Acer TimelineX 3830/4830/5830 T/G

After much investigating I finally figured out why my games stutter occasionally. It's because of the wireless! I've tried it at a few different locations now, and the behavior is the same in all places. Although others (non-Acer) do not seem to be affected. Plugging in with a physical ethernet cable fixes the stuttering.

My question: Is there a known issue with the Acer 4830TG wireless card?

 

Make sure you're using the most recent Wi-Fi drivers and that power-saving for Wi-Fi is disabled.

 

anyone know what this biod package does BIOS_Acer_1.07_Windows P4LJ0107.exe?

 

Hello all,

I finally got myself an MSI X460DX to replace my broken 3820TG as I was hoping to avoid all the issues with throttling on the 3830TG. It turns out that the X460DX is completely unusable to me as it will severely throttle down the CPU on battery power (the FPS in 3DMark06 get roughly divided by 3). Multipliers are not affected, only the CPU voltage, so this is not something that can be monitored nor fixed with ThrottleStop.

So I'm back to square 1, and the 3830TG seems once more like a valid contender. However before I buy I would like to make sure that gaming without a power socket is possible on this machine. It certainly was possible on my 3820TG, I actually was overclocking the Radeon 5650 big time on battery and never experienced throttling.

Can someone confirm that using ThrottleStop, gaming on battery is possible (no further throttling on either the CPU or the GPU) on the 3830TG?

Thanks for the help!

 

As I already said several times before in this thread, gaming IS possible on the 3830TG. The only thing you'll need to keep in mind is, that you will buy a 1900 Mhz machine. Using ThrottleStop and a multiplier of 19, everything will be fine. The 3830TG has a very powerful graphics card concidering the price of the laptop.

However, I bought the laptop, thinking it would deliver at least 2.3Ghz at any time. As Acer wasn't even admitting any fault, but instead telling me stories about their "cooling design, which effectively prevents overheating", I wanted my money back at once. It took 4 months and three useless returns, but finally I succeeded and got myself a Macbook now.

I heard a good gaming alternative should be some sort of ASUS. I don't remember which model exactly, but they should have a 13incher with good gaming capabilities and without any throttling.

 

Thank you for your reply. I have no doubt that it is possible to game on the 3830TG; what I would like to know is whether or not it is possible to play on battery power alone. This is critical to me as the reason I buy this notebook is to game on the train. I won't use it much for gaming at home.

Most recent notebooks throttle the CPU on battery to levels much lower than 1900 Mhz. Some of these can be fixed with ThrottleStop, some can't. I just want to make sure that the 3830TG belongs to the first category, i.e. that whatever multiplier you use (say x19) will remain in effect when the power cord is unplugged.

I've been looking a lot into this, and there is no 13 incher Asus with a GT540M or better. The closest Asus is the 14-inch N45SF, which I owned and returned. It has a GT555M, and indeed, it does not throttle when plugged in, but throttles badly on battery power. This can be fixed with ThrottleStop but the battery life was unacceptable (i.e. 25 minutes). I also own and am about to return an MSI X460DX, which also throttles on battery power, but this one can't be fixed with ThrottleStop as the throttling is not done on CPU multiplier but on CPU voltage.

 

I think the 3830TG may be used on battery with a manual multiplier, but I'm not sure, as I do not own a 3830TG anymore. However, a battery time of 30-60 while use both GPU and CPU is pretty normal, as the laptop uses 10-15W in idle and office mode, but 70-100W in gaming mode. The normal battery life for the 3830TG was around 4.5-5 hours for me - in idle mode.

 

Those are interesting numbers. So we can expect the battery life to be divided by a factor of 5 to 10. The N45SF had an idle battery life of 3.5 hours, so that seems right.

Still, I would expect that with the rated 8 hours of the 3830TG, I could get more than 25 minutes at full power. My train rides last 55 minutes, so I'd be happy with 50 minutes (and I'd recharge at work). At least I got that much on the 3820TG.

 

Prism, you can play without throttling on battery. I played Skyrim and Dirt 3 for 35-50 minutes until it turned off.

