Acer TimelineX 3830/4830/5830 T/G

Nedemai, fantastic work.
I have the 3830TG with a i5-2430.
I also see GPU temp at 75 cause CPU throttle using your .85v 1.10 bios.
Have you made any progress, or any rationalization of why this happens?
Thanks and kind regards for all your effort!

 

Just upgraded CPU from i3 2310m to i5 2540m and apply thermal paste. My 4830TG runs much cooler now Temperature drops from 80C+ to 70C+

 

I have a TimelineX AS4830TG that I am basically happy with (after adding 4 GB memory and changing the 5400 rpm drive for a Sandisk Extreme SSD) but I have one problem with it.

When I unplug the power supply the screen brightness goes to minimum. It does not matter what the Battery setting is (currently 35%), and it does not matter which power scheme I am using. Plugging the power adapter back in is not a problem.

I then have to use the Fn Brightness+ key to get it to usable brightness levels.

I tried to use the search function and I kept getting an error message, so I apologize if this has been covered somewhere already.

 

I think it's the epower management software. It will overrule the windows power schemes.

 

My laptop does not have epower management installed. The only Acer power program is PowerSmart, which controls the little quick switch mode button on the upper right of the keyboard.

Should I maybe install Epower?

 

I dun use both - installed PowerSmart and found it worked weird so ended up uninstall it. Now i just use BatteryCare

 

Hi guys

I have been looking for a "new" laptop recently, and I have found a TimelineX 4830TG-6808 online for under $500, manufacturer refurbished. I'm tempted to buy it for its great specs, but I have heard some bad things about Acer laptops

Has anyone owned this model and can give some opinions on it? Excuse me for not wanting to go through 380 pages on here, but I hope someone can help

Thanks

 

Never mind, it is installed. It does not show up in Control Panel > Programs, but when I ran Task Manager it was running.

After a little Googling I learned that Epower has no user interface or settings. So that is useless.

 

EPower was the first program I uninstalled on my Acer. I disabled it first and left off when I did a clean install.

 

How can I uninstall something not on the list of installed programs?

 

Hello guys!

I have some problems with my 3830TG.

I'm getting really bad performance in diablo 3 with low res and everything on off/low.
The laptop should be able to handle it well so I don't know what it is. I'm using throttlestop so throttling shouldn't be the problem.
Im thinking about doing a clean install of windows 7 and I'm wondering if I should flash bios aswell?

I haven't touched bios at all right now.

 

Leave BIOS as it is unless there were some interesting improvements in release notes.
BIOS does not affect performance so unless there are some serious fixes there's no point in flashing a new one.

 

Have you turned on the ThrottleStop logging feature yet while gaming? You need to create a record of your CPU performance and find out what the problem is. With the 3830TG, you usually have to decrease the multiplier and decrease performance so your laptop does not overheat and trigger throttling. There is nothing ThrottleStop can do if your laptop is over heating. For this laptop, you need to setup ThrottleStop so it prevents your laptop from overheating. Have you seen how others have ThrottleStop set up to work around this problem?

 

Has anyone tried removing the metallic ACER decal from the front of the lid? Is it a sticker or is it actually part of the lid?

 

It's part of the lid.

Just tried the unplug-restart technique to improve battery life- seems just as bad, if not worst. Expecting 2:50 on a full charge (panasonic battery). Guess it's just a POS.

 

The Panasonic batteries in the Timeline machines are dying really fast. Mine has 30% wear

I don't think I'll buy Acer again when I upgrade

 

I put a goofy OCZ sticker on it that says: "My SSD is faster than your HDD" xD

Do you have any acer software installed?
If you do, make sure that things like "Acer Conference Manager" are not running in the background. Also, make sure you don't have any uncessary processes running in the background.

After you reboot and Windows loads completely, put it to sleep and then wake it up. It might help and it might not :|

For the record, I have a panasonic battery too that started to wear very quickly at the beginning and went up to 20% wear. But then it started going down for some reason. Now it's been around 15% for a while and hasn't gone up any further.

 

PHP:

Mine is Sanyo and the wear level is at 18.5% after 1 year (130 cycles) Not sure if this is normal or not but i kind of disappointed because 15% of battery roughly equals 1 hr of normal usage

 

On my 3820TG after 1,5 year of use and a lot of using on a battery i have 17% wear level, but even when it was new it was like 3-4%.
As I am reading this topic from time to time I see that I've made a good decision to buy 3820 instead of 3830. Sometimes I don't understand Acer's decisions...

 

Yeah I have it installed. and sorry, I meant Sanyo. They replaced my panasonic one within the first month.

 

The Asus UL80VT I retired (gave to my wife) is currently showing 13% wear after 2 years and 4 months.

The "new and improved" Acer 4830TG shows 7% wear after 2 months. That is with the Sanyo battery.

