My Acer Aspire 5920G is heating up after installing Windows 7 x64

hello all, this is my first post here on this forum section... hi

well, i know that many people before me have had this same problem for ages but i still cant get around to have mine solved

i used to have a vista home premium x32. then i figured that i should switch to windows 7 like everybody else, that and ive read stories about how it revived their machines as if it was the rebirth of the human race. so i picked windows 7 pro x64 version because my laptop is capable of such a system according to the win 7 upgrade adviser

well... everything else is great, except that my GPU is heating up to 60-65 degrees, which never happened in vista except when multiple heavy apps were loading up. now the fan is just running nonstop and RARELY takes a break, all this while idle. now this shouldnt be happening right?

[rant]
windows 7 isnt supposed to choke my laptop if i dont have state of the art upgrades except for specs that still passed compatibility... why install something that would eventually kill your machine with overheat? i dont feel obliged to upgrade anything and i expect it to run smooth because its supposed to be compatible with the system, it means my laptop already has the stuff and therefore it shouldnt be working extra hard and wheeze and puff just to deliver me the qualities of win 7 x64. if my laptop really is compatible with win 7, why is it having such a hard time? yeah win 7 is designed to use the machines hardware to its full extent, but not in a way that itll eventually self destruct right? oh so i need a few extra gigabytes of memory to really accomplish what im desiring, is that it? so what i currently have just wasnt good enough after all? did it change its mind or something? what a lie.
[/rant]

sorry, just had to get that off my mind...

ANYWAY according to CPUID, its my GPU that is heating up the whole laptop. so my fan is running continuously and that isnt the way its supposed to be. this heating issue has to stop. its been going on for almost a week now.

ive tried updating everything. ive updated to the latest BIOS. the latest audio driver. the chipset. been to acers site and downloaded all of the available drivers. and i even snagged the latest nvidia driver that TehSuigi had put up in the sticky. and i can tell you, that NONE OF THAT WORKED. im still stuck with a heated up laptop and i just dunno anymore what drivers to get to make the GPU stop heating up.

TehSuigi seems to be running a win 7 x64, so maybe he knows what to do... actually i need all sorts of ideas tossed in here by those who can help me bring my laptop back to ease or otherwise, i will have to switch back to vista x32.

the specs are:

* Intel Core 2 Duo processor T5550 (1.83 GHz, 667
MHz FSB, 2 MB L2 cache)
* 15.4" WXGA Acer CrystalBrite LCD (8 ms / 220-nit)
* Up to 1024 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS TurboCache
* 2 GB DDR2
* 250 GB HDD
* DVD Super Multi DL
* 802. 11a/b/g WLAN
* Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
* Subwoofer

please help me

 

Hello Hammi, and welcome to the forums!
Sorry to hear that your GPU temperatures are giving you concerns, but they shouldn't - 60-65 degrees Celsius at idle are just fine, and shouldn't cause your system to self-destruct by any stretch of the imagination. When they start reaching the mid-80s, start to panic.
My 9500M GS is at 56 right now.

First thing that came to mind is that Nvidia's PowerMizer functionality got boogered up due to a wonky driver installation. PowerMizer downclocks your GPU when it's not needed, and thus it runs cooler on idle.
Which Nvidia driver version are you using? I'm on 186.81.
What Windows power plan are you using? Try Power Saver when you don't need the GPU.
When was the last time you cleaned your fan intake and exhaust? If the fan can't blow air on the heatpipe, the whole laptop's internal temperatures rise.

I wouldn't blame the increase in temperature on Windows 7; remember, it's less intensive on your computer's resources than Vista was. If your machine can run Vista, it can run 7 better.

 

Here are a couple of other thoughts

Before any 'big' upgrade run all the benchmarks, disk tests, thermal checks, etc that you think you are going to run after. This is good for the soul but also means you don't get into this "How come my new mouse mat overheated my HDD - I'm sure it wasn't that hot before" situation.