 

Thanks a lot Aviv for doing this test!

Well, that's good news and bad news at the same time I guess, 35 minutes is really not that much... but at least it works!

Were you using ThrottleStop to avoid the temps going too high? If so, what multiplier were you using?

 

I used throttlestop, set it on X24-X26 and reached temps not higher than 87C. After upgrading to bios 1.07, my 3830tg won't throttle anymore and run at X24 at the minimum, and sometimes rise to X26-X27.
Here is throttlestop's log, monitoring only, playing Skyrim for an hour:

12/14/11 19:19:17 27.03 22.0 100.0 100.0 0 79 65 1.1959 16.0
12/14/11 19:19:18 26.27 23.6 100.0 100.0 0 87 65 1.1809 17.2
12/14/11 19:19:19 27.59 33.0 100.0 100.0 0 83 67 1.1959 19.9
12/14/11 19:19:20 27.65 29.9 100.0 100.0 0 80 67 1.1809 19.4
12/14/11 19:19:21 27.47 31.3 100.0 100.0 0 83 67 1.1959 19.5
12/14/11 19:19:22 26.90 33.5 100.0 100.0 0 85 68 1.1809 20.8
12/14/11 19:19:23 27.37 31.8 100.0 100.0 0 84 68 1.1809 20.0
12/14/11 19:19:24 26.57 30.9 100.0 100.0 0 84 68 1.1959 19.5
12/14/11 19:19:25 26.35 29.8 100.0 100.0 0 82 67 1.1559 18.7
12/14/11 19:19:26 26.40 26.6 100.0 100.0 0 82 67 1.1559 18.2
12/14/11 19:19:27 26.51 23.8 100.0 100.0 0 80 67 1.1809 17.7
12/14/11 19:19:28 27.46 27.0 100.0 100.0 0 84 66 1.1809 18.4
12/14/11 19:19:29 27.48 35.3 100.0 100.0 0 82 66 1.1809 21.0

 

Wow, that's impressive!

Did you use any of the typical 3830TG mods (remove grid, put coins on heatpipe, change thermal paste)?

This is really helping me with my decision. 35 minutes at x24, I could probably squeeze an hour at x18 (which I tried and is okay for Skyrim). Plus the added bonus of maybe playing at full speed on AC power...

For the record, what's your CPU model?

 

Hey guys I just got the acer timelineX 4830TG-6450 and I was wondering how do we replace the battery? also where can we buy one? I know that its not as simple as the others that you can just swap the battery whenever.

Also, I think I have a battery wearing problem. After two charges I am at 8% wear according to HWMonitor. Is that a good program to assess the wear level? and if so then what do I do with such a fast wear problem??

 

You would need to open up the case to access the battery.

Battery wear level for this TimelineX seems jumpy.

 

I see, is there any guides out there to open the battery compartment? also where would I purchase a replacement battery from?

also I have the sanyo battery in here according to AIDA64 (Everest) which I read is the good one unlike the panasonic battery. Why does it seem to have such a battery wear level already if its the better one???

 

Prism,
I didn't mod my 3830tg at all. It's a 6424, with i5-2430m. I don't think that by decreasing the multiplier you will get longer play time on battery. I tried Dirt 3 with the Intel graphics and it didn't give much more than a few minutes over the Nvidia.

 

Interesting. Maybe the newer models deal better with heat than the first generation. Anyway, you got me convinced now, I'll get my 3830TG today.

Well if anything I think this gives even more credence to what I was saying: if removing the 540M from the equation results in roughly the same power usage, it means that most of the power is consumed by the CPU, and hence dropping the CPU frequency should reduce power usage.

 

Does Anyone tried to change nvidia vbios to reduce voltage from 0.98v to 0.83v? i see in some forums posts betters temps and can run at 740 (gpu)/1480 (shaders)/900 (mem) mhz. I tried with nvflash 5.57, 5.75 and 5.100 but none of them detect bios EEPROM for backup.

I use this tutorial: http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...ga-bios-modification-flash-restore-guide.html

I think games can run perfectly at 0.83v with [email protected].

PD: i'm searching a 1.07 modded bios (i'm now with 1.04 modded bios).

