G73JW-A1 Dual SSD temperature difference under load

Hey everyone, this is my first post on this forum but I would like to say thanks a ton for all of your collective input and knowledge on the G73 in all it's variants. My fiance and I are each proud owners of twin G73HW-A1s and absolutely love them.

The question for us at hand is simple. Will swapping the HDDs with SSDs lower operating temps so greatly that there will be a significant impact on the GTX460m's performance (in context of these machines)?

A little history on why we want an answer... if your not interested, drop down to the numbered plan of attack steps below and please let us know if there are any glaring issues with our approach.

An issue that both my fiance and I are running into is overheating, leading to a complete and instantaneous shut down while playing Titan Quest Immortal Throne. This game is buggy but we love it and initially it served as a holdover until D3 comes out but we've become so fond if it, we've kind of shelved our care for when D3 hits. That said we've NEVER had a failure while benching and/or tuning... it's just this game. You may say.. you idiots... clearly it's the game and it may very well be BUT we've played his game for years on many machines and we are 100% positive it will run at max settings flawlessly for hours on strong boxes.

Our first plan of attack was to entirely pull the overclock via afterburner off while reducing some of the gpu intensive effects the game offers. The results were great and we found that simply pulling the O/C off covered us... the game is back at max settings however on very rare occasions they are still shutting down. Next up (this week) we rolled the Nvidia 260.99 drivers on via the inf tweak found here.

No fails yet... they seem very stable but the fact that they were ever shutting down with zero o/c bothers us which leads me to the reason of this post. Long term we are going SSDs, a side benefit being the reduction in heat generated. I don't want to re-paste the GPU or drop money on coolers if there may be a way to cool things down while significantly boosting performance.

That said, we have a few SSDs lying around from previous builds. They are first generation solid series from OCZ that we had in a raid-0 array on a previous build. By todays standards they are slow, here are the specs for reference. What I plan on doing is installing 2 of them in my machine and then benchmarking while logging temps.

The idea being to see just how much cooler this machine will run with dual SSDs in it, the hope being that it will be significant. That said, here is the approach we plan to take:

1. Run base tests with stock HDDs monitoring via MSI sfterburner hardware monitor post results.
- Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
- Futuremark PCMark Vantage
- Titan Quest Gameplay - 1 Hour in Act 4

2. Install the SSDs
3. Install bloat-free Win7 and drivers (courtesey of Kalim) then upgrade the Nvidia drivers to 260.99. I would roll an image over but I've NEVER had luck going HDD to SDD this way plus the above can be done in under 2 hours.
4. Perform above mentioned tests while logging temps.
6. Organize results and come back here and post them.

* ALL benchmarking will be done @ stock speeds for consistency. As you know, some machines take a higher clock better than others. We'd rather not complicate things and/or muddy the waters. *

So... will swapping the HDDs with SSDs lower operating temps so greatly that there will be a significant impact on the GTX460m's performance (in context of these machines)?

We hope so and the reason we are posting this before we do anything is to ask for feedback because we don't want to miss the opportunity to answer any questions or test something for you while we are in the middle of this mess . Maybe the results will help someone out, who knows so let us know what you think.

Thanks everyone!
-Mike & Robyn

 

I would say that the best option to reduce temps are repasting, I actually managed to decrese my temps from 80C to 76/77C running FurMark at Xtreme Burning. Altough installing SSDs will reduce heating, critical components that could potentially crash the game are CPU and GPU so those really make the difference in heating.

 

your not going to see a temperature drop in your gpu just from replacing hdd with ssd. Sure hope that wasn't the only reason you bought them

 

Usually the GTX460 run a lot cooler, not sure what temps you getting. But i doubt you will see any drops, given that is less heating components inside, i doubt it will afect the gpu temps, specially since the laptop is suppose to suck the air from the top. Another option would be to add a laptop cooler, should drop you from 3-5C, but the in my case the GTX460m runs very cool, usually after 4 hours of starcraft the highest i seen is 69C.

 

Rorschach: I'll be using 2 old first gen solid series OCZ 30GB drives we have lying around for the test, I'm not buying anything and wouldn't invest in a SSD for a reduction of heat.

Fexnok: Yeah, we want to try to avoid re-pasting. We have 2 and both have shut down on multiple occasions. If it was just mine or hers, I would open it up and hit it w/ some arctic silver but since this is happening on both of our machines I want to explore other options. Laptop coolers would be a solid route but again, we want to see if going down the SSD path in the future (by testing now) can help address heat under stress and assist the cooling system keep both CPU & GPU cooler.

From what I've read, the machine will shut down if the gpu hits 106C so one easy assumption is the game has pushed it there on stock speeds. Whats ironic is this is never happening during 3DMark or FurMark testing at stock speeds. While benching the GPU, typically the hard drive(s) are barely moving. In a true gaming scenario though you may have a lot incremental drive activity, sometimes intense, that may lead to a hotter environment/internal temp in general. That is where we hope to see if lowering the internal temp helps.

Thanks for the feedback!

 

I just dont believe hard drives can actually generate the required extra heat for shutting down your machines, even if they generate heat, thats hardly comparable to what the CPU and GPU generates (thats were the voltage really is) also the thermal sensors are on those two components and the HDDs are way away from them.

Have you tried cleaning your back vents? How hot is the room temp while you guys play?

In my personal opinion swapping the HDDs would be a waste for thermal purposes

 

If the jw model is running into overheating issues you need to repaste the gpu or send it back, there should be zero issues with temps.

 

+1 That is true.

If this is the case with Figit, then I think we have found our first user with overheating issues. I do not recall anyone on this forum with overheating issues on the G73JW.

 

All this detail and you don't even mention what your temps are in the first place. Are they within spec? What happens when you run Heaven 2.0 benchmark?

 

Great point matrices.

At bone stock speeds with our ambient temp at 68 (were in philly):
FurMark Bench on Xtreme @ 1280x1024 peaked at 70
Heaven 2.1 w/ moderate tessellation 4x anti-aliasing and 4 anisotropy peaked at 69

Great temps but check this out... if I perform a hd read benchmark using HD Tune while running the above, my GPU peak jump 5 degrees consistently. HD Tune offers a free trial, for those of you that are convinced that HD heat has no impact on GPU temps I encourage you to try it out...

These are short bursts of benching... let's say Titan Quest's horrible code for whatever reason bring my peak up to 90-95C after a few hours of gaming, based on the above, I could see the HD heat generated by the many incremental reads while playing tacking on an additional 5C (at least) and voila... we go down.

Thoughts?

 

I really doubt any game will stress a hdd so much that it will give you the same results as HD Tune, now your temps are really good as they are, i dont think you will gain anything from the temp side on gaming, but if you feel it would help, just do it. My reasoning on getting an ssd is more in line of how the laptop feels and works, never temperature.

 

I can tell you first hand swapping out the HDDs for SSDs will not lower your GPU/CPU/NB/SB temperatures one bit since ive done it myself. But my reasons were different to begin with (annoying loud vibrations from HDDs and faster drives...).