~2000$ of issues (Acer Predator), story of acception.

Hello

I wanna tell you my little story about a gaming laptop I have. This is Acer Predator 15 G9 (593) with NVIDIA 1070 and Intel i7 6700HQ. This is a list of issues that I have to accept for some reason. I just wanna show what strange things you can face in such a device.

Screen with lines and ghosting

This wonderful laptop has an IPS screen. That’s really good, I thought. I love to edit photos and good colors of IPS is a proper thing for it. The bad part is that some colors have noticeable vertical banding. Sometimes I have to look pretty close to the screen to correct tiny details in photos, and that’s where I notice them. The thing which I never had on my previous laptops or screens. Example:

https://pp.userapi.com/c830609/v830609811/1dc5fd/9ZY5WgBoxdw.jpg

The second issue - ghosting. This one is pretty common for monitors and really don’t bother me. But still, I must point at it.

https://pp.userapi.com/c851032/v851032453/732c1/Vd84Eal6NR0.jpg

Buzz noise under load

That’s the worst one. In one year of use, many owners of this laptop started getting incremental buzz sound from speakers. After some digging, I found out that something on motherboard overheats (looks like it’s a south bridge) and affect the sound system. You can turn fans to maximum and this will force buzz sound to fade away as laptop cools down. Or you can disconnect laptop speakers from the motherboard, this will also solve the issue. Headphones work perfectly.



We had a big thread on Acer forum and first official answer was to bring a laptop to service. They’ve just replaced the motherboard to some users, but issue returned after a ~8 month of use.

This is definitely an HW issue, cause this buzzing sound happens even in laptop bios. And funny thing is, Acer just closed thread and refused to fix laptops that were out of warranty.

https://community.acer.com/en/discu...ing-from-speakers-under-full-load-with-video/

Weird behavior of Dolby addition

This laptop offers a Dolby audio software, with it sound from speakers and 3.5mm headphones are perfect. Loud and clear. If you disable it, the sound is crap. Problem is, that when you enable microphone, the system disables Dolby stuff. You have to manually open its menu and re-enable it. Bizarrely idiotic behavior.

Other solutions: disable microphone in the system, use USB headphones (cause they have their own sound chip), use another equalizer.

But most people won’t even understand what is happening. They will just have trash sound in games that enable mic by default. Like PUBG or even Mass Effect Andromeda.

Temperature issues

Out of the box this laptop, despite its gigantic size, had CPU overheat issues. In PUBG or Battlefield 1 you could easily get over 90C with stable throttling. I had to re-paste CPU and lover CPU voltage via Intel Extreme Tuning Utility. This is not an acer-only issue. Many laptops of its generation have it:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ven-core-temps-due-to-uneven-heatsink.797477/

Bad surface

This laptop is covered with some rubber soft-touch cover and it damages really quickly. You can just pass with your nail over the surface and will have scratches. This, eventually, makes your laptop look really cheap and overused.

https://pp.userapi.com/c851428/v851428453/70bd1/gJ99mtVFlk4.jpg

 

Color banding:
Is usually caused by the system being miscalibrated.
You can try this color profile and see if that fixes your color problems.

Temparature issues:
It's sadly pretty normal, most of the notebooks out of the box tend to powerlimit or thermal throttle.

Buzzing sound:
The PCH seems like it's in a fine temperature. The buzzing sound is static noise that doesn't get filtered through the components that should filter it, most likely caused by the poor positioning of the components. They likely are close to a heatsource (according to research close to CPU side).

I suppose the only way to fix this is by cooling down the components near the CPU.

 

This is funny, cause with calibration vertical banding is even more visible. I think that's because my LCD is 6bit, instead of ordinary 8bit, but I'm not specialist in such stuff.

LP156WF6-SPP1 - Color Numbers 262K (6-bit)
https://pp.userapi.com/c846220/v846220391/18067a/hKlUA7RfC3I.jpg

I just wonder why this became obvious only after 8-12 month, what has changed in components...

And also Acer attitude buzzes me, since they've just closed thread and provided zero support other than replace faulty motherboards with other faulty motherboards.

 

Oh yeah. Thats not the panel they normally use:
https://www.mysn.de/driver/1_XMG/XMG_A507_und_A707/Farbprofile - Display Profile/LG_LP156WF6-SPB1_15.6_FHD_IPS_N7.zip

Here you go buddy. With that it should work.

Well it does make sense. Paste gets dry, components get hotter, motherboard gets hotter, suddenly static noise.

I would recommend repasting it and use a laptop cooler for now.