Secondly if doing FW upgrades do those next and re check. Strange graphics effects and altered fan profiles often come (and go) with BIOS updates. Also make sure it is the RIGHT bios !

Then if all is well do the software. By the way all those benchmarks sound a drag to write out . . I just snap then with a digital camera. If all is well they never need looking at again. (don't save screenshots on the HDD you are about to format

I agree with Tehsuigi 50-60 is not a surprise and you shouldn't begin to try to 'correct' temperatures until you have all the dust out !!

Well worth a look at clock frequencies etc to ensure that it winds down when not under stress - Various overclocking tools will show this in real time.

IMHO W7 is a great OS,
I run 3 W7 machines including both 32 and 64, one still on Vista and 4 on XP

XP has the advantage of being 100% sorted out and supported. Vista is just irritating (though not to that Laptop's owner and W7 is very stable, pretty well supported for drivers etc and had far better manners than vista. It is also pretty quick!

 

No need to use overclocking utilities to see if your GPU is properly downclocking - just use GPU-Z!

 

thank you TehSuigi!

i see... well nah i didnt literally meant self destruction, but it could lessen my hardwares life the way its going right now. i still think its weird why its getting warm in idle state when in vista it was more laid back and was actually running cooler than it is now. i figured i just need the right drivers to make it relax again like before.

i will consider using this software as soon as i get this sorted out, thanks for mentioning!

i used one of those drivers you had put up on the sticky thread "The Ultimate ACER Resource Thread". the newest and the most compatible driver would be 186.01 according to that thread, which ive been using for a day now. right now im using 186.81 since you mentioned about it lol.

ive always been using a balanced power plan even in vista, and i had no heating issue then until now right after installing win 7. switched to power saver now.

quite frankly ive never opened the laptop to remove dust since i bought it in 2008. instead ive blown inside of the exhaust entries sometimes in a while to blow out the dust since i dont have air on can or vacuum cleaner or stuff like that. pathetic, i know. but really, win 7 cant be reacting immediately on something like that can it? and sure, i would clean it properly one day... if i only knew how without risking to damage any hardware

yeah well of course not, its not win 7's fault... but i need the right adjustments to make it stop overreacting when its supposed to be easy. i want it in the same cool state like it was in vista, when even dust didnt concern it. i strongly feel that this is a drivers issue. since vista was being ok and not so intensive with my laptop, win 7 shouldve been a blessing. but now the heat is even worse than vista. its just confusing you see. thanks for your advices so far!

im sure i checked what the requirements were before i decided to get win 7. i dont need any hardware upgrade, everything is already consistent coming straight from my manufacturer.

i am very certain it was the right BIOS, i downloaded it from acer. it was version 3813, thats all there ever was.

software, no problem. but again, i dont have any plans on upgrading. i just want it to run like it is now because win 7 is supposed to be more hardware-friendlier than vista and my GPU is only a few years old.

well it was fine before, why should it be necessary to remove dust when win 7 can take care of the machine better than vista? not that i shouldnt remove dust, but doesnt that mean that win 7 is more demanding when i suddenly have to clean out dustt while this wasnt needed while in vista? just saying.

well TehSuigi just suggested GPU-Z so i guess that should do the trick.

though i agree that win 7 is a pretty good OS as its very fast indeed and reliable and royally outpaces XP, i still have a heating problem. i think its driver related or that win 7 has left some auto settings to make my GPU spazz out. whatever it is, i want the thing that is causing it toned down.

 

Shortening your hardware life? Maybe from 15 years to 10, but are you really going to lean on your 5920G for that long? :3
PowerMizer isn't a separate software; it's built into Nvidia drivers, which is why I thought that a driver installation or uninstallation went wonky and caused that functionality to be removed. Nvidia's drivers are notorious for that sorta thing. Heck, I'm only on 186.81 still because 195.62 didn't have brightness control on my machine!

I think you might have some misconceptions about Windows 7. It isn't the be-all end-all of operating systems; just another evolution of the Windows environment.
It does most things better, but it's largely a refined Vista.