 

Guys,

I bought the 3830TG this afternoon (still unopened int he box) but in the meantime got a call back from someone selling a used 3820TG for 2/3 of the price. The 3830TG has a 2 year warranty, but only 1 year remains on the 3820TG. It was already sent for repair (a minor thing - a keyboard key was not working) but otherwise seems to be in good condition. Now I'm wondering if I should not get this instead of the 3830TG.

When the 3830TG came out, many people said that the 3820TG was in fact better than a 3830TG because of the throttling issue. Now that time has passed, and that easy mods came out for the 3830TG (grid, coins), do you guys still consider the 3820TG to be the better machine?

Are there other users here like Aviv with a throttle-free stock 3830TG?

What is the consensus regarding this now?


Thanks for your guidance!

 

I think the only people who have a throttle-free 3830TG are ones who never push it. Try playing BF3, anything above x24 will melt it even with mods.

 

Well, at least in the case of the i5, the CPU is rated at 2.4 GHz, so x24 hits the spot; that a notebook can't sustain constant turboboost (i.e. overclocked) speeds is not too shocking to me. I'd be happy with x24 anyway

 

I played BF3 a couple times forgetting to turn on throttlestop and I played for like an hour and didn't notice a difference in performance and temps topped out at 91c. I don't know how this happened, I updated to the 1.07 Bios, maybe it really solved throttling.

 

According to Cpt. Yesterday in this post, it looks like the new BIOS introduced a "smarter" management of the CPU multipliers. So the heat issues themselves have not been solved (which anyway is probably not possible by software alone), the multiplier appears to be locked to x13 now, which seems quite low to me (it reduces CPU performance by half basically). From what I understand, it used to be more like 18 and then sudden drop to 8 when critical temps were reached.

I suppose that for most games this is enough though; I don't know how demanding BF3 is on the CPU front, but is it possible that you were running a x13?

At the end of the day, if we can play and performance is acceptable, then it does not matter that much I suppose.

Edit: However Aviv was really running Skyrim at x26 without throttling... I guess I'll have to try it for myself

 

I don't think so, usually when I run throttlestop at 29x it gets to around 90c. I didn't monitor my CPU usage though.

 

Can anyone tell me what drivers I can use to update the video card? Can I just use any nVidia Verde driver?

 

anyone have problems changing the screen brightness using the keyboard shortcut key (fn + left and right direction arrow) after updating the nvidia drivers to the latest? seems that was the only thing I did before the short cut stopped working. anyone know how to fix this??

 

Close the lid for half a second and then reopen, the keys should work again.

 

thanks! it works!! very cool. loving the laptop

 

Ok well that's very encouraging! Anyway I'll be running tests myself soon enough, I decided to keep my 3830TG

Thanks for the help!

 

BUT, I put a new processor in there and did some heating mods so I'm not sure how your system runs with the new bios.

 

How do you guys overclock the gt540 in this laptop??

 

I was able to do it from Nvidia Control Panel after installing Nvidia System Tools. I use the default profile when Windows starts, automatically switch to an overclocked (to 550M levels) profile when a game is launched, then back to default when the game is closed.

 

oooo awesome thanks! one last question, what are the levels of the 550m??

 

GT550m clocks are 740/1480/900, but you can OC your memory up to 1000mhz. I dont suggest OC your nvidia card with default voltage because your laptop can will be a furnace. I was looking for a tool to reduce stock voltage without result, the only way to reduce is by modifying the vBIOS, which is embedded with system BIOS (nvflash, gpu-z and others not working).

 

I OC to 790/1580/1000, as far as I could tell there's no effect on the temps. It heats up just as fast at stock than OC'd.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't adding heat sinks (and coins) to the ducting that is supposed to pipe heat out of the laptop dangerous to the motherboard and other internals?

I think of it like this, in your car's engine bay, the headers duct hot air out of the engine, under the car and out the exhaust. To mitigate underhood temps from being too high, you can put header wrap on the pipes in order to prevent the heat from escaping them, putting heat sinks on there would cool the pipes down, but it would dissipate all that heat into the engine bay.