That and stuttering performance doing simple things like watching YouTube while plugged in make me question my purchase decision.

 

Hi Guys!

Have a 3830TG (i5 2410M) and am thinking about upgrading the wifi to Intel 6200 for dual-band capability, are there any better half mini-pcie out there?

The Intel 6200 is really cheap, $12 incl. shipping (live in Sweden so the seller ships free worldwide from Ebay) and since I don't feel its worth to disassemble my notebooks screen to add an extra antenna for 450Mbps with the Intel 6300 for example, it (the 6200) seems like a good choice?

Any other suggestions?
Has anybody tried installing another antenna on this computer, if so is it hard?

One last question:
Is the Bluetooth integrated on the current wifi-card?
If so I need to buy a new wifi-card with integrated bluetooth.

 

for wireless: stick with 6300, the price is not so much bigger and you'll be able to put it in your future laptop (or maybe add a third antenna in the existent one - it's a bit tricky, but i did it)
as for the second question, the answer is no - in my 5830tg the bt3.0 is a separate module, and the wireless is Atheros T77H167.07 (AR5B97) - which i replaced with intel 6300

 

Thank you for your reply.

Did you use any teardown instructions etc. and if so where did you find them?

 

Hey guys, I'm really focusing in on finding a good deal on the 4830TG-6808 and I just wanted to ask a couple of questions.

Has anyone tried removing the optial drive and adding a SSD as the primary drive and placing the stock in the optical drive slot? I think it would be cool if I could buy a SMALL SSD, like ~20 GB only for booting Windows 7 on (and all other programs and data off of the stock 500 GB drive unless they are necessary for booting).

I don't know much about replacing laptop internals but I am definitely planning on buying an 8 GB RAM upgrade from Crucial for ~ $50, and I would probably have to send the laptop to a guy to do the optical drive removal because I don't feel comfortable with it unless I can find a guide.

Also, does the 4830TG-6808 with the i5-2450M processor suffer from throttling?

Thanks guys

 

Check the first page of this thread, there were some pages in russian with the manual how to dissemble it.

 

Thank you!

I guess you mean this:
http://mycomp.su/arh/sg/nb/acer/aspire/Aspire_4830T_4830TG_www.mycomp.su_.pdf
?

It seems to be for the 4830T / TG but it should be mostly the same I guess?
Seems like a LOT of hassle though, I think it might be a project for when I get a 450MBps router but thanks!

 

Hey guys,

We have a 4830T that we need to get the VT-x extensions enabled on, we scoured the bios with no luck. Im reluctant to simply update the BIOS from Acer's site without knowing if they enabled this and would really like to avoid any modded BIOS.

Does any one have any insight, I tired to use the forum search but no matter what I type I get "Invalid Query".

 

Can't answer definitively about the throttling issue, but I replaced the factory HD with a Sandisk Extreme 120 GB- on sale for $109, and got a 4 GB Corsair memory module for $22.99.

Took about 10 minutes to swap out the drives and install the memory, and about an hour or so to reinstall everything on the new SSD.

Yesterday the Sandisk Extreme 240 GB was on sale for $177 at Buy.com (expired now, but I'm sure the same deal will come again). The Extreme is hella fast- my 4830TG boots in under 17 seconds.

I know the DVD/CD player is easily removed, and a hard drive caddy is easy enough to find. You should not have much trouble with that. Maybe somewhere in this 388 page thread is some specific instructions.

Good luck.

 

Thanks for answering. Do you have the link for the RAM you bought? I was told to only have the same 2 sticks so you should buy them together, but if you have done it without a problem and I can get it for only $25 (college student, no budget) that would be GREAT.

Also, thanks for the info about the SSD but honestly I don't really want one that big. I plan for most of my HD space to be data, games, programs, etc so I don't really want to be spending a lot on a big SSD, I really only just need one for booting.

Thanks

 

Yes. You can take everything out.

 

It should not downclock. Mine has i7 and sometimes it goes up to 100 degrees C and stays there for a long time at maximum speed.

 

I got the Corsair CM3X4GSD1066 on Amazon, now $21.99 with free shipping.

No problems, the computer seems to be quite happy with 2 different sticks.

Good luck.

 

http://mycomp.su/arh/sg/nb/acer/aspire/Aspire_5830T_5830TG_www.mycomp.su_.pdf

 

And you have the AS4830TG-6808 correct?

 

@alc027 Sorry I've not been reading this forum too often lately,

From everything I can tell all the timeline X series that have the number scheme. XX30TG seem to use the same bios files. That is to say, the 3830TG, 4830TG and 5830TG all use the same bios as far as I know.

There is no reason why my bios mod won't work for you, and I've personally had no issue rolling back to older or even default bioses. With this in mind please remember you take your own risk and I cannot be held responsible if some problem does arise from your tinkering.

