GeForce 9600M GT overheating on Aspire 7720g

On my 7720g (from the signature), I replaced the GeForce 9500m GS (which died suddenly) with a GeForce 9600m GT (Acer spare part VG.9PG06.006) and moved bios to 1.45 black edition form the MXM bios mods thread.

After struggling with drivers for some time, I finally managed to install 259.47 drivers and I've noticed that temperatures seem to be high for my taste.

With outside air temperature of 25 C, I get idle GPU temperature of 60 to 65 C, which isn't too different to what I used to get with the 9500, if I remember correctly.

The strange thing is that as soon as I start any computer game, GPU temperatures start to go high and reach peak of around 93 C. After that, they drop down to 89 C and go back up to 93 C. Then the cycle repeats. This happens even with 2D games which kept the 9500 at around 70 C.

The fan and the heatsinks are clean and the thermal paste is fresh.

Any ideas on what could be causing such behavior and how to solve it?

 

If you have the "common" version of the 9600M GT (with a small indentation above the DC/DC coil, like the one in my avatar), then chances are that the coil is interfering with the heatsink. Try dremeling out the part of the heatsink that is interfering. If that doesn't help, use a copper shim.

 

Actually, I did work on the part which interferes with the inductor there, so the heatsink seems to fit completely. I forgot to mention it. Sorry.

And yes, the card is like the one in your avatar.

I'll check everything one more time just in case I missed a part somewhere.

 

Did you try the older "MXM Edition" BIOS (as opposed to "Black Edition")? Or stock 1.45 for that matter (the 7720G doesn't require a BIOS mod for upgrading to 9600M GT, it is only needed to fix DVI detection on certain cards). "Black Edition" has a DSDT built for ACPI 4.0 (as opposed to ACPI 3.0 in the stock BIOS), and I've received reports of other ACPI 4.0 BIOSes failing to correctly control fan speed under Windows 7 (though I never managed to reproduce this myself).

 

I didn't try older version. Can you post a link to it?

I didn't test the computer much with the stock 1.45 and the 9600, so I don't know if the temperatures are caused by the BIOS change. I mostly moved to the modded version because I wanted to experiment with EFI shell and replacement of the card looked like a good time to move to a new BIOS version.

UPDATE: I tried using stock 1.45 BIOS and while the peak temperature is the same, it seems that the card spends much of its time in the mid 80s instead of the high 80s low 90s of the black edition BIOS. Another noteworthy thing is that with stock BIOS, the fan will start running when card goes over 64 C (and stop at 60 C). I didn't note exactly when the fan starts on the black edition, but I remember it being off with card temperature of 68 C. I'll test that too and post update soon.


Also it seems to me (but I could be wrong) that the stock BIOS is a bit more aggressive when switching to higher fan speeds that the black edition. I'll see if I can measure that somehow.