Acer aspire 7520-5460 graphics problem

Hi everyone, Im new to this forum.

I appologize if this problem has already been fixed. I went through many pages in search and couldnt find anything to help fix it.

So here it is. I bought my laptop last year around christmas time. Surprisingly the nvidia 7000m performed very well. I was able to run Gothic 3 on low specs, and also fallout 3 which ran well on medium specs. But about 3-5 months ago the performance deteriorated a lot. it got so bad that i cant even watch movies on it anymore. All the framerates, on games it ran fairly well before, are unplayable now. I just hope i didnt fry the gpu because it did overheat before, but i just thought it was normal. Ofcourse if i new about this forum before none of that might have happened. There many useful posts here.

Anyway i hope someone can help me out. Any help/input would be appreciated...

My specs are:
AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-56 (2 CPUs), ~1.8GHz
2GB DDR2
NVIDIA GeForce 7000M / nForce 610M

 

nothing?..

 

I have had similar problems with that same laptop. Did you try checking if video drivers are correctly installed? Some time ago on my 7520 new drivers got installed via windows update and I had similar problems with it. Maybe you should try to install the newest drivers from nVidia's web site.

 

I have been updating my drivers quite regularly from the acer website. I even updated my bios, but still the problem wont go away. I reformatted my laptop, erased everything through erecovery thinking it will be as good as new but i was wrong.

 

wow lots of help on this site...

 

First run HWMonitor .
Leave it running and start gaming then check the temps to make sure it is not an issue.
If the temps are high it is time to do maintainance.
If the temps are not high try reformating could be background programs causing issues or malware.

 

Here are the temperatures after 2 minutes of playing sid meier's pirates:
ACPI Thermal Zone : 70 °C
AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile (Core 1) : 64 °C
AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile (Core 2) : 65 °C
GPU Temperature : 103 °C
Hard Disk Hitachi HTS542516K9SA00 : 34 °C

 

I dont know if thats normal or not.

 

Well, I am not 100% certain on this one, but I think that your GPU temperature is too high. I don't have the 7520 at the moment so I can't test it to see if the temperatures do get that high on it.

Just for the reference I have a laptop with GeForce 9500m GS and the temperature of that video card doesn't get above 95°C.

On the other hand temperatures on processor cores do not look too high to me, but I never did play Sid Meier's Pirates (I assume you are using new Windows version of that game. If you are using the older version, then I must say that temperatures are alarmingly high.), so I don't know how much it stresses modern computers.

I think it may be a good time to clean the heat dissipation system on your laptop.

Also we could use an opinion of an expert here, concerning the temperatures, just in case one of them happens to be reading this.

 

Yes an expert opinion would be nice. Pirates is an old windows game (2004 i think). So it should be running flawlessly.

The gpu temperature sometimes goes to 110C even without gaming, itll do it if i have too many windows open.

How do i clean the heat dissipation system?

 

0. Touch a grounded metal object such as a water pipe or a metal part of desktop computer chassis. Be careful not to in any way generate static electricity on your body. So avoid moving over carpets, touching woolen objects and similar.
1. Remove the battery, disconnect the power connector and press the power button.
2. With battery removed, rotate the laptop so that the battery compartment is facing away from you and the hard disk compartment is close to you.
3. Under the turn the laptop upside down, so that you can see its underside.
4. Below and to the left there should be a visible plastic door.

This part may be problematic! You could void laptop's warranty.

5. Remove the 4 Phillips type screws using a small screwdriver.

6. This part is first time tricky!
You should see close to you near a rubber foot a small handhold. Using it you should remove the door. Be careful not to damage it in the process. In will require some force to remove it, but you should be careful not to apply too much force or the door will be damaged.

7. Inside the laptop you should see 3 compartments. The one to your right should be empty with two rows of solder contacts. Above it you should see a blower and to the left a heatpipe.

8. Remove the 3 screw holding the blower. It should be connected to the main printed board with a cable which near its end has a small plastic connector and 3 visible wires. Carefully disconnect the cable. You should be able to remove the blower with minimum application of force.

9. Remove the dust from the blower.
If you want, you can disassemble it for more thorough cleaning, but I would not recommend you to do it on your first time.

10. Above the blower you should see a metal object connected to the heatpipe. It will have many ribs and a large surface area. You should clean it with compressed air. In it there will probably be a large amount of dust, so be careful. It is not recommended to use a vacuum cleaner for this process, because it can generate large amounts of static electricity which could damage electronic components of the laptop.

11. Inspect interior of the laptop. You should look for dust particles. Clean all dirt and dust particles you see.

12. Connect the 3 pin plastic plug on the blower cable back to the board. Then place the blower back in its original place and screw the screws back in their locations. You should be careful not to over tighten them. By doing that you can damage the blower.