So by that rationale, wouldn't it make more sense to insulate those pipes rather than redirect the heat into the computer's "engine bay" as it were?

I'm just thinking out loud here, and I am in admiration of the creativity I've seen reading through some of these posts.

 

I just check this. I had tested in furmark, 1366x768, AA off, dynamic background on, burn-in on, xtreme burn-in on. I'm a i5 2430M cpu. GPU Temps results:

Default clocks : 80ºC @ 1.9GHz
Default clocks : 90ºC @ 2.4GHz
740/1480/1000: 86ºC @ 1.9GHz
800/1600/1000: 90ºC @ 1.9GHz

Results show me OC has effects on GPU temperature, therefore has effects on the temperature of the CPU.

 

@unrealtrip

You are right. The coin trick will lower the CPU temperature but at an expense of making the mobo and the underside of the laptop hotter.
It is likely to shorten laptop's lifespan but then again what would you rather have- a throttling laptop for 5 years or a non-throttling one for half of that time

 

I just recently got a 4830TG so I'm late to the game here, and I've read through a lot of this thread but it is quite long so this might have already been brought up, but do traditional notebook coolers not do the trick?

 

Interesting- but how did that temperature affect the CPU temperature? The 64 dollar question is: does overclocking provide more performance gains than would be had by increasing the clocks?

 

The answer to the 64 dollar question is it depends on the game itself. Some games favor the CPU more some others favor the GPU more in which case the best is to have both clocks upped. The temperature of the GPU affects the CPU because when I opened up laptops back then I noticed that the heat pipe actually runs through both the GPU and the CPU which means they share the same heat pipe. That said, GPU temp increased could transfer heat towards the cpu and vice versa. Another note to take is the overall heat inside of the laptop is trapped. So even if the heat pipes were separate, the increase in heat of the GPU would cause the ambient temps inside the laptop to increase, thus heating up the CPU as well.

 

CPU is directly affected by GPU temperature because both chips use same heatpipe and radiator. arrangement of the elements is: GPU -> CPU -> radiator, each degree more in GPU is a degree more in CPU.

I think GPU is more limit factor in fps terms, due to few shaders and low clock. 1.9GHz is sufficient with 740mhz gpu clock. Some games as GTA 4 is more affected by CPU freqs than GPU, it can be cause due physics.

 

I have a 4830tg as well, and probably need to test some more in depth games, but skyrim runs fine and has for hours at a time with just about everything on high settings (only things not on 'high' are the draw distances, which I put about halfway on the scale).

I oc to 800/1000 on gpu. I think the 4830tg suffers less from the throttling/overheating due to larger surface area for heat dissipation. I could be wrong.

 

Hey guys, I'm considering picking up the 4830TG from TigerDirect for $600.

Acer Aspire Timeline X AS4830TG-6450 LX.RGL02.119 Notebook PC - Intel Core i5-2430M 2.40GHz, 4GB DDR3, 640GB HDD, DVDRW, 14 Display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, Blue at TigerDirect.com

I've been out of the loop on computers for a couple years now and could use some advice from the guys who already own this particular model laptop.

My needs are pretty basic. Looking to surf, watch netflix, and play a few games like Crysis 2, Skyrim, and Starcraft 2.

I know this laptop will handle those games well enough but if you had $600 to spend would you pick up the same laptop or is their another model I should be looking into for roughly the same price.

 

Well I just bought mine (also a 6450), so I'd say I'd do it all over again. But GD I paid $660

 

would you guys buy the 3830tg or 4830tg assuming they are priced the same?

 

Hey guys!, i hope your all having a good holidah season, i was just wondering how would i know if i broke my gt540m GPU? i dropped it on my bed and some reason when i play sc2 on medium i only get less than 20 fps...any help would be nice, i probably got something loose. Thx

 

You're probably using the integrated card. Check to make sure the dedicated is being used.

 

I bought the 14" just to have SSD + HDD inside. Maybe it's a bit easier on the throttling too, but not much I guess.
Otherwise I would have go for the smallest one, since they're spec'ed the same.

 

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