Say, here's an idea.
Back up your Windows 7 installation (using Windows Backup), then use your Acer recovery DVDs and hop back to Vista for a bit. See if the problem persists or goes away!

 

haha ok i see then... well i planned to keep it safe and running without any quirks as long as possible by any means! i still got games to play and stuff

what if i uninstall the driver from the control panel, will i be able to reset the powermizer thing?

and i did knew it was a greater and enhanced version of vista, but it beats me that its not running the GPU on the same level as my vista at least... i mean the laptop has already passed all requirements for x64 and all that right. i have a slight feeling that something terrible mustve occurred during my install. in that case, BLEHHHHHH.

well alright then, ill make an image backup of 7 as it is now and switch back to my previous image backup of vista then ill see. if it stays cool, then ill reinstall win 7 from scratch. if the heating happens again... then uhh... ill report back in here and if theres nothing that can be done then i will have to return to vista again, till i figure out one day what to do :C but if it DOES stop overheating then ill just reinstall all my apps!

i mean i do love windows 7, its just that it has become such an ordeal when the cooling fan just started running endlessly because of a constantly hot GPU... and it had to happen right after the win 7 install. maybe its because of the x64 system, idunno. hope ya understand. thanks for all your help

 

I would suggest uninstall the old Nvidia Drivers, do a CCleaner on the registry then install the latest nvidia verde driver.

 

Hang on Hammi, that's a crucial piece of information here.
You performed an upgrade installation of Windows 7, right? Not a clean installation?

Keeping in mind that you can perform a clean install using upgrade DVDs, that'd be something to look into.

 

i recommend installing a clean version of 7 x64, and installing teh latest 197.16 drivers, they have no brightness control issue and they seem to run fine.

 

alright ill give that a try, thanks weinter!

edit: i dunno if its safe for me to use ccleaner, i mean i dunno what to tick on and off when cleaning the registry... i usually have ace utilities to do the cleaning job for me.

i didnt upgrade, i did a clean (custom) installation since upgrading from x32 to x64 isnt possible. it forced my previous system into a folder of its own named "windows.old" which cannot be brought back now and only containing files and settings. and i dont have any upgrade dvds of any sort which is why i proceeded on to download all the available drivers from acer before installation. the fan began to run in the middle of the installation. windows 7 auto adjusted itself and the fan still went on to run without stop ever since.

i forgot to burn the containing factory default image from vista though but i still got a backup image so... nothing else came with my laptop upon purchase, it sure would be easy to have dvds as well.

i was gonna roll back to my backup image today and proceed on, but ill wait some more before i do it.

im considering to do a new clean install, and ill be sure to grab that driver as well. thank you

 

BUMP

well, anyone got any further suggestions before i proceed on to go back to my vista backup, and do a new clean install of win 7?

if no, then i hope this will make my problem go away...

 

Nope - just double-check your backup'd files, and come back to us with results.
Best of luck!

 

It is likely your cpu is working slighlty harder in 64 bit envionment and new apps than before, thus higher temps.
It is also possible your gfx is not throttling down as win 7 sems to be more demanding with aero on, thus keeping gfx at higher clock speeds. Try going win 7 basic with latest nvidiia LAPTOP Mobile drivers. You have a 8 series M card.

Also, I dont know if this has been menioned, the latest 8013 firmware keeps the fans running more than before thus keeping the components cooler. Its worth a try if you havent got already.

And finally, Your temps are fine as they are. They will be the same when your hardware is pushed to 100% regardless of the OS, which is where there can be concerns, so I woudln't worry if they slighly higher at idle, you will find load temps are same as before.

 

Pampum, I'm questioning your first point. I haven't noticed any increase in CPU stress or heat between when I was on Vista Home Premium 32-bit when I first got my machine and Windows 7 Pro 64-bit now.
I also haven't noticed that Aero is any more demanding in Windows 7 than in Windows Vista.