13. Replace the plastic cover. First put the right side of the cover. Then put in the left side. The order is important because there are 4 pieces of plastic going out of the cover on the right side. They are much thicker than similar pieces of plastic on other sides of the door, so I think that they won't just click into their place like the others.

14. Once the door is back in its place put the 4 screws back.

15. Connect the battery and power connector. The laptop should be now ready for use.

If you think that the procedure described above is too complicated for you, then there is a simpler solution. You can try to blow some compressed air into the laptop's openings used to remove hot air inside. It will not be as good as the one described above, but is you damage or destroy laptop in the process of its cleaning, then there isn't any logic in cleaning it.

 

Yeah, anything over 100 on ANY component of your laptop is a major red flag. The fact that it's doing so on idle is seriously bad.
Time to clean that sucker out, and possibly look into getting a fan replacement.

 

I cleaned out all the dust, the game performance has improved a bit but still not even par. gpu temperature is still 101C. Thanks though at least its a bit better. But maybe i have to upgrade the cooling system.

 

OK. Then here are a few thoughts:

Outside temperature will affect the efficiency of heat dissipation.
So: How much did outside temperatures change between now and the time when the laptop was performing adequately?

Did you change the location which you use when you play games? If you did, it could affect temperatures.

Did you add any hardware to the laptop? I for example added a sound-card and it increased temperature of my laptop.



Right now I do not have any more ideas on what could increase the temperature of your laptop.

 

outside temperature didnt really change, locatatoin didnt either. I did not add any hardware. I am beginning to think that its my grphics card hardware itself is shot.

 

I doubt that your graphics hardware is damaged, and here are the reasons why:

First there is no dedicated graphics hardware in your laptop that could be damaged. It is using motherboard's chip-set to generate video. If the 7000m was damaged, it would take the rest of the laptop with it.

Although I have not empirically tested this, from what I know about graphics hardware I believe that if there was any damage, the chances of your laptop actually working would be extremely small.


First thing you should do, in my opinion, is to upgrade BIOS to its newest version. Opinions are divided on the issue of BIOS upgrade, but there is chance that your laptop came with old version of BIOS which has temperature management problems. On the other hand, if there was a problem in BIOS, then it would be visible from the start. There are several tutorials about BIOS upgrade on this forum, and countless more on the Internet. So remember that search function is your friend!


This problem is, in my opinion, probably related to heat dissipation system.

First: Did sounds which laptop's blower emits change in any way? There should be audible difference between the speeds of its rotation. If the blower does sound different, than it may indicate that it is damaged. During its normal operation its internal components will be contaminated by dust and anything with small enough mass to be sucked inside the laptop.

You should consider cleaning the blower.

The blower consists of plastic housing and a cover made of metal. The cover is attached by 4 small Phillips-type screws and by two stickers made of something that to me looks like aluminium foil.

Under the cover you should be able to see the rotor. Remove it. It is held by the magnetic field so some force needs to be used. Be careful not to damage the blades when you are removing the rotor!

Then remove the dust.

You may consider lubricating the shaft, but I cannot give you much information on what to use. As far as I understand, with this type of blower, the axle shouldn't during normal operation have any physical contact with the shaft, so the lubrication shouldn't make any difference.
I managed to remove grinding noise by dropping a very small amount of oil for two-stroke internal combustion engines.




Next problem could be with the contact surface which "absorbs" the heat from the processor and chip-set dice and transfers it to the heatpipe. The only way for this system to operate with lowered efficiency, as far as I see, is if it was removed and the improperly installed.

This system consists of a peatpipe, contact surface with 4 screws for processor and some power supply components, a contact surface for the nForce 610m chip and at its end an object with large surface and many ribs, the one which you were supposed to clean, into which the blower blows air.

The problem with this part is that you cannot inspect it without removing it, because the side which you should inspect is not visible. If you do remove it, you will need some time and components to put it back in place, and the results will depend a lot on experience you have with use of thermal paste! You will need some thermal paste (also called grease, compound interface material and few more names, which I can't remember at the moment) and some thermal paste remover or suitable chemical. The thermal pastes usually go from 5USD to 15USD, while the removers go from 5USD to 10USD. As far as thermal pastes are concerned, most of the higher quality pastes would be much better than tho one which is factory applied. Arctic Silver 5 has been considered the best for a long time, but it seems to be superseded by Arctic Cooling's MX-2. For the removers, the most popular seems to be Arctic Silver's ArctiClean. There are others, but I can't remember any at the moment. Also there is the traditional method of using isopropanol (here where I am, we use ethanol instead) to remove thermal paste from the contact surfaces. It is more difficult and less thorough that using proper removers, but if you don't want to spend money on remover or can't be bothered to get some, it's good to know that it too is a viable choice.