I noticed you had also asked about bios recovery incase of a bad flash. This has me curious as well because every other laptop I've had that uses a insyde bios I've managed to kick into a recovery mode and gotten to flash a stock bios, but I've not got it to work on my 3830TG.

 

I have a software version problem. Something is wrong with my PowerSmart button- it doesn't work.

I had uninstalled ePower Management to see if the Windows power schemes were better at managing battery life than ePower. It seemed to be worse. So I went to reinstall ePower Management and the only version I could find on the Acer website for the 4830TG was 6.00.3006, I was pretty sure the version I uninstalled was newer but whatever.

The Powersmart button doesn't work after reinstalling the ePower software, so I figured I should reinstall Launch Manager considering they are supposed to work together. But I am hesitant to do so because the version on my computer is 5.1.7, the version on Acer's site is 5.1.4.

What is going on here? Why is the software on the support site older than what I have installed?

I don't have any software on disk because of Acer's decision not to supply driver disks, and I replaced my HD with an SSD. I had used the restore disk build to put the OS and factory default setup on the new drive. I don't want to have to reinstall everything from the rebuild disks and have to restore all my installed programs and data.

Any ideas?

 

If you still have the originial HDD boot to it and take a backup of all the Acer applications using the Acer backup manager to a USB Flash drive or a CD. Then, boot to your Windows installation on the SSD and only restore the programs you need.

Or just download the newest one from this link:
Acer Support: Downloads & Support Documents - Notebook / Aspire / Aspire 3830TG

These are for the 3830TG but they're actually the same. The reason you couldn't find new ones is probably because no one bothered to update the list for the 4830TG at Acer.

 

my acer 4830tg nvidia card was not detected and also the power smart button doesn't work.....
it's that mean my nvidia card was broken?
is someone in here know how to fix this ?

 

I'm pretty locked into getting a 4830TG-6808 or 4830TG-6457 (they are the same model, just sold in different places) and I was wondering if anyone has tried using a hard drive caddy to put the stock 500 GB HD in the optical drive and installed a SSD?

I was thinking of getting this thing

New SATA 2nd HDD caddy adapter for Aspire AS4830TG-6808 14" Laptop Cobalt Blue | eBay

and maybe in a few months or a year or so, getting a small SSD (like 20-30 GB) just to run windows and programs off of and putting the stock HD in a caddy to use as data and to run games off

 

The new Ivybridge M5 Ultrabook with Kepler GT640M is on the US website and should be generally available soon. They are selling for $779 retail and are far less likely than the 4830TG to throttle. Why not wait for the M5?

 

I'm a college student and don't really have the budget or need for an ultrabook. I don't need a gaming laptop either. The 4830TG just happens to have basically everything I want in a laptop and is in my price range

I thought the 2nd gen i5 processors were not affected by the throttling problem?

 

As far as I know, all of the TG models of the 4830 throttle under stress. The people in this thread could tell you better, since I have an earlier generation Timeline (3820TG) that does not throttle under any conditions. If you're not going to stress the unit and you're getting a great price, I guess it won't be a problem.

 

Hello,

Depends wht you mean by stress. On mine (with an i7 cpu) I put to run several cpu programs and some gpu programs. The temp went up to 99 and stayed there for long and from time to time it disabled the turbp, but this is not a realistic situation. Even if you play a game I do not htink you can get so extreme, so it i up to waht you needed for. Stress id something relative. I am writing programs in fortran and C which are very intensive, but I learn they it is not effective to run them on the laptop, so I just se my laptop for development and tets and then the final nalysis and do the stressful part on servers So it depends on yo a lot. I am happy about the battery lie. I use linux and I ws able to get up to 9 hours of battery with wathcing movies (350 MB/ 40 min quality) and some internet on.

 

Do you know if the 4820TG line throttles? Maybe I'll try that one instead.

 

The 3820TG, with its dual fans, is the best of the Timeline series but the 4820TG is fine, as long as you stay away from the I3 models, which were discontinued because of thermal issues.

 

Well on eBay I just won the 4820TG-6847 i5-480M, ATI 6650M, with 8 GB RAM and a 750 GB 7200 RPM hard drive (both upgraded) for about $350 total, so I hope it was a decent deal

 

You'll love it. It's a great little computer and that is a good price. I5/HD6650M are not very common on eBay. Enjoy it. I haven't found anything that I like more than my Timeline.

 

Hey guys i just stumbled onto this form and i also got a 3830tg like a lot of you guys but i've been really wanting to overvolt it but all i can find is undervolted bioses. I have a really good chip and vram at 846/1086 and i want to push it further but does anyone know where i can get one or can someone make one? That would be awesome and don't worry about temperatures, i have that covered.

 

If I understand you correctly you want to overvolt the GPU?

Also if I may ask what did you do to take care of the thermal issues?