today just because I'll be gaming a lot at home with it hooked up to my flatscreen.

 

Almost 5 to 15 °C ... it depends on usage and room temperature.

 

Without the NC1000 my 3830TG throttled after playing Crysis 2 for about 30 min. With BC2 no throttling issues so far ... with or without the cooler. I didn't try other games. The same with Adobe Premiere CS5.5. With heavy editing while using the Mercury Engine which utilizes the GPU (most of the time) no throttling with the NC1000, while without the cooler my Acer drops down to 1.2 GHz after 15 min. of editing HD material.

 

great to here that. i hope i can find an nc1000 here at our country. thanks for the info man

 

Just got my new 3830tg and the battery meter flucuates so much.

There's only 1.7% wear so thats fine but the battery life meter switches from 6 hours to as low as 3 hours even with battery care, battery bar, and the default meter.

I've tried recalibrating the battery but still the meter flucuates so much. Anyone have a solution to get an accurate read on the battery?

Note i have a panasonic battery

 

@heatless

Hows the progress so far with the quad core cpu?
What about current temperatures and throttling ever since your paste fix?
I'm receiving this laptop monday I may have to do the mod myself.
thanks for the information.

 

This has nothing to do with battery calibration, and is 100% completely normal. As your laptop runs various processes, the load on the CPU and GPU change, the curren they draws likewise, and the estimated time remaining to run on batteries changes with it. Normal, 100% do NOT worry about that.

The wear level changing at first is the battery calibrating itself and adjusting charge / discharge factors, and is also normal, to an extent. But if it never settles down after a few months then some thing's likely wrong with the battery.

 

would you guys wait for the asus U46?SV or just pick this one up since its cheaper and most likely the asus has throttling issues too?

 

Well I bought some thermal paste and was going to take my laptop apart to reapply it. I got to the part where I was supposed to disconnect the connectors to my wireless- and the connector on the micro-wireless side uprooted with the connector. ty quality. At least my wireless still works, it's just the antennae is getting me 3 bars instead of 5 in my apt. Now I have to go to an Acer shop and see if they can fix it for me. I guess that's what I get for messing with it.

 

Guess I'll just buy the 3830T then even though I know I'm going to have battery wear problems. But I could sell it when the (I hope) ivy bridge refresh comes out in April/May 2012 and get that one instead. Think I can live with the faulty battery for 8 months.

I just think it's embarrasing that not a single retailer can tell me if the battery is Sanyo or Panasonic. Acer couldn't either

Throttling won't be a problem as the model I'm getting is with the IGP

 

You can download the AIDA64 portable, copy to your UFD (USB Flash Drive), and plug the UFD onto your new 3830T to see the battery. If the don't allow you to boot into Windows, you can download the Ubuntu 11.04 ISO and make a Live USB, then boot the Ubuntu Linux from your USB to see the battery

 

you got 30 fps average and up to 50 fps?!?

how!?!?! i was getting 20 fps in the opening scene

 

also has anyone tried undervolting timelineX AS3830TG to lower temps? what about any improvement with throttling? I'm trying to get prepared for the worst thanks.

 

The days of simple under volting like you could do in the Core 2 era are over. With Core i the only way to reduce the voltage is to also reduce the multiplier and performance at the same time. That's what users have been doing with ThrottleStop to keep the 3830TG from going nuclear. Disabling Turbo Boost reduces the VID voltage and the maximum CPU speed at the same time. Not a perfect solution but better than over heating or the Acer bios using severe throttling.

 

Hi all,

In one of the videos in the opening post I think the guy is talking about several options possible (e.g. blue ray, 3g sim slot, etc). Now it might be just wishfull thinking from my end but is there actually a 15 inch (5830) model that has a core i7 processor, blue ray drive, 2 GB video ram and a 3G sim slot?

If so, can anyone point me to link of a shop that sells those?

Thanks.

 

Well I ordered the 3830 once again, this time though the T model (without nvidia) But it's still got the i5. So back in TimelineX land again, hopefully this time it will be a better experience.

I can return it if the battery wear becomes a problem again.

The price for the T model is 35% lower, so it was cheap and satisfied with the deal

So this time I'm trying another strategy so to say, buy cheap and replace sooner (when the ivy bridge refresh comes out)

 

Question: Are owners of the 14" getting as much overheating as the 13"? And what about the 15"?

I checked out the Asus U45E and the U55 at Best Buy. The gold looks better in pictures to me than real life. The U55 I liked the rubber palm rest.

If a sub 15 is going to run hot with Sandy Bridge I would prefer to just go with a 15.

 

@unclewebb:

my battery wear is now either totally awesome or something's wrong.

batterybar now shows my wear at 0% with a capacity of 65,243 mwh. Throttlestop shows 65.24 wh.

my capacity before was 64,900 or so...

uh... my battery capacity is increasing....

also i can't seem to activate my batterbar's 30 day trial, so i still don't know what brand my battery is

EDIT: nvm seem to have activated the trial. I have the Panasonic battery... :'-(

 

Maybe the heat is more of a problem than the battery brand?

 

it's possible. prolonged exposure to very high heat is prob not a good idea for battery capacity.

my cpu/gpu idles around 50C. At full load it goes up to 95C or so. If the ac is on and the room is around 68F, full load hovers around 85-90C.

Still... I've been using the computer all day. Not on battery, but for a few hours in the morning it is on battery. So.... my wear should be getting worse...

 

I got all my tools ready to paste the new latpop, in the scenario i get heavy throttling, i just wonder how many people have tried replacing the glu paste gunk under the 3830TG heatsink ?
UPS should be here anytime today.... tic toc

 

i have not. my temps are listed in the last post above. throttling was def a problem, but i just used throttlestop, set my multiplier to 18, and never had a problem. at 1.8-1.9 ghz, every game i've tried works perfectly fine. cpu is not the bottleneck so it doesn't really matter that much

 

nice maybe i don't have to go to the extremes well if thats the case a notebook cooler might be feasible, still waiting for UPS delivery, the days i wait they come here late the days i don't they show up early morning -.-...