 

If the OP tried multiple gpu drivers and didn't do cleanly uninstall between each change, the driver could just be screwed up.

 

Tehsuigi, at idle I have not noticed an increase either, which is to be expected as not much is being processed. However i was pointing it out anyway since he may have some background apps that are taking some cpu usage, and this would be more so in 64 bit.
The reason i say this is there is absolutely no way a 32 bit program can require equall or less processing power on 64 bit, its just not possible. They require more.
95%+ of apps are still 32 bit only, thus 64 bit windows has to in a way perform an emulation of a 32 bit environment for the 32 bit app, it does this by running a 32 bit windows within its own 64 bit core OS. The result is more processing power is needed. Dont get me wrong, its not always much more, and I think 64 bit is great and required for future computer use, but only if your hardware has headroom to cope with it.
These days hardware is still being maxxed out quiete easily by 32 bit applications, and these will always run faster ina 32 bit environment, maybe not by much, but its there.
That said I'm running 64 bit windows atm. I I ma planningt o go back to 32 bit though. Ill run some benches beforehand. I'll let you guys know.

 

Pampum, I think you're misunderstanding what the Windows-on-Windows-64 (WoW64) emulation layer does.
For an Intel Itanium (re: server) 64-bit architecture, it does perform emulation duties to translate 32-bit instructions into 64-bit.
But for consumer CPUs like ours which use a 64-bit extension of the existing x86 instruction set called x86-64, no such translation is necessary. Instead, WoW64 handles the switching of the CPU from 64-bit mode to 32-bit compatibility mode and back for 32-bit threads, along with any calls to drivers necessary. There's a minimum of overhead, if any at all. It's not emulating a complete 32-bit environment within 64-bit Windows by any stretch of the imagination.
Have a gander at Wiki and the external links from it.

 

Lol 60 degrees? My cpu AND gpu become 92-94 celcius, and its still running after 2.5 years. Dw about those temperatures, I wish my 5920g was as cold/cool as yours

 

Tehsuigi, always appreciate the clarifications .
I am in no way saying I am 100% sure of what I'm saying as facts, I'm just going off experiences and some barebones knowledge.

I understand what you said, but even so, it STILL means 32 bit applications can NOT run any faster in 64 bit mode, at best they will run the same accoring to what you said, agree?

However the ARE examples where applications do run slower on 64 bit, so clearly there is something going on similar to what I described, regardless of the actual technical reason the performance loss is there.

Can you explain why games like crysis and bc2 perform worse on 64 bit than they used to? dx 9 or dx 10 makes no diff, there is a loss across the board regardless of settings. Im talking like like 15-30% pefformance cut.

I also have noticed my youtube can no longer play 1080 or 720 p videos smoothly, I have no idea why, the only change is 64 bit windows!
Half life 2 for example, which is a 64 bit app, works faster.
I don't think my conclusions are so wild thats so many 32 bit apps are working slower for me under 64 bit that there is a performance hit.

Even though I could be wrong, I wasnt paying that much attention to youtube since it always worked fine but I really need to go back to 32 bit to check. But its a bit crazy that no one else is noticing.

I think a lot of people may not notice diminished YouTube performance because they now have such high end systems like QUAD CORES AND I7S that even though they are subject to the same performance loss under win 7 64 bit at the moment, they have enough headroom not to notice it and their conclusion is to tell people like me "Man my win 7 64 bit runs awesome theres something wrong with your system win 7 is awesome etc mine runs fine your laptop specs are crap time to update I pwnozors"

Very incorrect logic there.

 

Pampum, you've got it. No one said that 32-bit would run faster in 64-bit.
I guess for the games, WoW64 has to translate 32-bit calls for graphics drivers into 64-bit ones, performing some emulation duties. I'm a little unsure myself.

I can still watch 720p YouTube videos without stuttering (1080p does have some framerate drop, but why bother when my display's only 1366x768?), and I'm on a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo. No quad core, no Core i-Anything.

