A12 overheats my 1530

I'd updated my BIOS from A9 to A12 and the temperatures of my 1530 are shooting thru the roof. I'd left my laptop idle for an hour with a download in progress. when I came back, the laptop had shut down and upon restart the system the CPU temps touched 80 . The fans weren't even turning on.This wasn't a one off case, it had happened before. I've since reverted back to A09 and things are back to normal.

 

whoaaa......thats a new one,never heard of such a thing before

 

Yea ... thats new ... A12 is working great for me
Just stick with A09. There is not much difference anyway between both of them

 

No actually there is a difference. A09 kicks the fans on 5c earlier than A12.
This causes the temps to come back down faster. There are other differences in the fan control but that one is what affects temps the most.

But you also may have another problem here and A09 was just hiding it. It isn't normal to have your M1530's thermal intervention shutdown the machine just doing what you were doing. It usually takes something heavy like gaming to heat up a problematic machine and cause it to shut down.

I'll take a stab at it and say that your thermal pads (between the heat plate and chip) have failed. It's extremely common on the M1530 and I myself, along with many other people, have cured that by removing the heatsink, cleaning of the crud, and applying good thermal paste. If this is your problem, it will disappear after doing this.

The thermal compound mod will normally cause a CPU that previously was reaching 80c and above to never pass 70c. Undervolting will bring you down to the 60's and I highly recommend it.

It could also be that you have lots of dust in the radiator (where the fan blows air through the cooling fins). How long have you had that machine?

 

I've had this machine for the past 5 months. I've undervolted the CPU and this temperature increase and shutdown procedure occurs when the system is left idle for an hour or so. I've moved back to A09 and the temperatures are in control once again. The only thing i might be missing from the A12 is the decreased clicking sound from the HDD. The annoying clicks have come back with A09.

 

There is an easy fix for that. HDparm or Notebook Hardware Control. Are you running Vista? If so go with 'HDparm for Windows' and use this as your command line in your startup batch file:

hdparm.exe -B 254 /dev/sda
hdparm.exe -M 254 /dev/sda

These hdparm settings will eliminate that clicking.

That clicking that you hear is constant read/write head parking. It's an effort to save the had drive if you drop the unit (and a failed one if you ask me). It's just plain annoying.

 

One more thing - be careful with RMclock and disabling C states and using halt (can't remember exactly how that go's). I remember something about temps actually increasing if it's done wrong. All you should need to do is undervolt something like this scale:

For my T5800
6.0x 1.050
7.0x 1.062
8.0x 1.075
9.0x 1.087
10.0x 1.100

Those setting reduced my temps about 9c.

 

Can you elaborate on this? I tried finding hdparm for windows but theres no .exe file and I have no idea where to put these command lines?

 

I don't know why it's so hard to find now but I found the place where I got it:

http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/hdparm-6.9-20070516.win32-setup.exe

Just install that and then create a batch file. Call it 'hdparm.bat' and place it on your desktop. Open 'hdparm.bat' with notepad and copy and paste this into that file:

hdparm.exe -B 254 /dev/sda
hdparm.exe -M 254 /dev/sda

Save the file. Then you can drag the file into your 'Startup' folder so that it loads each time Vista starts.

I have heard some people say that if your PC sleeps, when it wakes up the hdparm settings are gone and you have to double-click your 'hdparm.bat' file again to re-enable the settings. There is apparently some way to do it so that the machine automatically executes the hdparm command upon waking but I cannot remember it.

This will kill the hard drive clicking. Most people have no idea that the clicking is controllable via the OS and they try firmware flashing their drive and flashing their bios. You don't have to do any of that if you use hdparm. I've seen countless threads on the forums of people chasing their tails with this problem. I wish I could help them all but I can't. What happens is you help someone with these instructions, then the post gets buried, then no one bothers to use the search function, and ....

Note that if you are running a machine other than the M1530, and your machine does not use SATA, your hard drive will be '/dev/hda'.

Also, if you want to do a quick test of your drive's speed, use this at a command line:

hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

For reference, my results under Vista look like this:

Code:

Timing cached reads:   310 MB in  2.00 seconds = 155.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  182 MB in  3.00 seconds =  61.55 MB/sec

And under XP, my results:

Code:

Timing cached reads:   374 MB in  2.00 seconds = 187.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  192 MB in  3.00 seconds =  64.00 MB/sec

Disk performance is slightly faster in XP.

Hdparm is a command line only tool.

 

Ok I think I am figuring this out. When I read people talk about batch files and things I was getting all confused. Thanks for explaining that now it makes sense. I don't know much about DOS and command lines and things.

So I need to use sda and not hda eh? That's fine. I did a speed test after changing settings and got:

Timing cached reads: 352 MB in 2.00 seconds = 175.91 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 180 MB in 3.02 seconds = 59.56 MB/sec

This is in windows vista x64.

Before I changed the sda settings (but after I changed the hda settings - will this do the same thing?) I got:

Timing cached reads: 346 MB in 2.00 seconds = 172.83 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 168 MB in 3.02 seconds = 55.72 MB/sec

So it's a bit faster now.

Last question: When I had just started it up my HD light was flickering constantly and it was making the read/write noise continuously. What is happening here? This seems different than the intermittant clicks I was getting before. After changing the settings it has since quieted and the light is not on constantly, but I see some flickers on every 3-5 seconds. Is it not fixed (tv is on so I can't hear it atm)?

 

I think I might know what the problem is. In your batch file, right after this:

hdparm.exe -B 254 /dev/sda
hdparm.exe -M 254 /dev/sda

put this in there:
pause

So now it looks like this:

hdparm.exe -B 254 /dev/sda
hdparm.exe -M 254 /dev/sda
pause

The 'pause' will let you see if the command was successful. Just hit any key to close the shell.

I think you will see a permission denied error. That would be UAC stopping you.

I think I got around this by right-clicking that batch file and setting it to always run as administrator. It's a bit foggy in my brain.

If you can't fix it like that then you can always disable UAC an be done with it. I run my Vista without UAC, but then again I'm fearless with computers. Some may point out that I'm being wreckless for disabling UAC. I really don't need UAC to protect me.

 

I turned off UAC long ago, it's so annoying and I just dont be dumb. Mine seems to run ok without an error though. Not sure if it is working still.

 

As long as those commands complete successfully, it has to work. What happens is HDparm overrides the hard drive controller itself and tells it to ignore the request for parking the read/write head. Then it will only park it if the drive go's to sleep or you power down (obviously you want this behavior or your disc could be trashed upon transport of the unit).

 

i see well it does seem better now even though the light comes on i dont hear the noise as loud. Did we ever figure out how to get the comp to auto change the settings when waking from sleep?

 

I need to specify something - when I said the hard drive controller, I mean th controller on the hard drive itself, and not the one on the motherboard. HDparm sets bits on that controller to alter the behavior.

As for the issue when waking from sleep, I know that someone has done it, just can't remember where I saw that. I just double-click my batch file again (leave a copy on the desktop).

Edit: I think we may have hijacked this thread. I hope it is in some way useful to the OP.

 

lol hijack. Sorry OP! Hope we helped!