Under the contact surface for the motherboard chip you should see a violet thermal pad. Unfortunately, the distance between the contact surface and the die is too big for use of thermal paste. It could be that the thermal pad was somehow damaged, but I cannot see how such thing could happen.

If it is damaged you will need to replace it, but I do not know where you can find a suitable replacement thermal pad.


Under the contact surface for processor, you should see a white thermal pad for power supply components and remains of thermal paste. Also on the processor there should be some visible remains of thermal paste. If you do choose to remove the heat dissipation system, the you can probably lower processor temperatures by placing the thermal paste by hand.

There are many opinions on the ways to apply thermal paste, so I won't give any recommendations here. Just keep in mind that it has a small exposed core.



At this point I have no more ideas on what could be the problem.

 

hi i have the same laptop and have the same problem as you. and i just read on another forum that acer has put too little thermal paste on the GPU and that is what is giving the problems, i have already wrote an email to acer hoping they would solve the problem, (i don't think they will)...

 

Respectfully, I disagree with that statement.

Here are my reasons:
1. As far as I know, this laptop doesn't have a dedicated graphics card.
(there are other 7520 versions that do have dedicated graphics cards)
Therefore there is no thermal paste on the GPU. Since there is no thermal paste on the GPU, there cannot be too little thermal paste on the GPU.

2.If my data sources are correct, and I believe that they are, but cannot be 100% certain, graphics processing unit should be on the same die as the chipset. It should be connected to the heat dissipation system by a thermal pad. So there is no thermal paste there.

On the other hand I do think that heat in this laptop could be dissipated in a more efficient manner.


I don't think that, even if you do get a response from Acer's technical support, they are going to be able to help in any way. To me it looks like someone did some bad engineering when designing the heat dissipation system.

 

I had a similar problem with a acer aspire 7520 - Geforce7000m:
- After few minutes, the graphic performances decrease. Games were not playable, even simple one.
- This problem appears 6 month after I bought the laptop.

I check the GPU frequence with GPU-Z: blocked at 100Mhz (Geforce7000m is 350 Mhz capable) and the temperature stays above 95 degre.

I remove the back panel (4 or 5 screws) and the blower(3 screws): at the exhaust of the blower, there were a lot of dust, just before the heatsink. No more air couldnt cross the heatsink.

Carefully,I remove the dust and I clean the heatsink.

Now, the GPU's temperature is between 65 and 75 degree and GPU frequence can reach 350 Mhz. Even 3D games are playable!

Note: in GPU-Z (different of CPU-Z), check these values in the sensor tab.

 

Hey there, I have the Aspire 7520-5757 with a similar problem, haven't noticed any issues with the laptop randomly shutting down, but my GPU temp is showing 96-100c pretty much constantly, just sitting on the desktop keeps it around 100c. Is this normal? I've heard someone on another forum say they removed the GPU chip and reapplied thermal paste but you're saying that's not possible. I'm not even able to overclock the settings for the GPU not that I would with the normal GPU temp sitting at 100 either. But then maybe that temp is normal for this laptop?? I haven't had trouble with programs till I tried playing Dragon Age on the laptop, it's barely playable but quite choppy even on low settings, but if it's like this now Starcraft 2 (which is what I plan to overclock the system for) is not even going to play capably well. But you all are saying 100c is bad on ANY component. Guess it's time to peel apart the laptop, clean it out and see if there's anywhere to apply the arctic silver.

PS: Zwazoo; so are you saying that the GPU was blocked at 100mhz and wouldn't perform at the actual 350mhz BECAUSE of the heat?

 

Well I tried cleaning the laptop out, and though now my temps are between 90-100, slightly better, still nowhere NEAR where they should be, even as I write this Speedfan is showing 91'm. Yet there are times when just sitting idle on desktop it will spike to 100-105. I'm at a loss, when I took the door off, I noticed what someone else was saying that there is no thermal paste just those heat pads, but they seem to have a bit of space, not big, but noticeable to my eye, should I carefully bend the heatpipe to make a better contact? Unfortunately I live somewhere where I can't put the AC down to a colder temp, and it's pretty much 80 in the house all the time, I have a regular fan always blowing air on it, and my xbox360 as well. Wow I've never seen it hit 89 before, just did for some strange reason, doesn't feel like the fan is on. If there was one thing I wish I could do, would be to turn that fan on 100% all the time, but speedfan doesn't give me that option. Now it jumped to 93, I haven't done anything but type. I have v1.31 Bios, I guess the only other option is to reflash the bios? Though admittedly it is a crap bios you can't change ANYTHING other than boot order and maybe 128 to 256 for the GPU.