If they're stuttering that bad, get the latest Nvidia/ATi driver and Adobe Flash 10.1 Release Candidate, and let your GPU do all the heavy lifting!

 

Tehsuigi, you can trust me that both crysis and bc2 run slower in 64 bit in my case. Do doubt about it, and I'm not missing to note something like different drivers or settings or dx etc. So do browsers, for sure.
As for youtube, I can almost swear it used to run ok on 720p and 1080p before. Not smooth, but much different than now, which is like a slideshow.

Why bother on lower res displays? That's what I thought too, however it does make a difference, since the videos are heavily compressed and each setting is different, it does actually make a difference. 1080p in most cases is noticeably sharper than 720p I'm afraid to say even on our lower reses.


As for using flash 10.1 as a magic fix. 2 Things. First of all I Never used flash 10.1 before on vista 32 bit and it ran fine from memory, so the reason for that should be looked into first.

Secondly its not even that great of a fix. Im using it, and sure i made a difference, videos are now somewhat watacchble and bearable, however they are still jerky enough not to be a good experience. Yeseven with 10.1 it sucks. My CPU usage is still almost maxed out, and my GPU usage is only around 6-10%. My gpus isnt doing any heavy lifting at all as you put it! Its only helping out with a finger or two.

 

Doesn't flash have some hardware acceleration setting somewhere ?

 

pampum, i've tried both 32bit and 64bit. they are the same for me. games run at same speed.

 

Is that of feel?
Run an actual benchmark, with the same drivers same version same settings etc. Youchange one setting like mipmap quality level, and your results are skewed.

 

no. i've played some games and they run exactly the same. the wow64 layer is very lightweight, so it might affect 2% performance or so.

besides, if you want to use 4gb or more, you need 64bit as 32bit can only use 3GB.

 

Pampum, I kindly ask that you provide some evidence. Specifically what game did you run, graphics card, processor, sound card, hard disk, ram amount and settings, driver versions and lastly what did you use to measure performance.

I'm interested in this because I'm doing game development in spare time with some friends. There were no measurable performance differences between 32bit and 64bit versions of the game we made.

BTW, I'm pretty certain that Crysis has both 32bit and 64 bit executables.

 

andrejako, I've been had different Oses for other purposes not really gaming, so I'm not exactly sure what to report as hard facts. All I can tell you now Is when i went to win 7 64 bit for the first time, I noticed my crysis and bf bc2 fps was about 5-10 lower. AFAIK my settings were the same, and nothing i tried got it running the same again. TBH im not too keen on it now, as its a lot of effort, but I am planning to go back to either vista or win 7 32 bit. I will run some benchmarks before I do that see and if there is any difference in 32 bit.

Yea crysis has both, tbh I'm not sure which I was using. IM not focusing on games too much atm, but I never could reach teh same fps under win7 64. I'm more bummed about not being able to stream HD youtube vids. My main desktop computer is also suffering strange performance loss during heavy browsing in win 7 64 firefox. Hard to quantify, but I should be able to later.

If you are able to, dual boot into win 7 32 bit and do some benchmarks for you games if you have the time.

 

I will install win 7 32 bit and compare performance.

I'm not having any problems with Firefox and Youtube. 1920x1080 videos work fine for me(the 1920x1200 screen is great too!)

 

Pampum, maybe you should start a topic in the Windows forum regarding your 64-bit woes and see what they have to say.

 

guys im back now

im currently on vista, its been over a week now. and after a whole week of having vista, to my surprise my laptop is STILL breathing like this. its supposed to be idling at 40 degrees like before, but its still heating to 58-60 degress like in win 7. i am very confused, though i quickly reached to the conclusion that i need to wipe some dust in my gpu core and elsewhere. i still dont get how my laptop was just fine before installing win 7 for the first time and all. i am very confused. how did dust suddenly become a huge problem at that specific point while installing win 7?

so i dont think it would matter if i reinstalled win 7. and it probably wont matter either if its x32 or x64 im installing. the problem is still going to be there. i mean how on earth is it that the problem has become permanent after having win 7? this idea might sound silly, but what i kinda think is that when win 7 x64 started utilizing my laptops hardware to its full capacity, all the dust that have been built up over the years were in the way of the process and it became an issue. so while the hardware was being prepared for full usage in x64, the dust clogged the machine even more or the hardware became more sensitive to the dust remains. the fan also ran on full during the win 7 install, so i think thats where the problem first started. now the dust issue has become more severe, no matter which OS i switch to. this is my theory.

or if you guys have a better clarification of this then please do share because this is pretty urgent. if its not entirely a dust issue, then what can be bothering my laptop, and why all of a sudden when my laptop with vista was fine a month ago?

 

Ok:

I assume you got back to vista by restoring a previous image that was not causing problems or by reinstalling from a recovery disk/partition.

Hopefully we can now agree that W7 does not generally overheat and overtax systems compared to Vista . . I think others would have noticed . If you downloaded some pirate copy of W7 you may have acquired some trojan that is adding to your system load but if not then forget it.

So what is clear is that YOUR system is overtaxed or overheated and the problem is not the OS assuming you cleanly restored or reformatted.

Strange fan behaviours can come from OS power schemes but excessive heat with a fan running cannot. What causes fast fans and high CPU temperatures and cool exhaust air is dust blockage or a poor thermal contact between the CPU and cooling system. What causes fast fans and High CPU temps and HOT exhaust air is something loading the system. Check task manager, processor utilisation etc etc

 

Just to clarify, Windows 7 does not utilize your laptop's hardware any "harder" than Windows Vista. Win7 is simply more efficient at using those resources. Keep in mind that 7 is very much built on Vista's framework. No offense, but your reasoning is bogus.
Have you considered that maybe your temperatures were rising under Vista, but you never noticed it until the upgrade to 7?

Now that we've eliminated your choice of operating system from the equation, it's time to pop open the bottom of your machine and clean out the intake vent, the exhaust vent, the fan itself, and the copper heatpipe grille that the fan blows on to cool your system. If things continue to be bad, consider getting new thermal paste for your CPU and GPU to make better contact with the heatsinks.

 

Maybe we should duet on this one

 

I've noticed that the fan turn-on temp is 65C and turn-off is 60C for my GPU.

My CPU is cool at less than 50C.

This seems to be for all the drivers I've tried until 197.16
When I first installed this driver the fan would go completely off and only turn on (high speed) when the GPU got to 65C and turn off when the GPU got to 60C. Temp slowly climbs up to 65C over 30 seconds and then the fan kicks on again for 30 seconds.

Recently the fan would run at low speed all the time keeping the GPU at 55C and CPU at 30C (idle).

I'm not sure what caused it to turn from off to low speed at idle...

I wonder which method is more efficient? Running fan at low speed all the time or having the fan come on at high speed for 30 seconds and then off for 30 seconds?

Seems to me like the low fan speed setting would consume less power because it takes quite a bit of juice to start the fan on high (as with all motors).

Anyway, after messing with drivers it's back to turning on and off at idle which I don't like. It's disturbing. I'd rather have a fan on low speed than coming on and off like a hurricane every 30 seconds.

Anyone know how to modify the fan speed settings for these acers? Or is that just something that's part of the bios...

 

Apart from the Bios (maybe?) there are active /passive cooling options for the system generally in the windows power settings. Active tends to be the default on external power, passive on battery. It just means when getting really warm do you throttle first (passive/battery option) or set the fan to hairdryer mode first (Active/External power)

 

ps A lot of users (and a lot of graphics boards) seem to forget they are not in a desktop with a separate fan for the graphics card.

Generally there is just one fan . And the BIOS somehow takes votes for cooling from the CPU and GPU into account. It is hard to specific that it turns on at GPU =Xc unless you have a way to stress the GPU while leaving the CPU at idle or vice versa (a bit easier)