Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Well, I think every little bit helps and now that the fan runs at higher speeds earlier is definitely a great thing.
Atleast I haven't had any serious problems with GPU overheating even when overclocking, propably because I have changed the thermal paste and tapes with care, use a notebook cooler and try quite regularly keep the insides clean of any dust or dirt. But I think the onboard soundchip is sometimes suffering from too much heat when doing some heavy gaming many hours in a row, because I sometimes get BSOD relating to a some Realtek driver file. That's why I have considered an external sound card into the ExpressCard slot, like this one: http://soundblaster.com/products/product.asp?category=1&subcategory=208&product=16642
Then I can get rid of this one problem for good, disable this crappy onboard soundchip in the device manager and hopefully enjoy a lot better audio anyway.
Though it's very true that this laptop's cooling system is horrible horrible design. The end-user shouldn't be obliged to do any of these changes (thermal paste, notebook cooler, external audio...) to make the notebook work flawlessly.
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Indeed it is, and every little bit helps a lot with cooling this else beautiful laptop, was a very nice performer, even by todays standarts.
Sadly, ive not been overclocking mine to full potiential, well, yes, tested it, but havent really made use of it. I took good care of it, and by redelivering, only things, that shows its closing in on 2 years, is a slightly used palm rest, a little wear on W,A,S,D and spacebar, also a few scratches on the lid, which has occoured under service
Had it open for cleaning atleast once every 2nd month.
Ive never experienced troubles with the soundchip, even playing 8+ hours in a row. But had some driver issuses once, solved by using a specific driver version, dont remember which one atm. Which driver version are you using? Might still have the one I used laying around on an external disk
Indeed, end-user shouldn't have to do any changes to make use of the product bought. -
Sorry, but to that i can't agree. To me this looks ugly as h*ll. But i don't care about looks so much anyway.
Good performance was in my mind when I bought it.
You would laugh, if you would see the wear on my laptop's palm rest. The paint is like totally worn away.. I must be gaming too much...
Thanks, that would be nice. I'm currently using version 5.10.0.5523, dated 5.12.2007 (checked from device manager). And the package version is R1.83 -
Hehe, and indeed it had very nice performance at the time being
Got a mate with the model with the geforce 6800, there you can actually see the whitish plastics the casing is made off
The driver version Ive had best results with is the 5.10.00.5224 drivers mine was delivered with tbh Just remembered, as I didnt find any other drivers for it, than the one it came with stock
I upgraded to a newer driver at some point, just making the system up to date, finding it making problems, searching around the net and i returned to the stock ones and never had any problems
Actually, Id never try another driver, as I didn't experience any problems with the stock ones
Edit:
If you don't got them and wants to give them a go, just say, still got a copy of them -
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I don't think so. Thermal pads/tapes have very bad heat conductivity, but still better than air. That's why they are used on those memory chips, which don't produce nearly as much heat as the gpu core. Unless you don't mean a custom pad made of copper,aluminum,silver,diamond etc. (which have good heat cond.) and it's both contact sides are also imbued with thermal paste. Also this would only be uselful if the heatsink is badly dimensioned and doesn't give good contact to gpu, but I think in that case it would be better to send the laptop to service and swap the heatsink.
The idea of thermal paste isn't filling one big air gap between gpu and heatsink, but instead filling only tiny microscopic gaps between them. The ideal situation would be having no thermal paste between them and their surfaces were totally even. But of course in reality this isn't possible, because it's not possible to polish the surfaces of gpu and heatsink so even that there wouldn't be any microscopic bumps or holes on them (well, mby with laser ). The microscopic scale is also the reason why it's adviced to apply so small amount of thermal paste, since the paste itself doesn't have as good thermal conductivity as the actual metal of heat sink/gpu surface. So, if you apply too much of thermal paste, you may actually make the thermal conductivity worse than it would be without the paste (meaning higher temperatures in practice).
You propably knew some of this, but I posted it just in case.
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Quite recently I've had major problems with my Xi 1546. BSODs, red/green pixels for now reason and finally those lovely "Hardware malfunction/Pairing check" blue screens. It got so bad that when I decided to go back to Fujitsu-Siemens' own drivers from their drivers-webpage, the laptop couldn't get to Windows without that blue screen. Naturally I called up F-S, but they refused to service my laptop saying that the warranty had expired and that I would need to use my own money to get a 3rd party to fix it. About the warranty... I bought Amilo M3438G back in Fall 2005 with a 2-year warranty. As you all know, this model had major issues and it didn't work half the time. Finally, a year later in Fall 2006, F-S finally compromised and replaced it with my current laptop. So basically I had a useless laptop for a year, then another laptop that didn't work properly in the beginning, then worked okey for about a year and then had the same major issues that the first laptop had... And F-S has the balls to say I don't have any warranty left.
Luckily I got my Xi 1546 working after several tries of different BIOS and Ati drivers (F-S, Mobility Modder and Omega). Right now, my laptop is working okey with BIOS 1.25 and Omega 3.8.413 (although Omega drivers have always failed me when I try to game). So CaptainFlameRate, I'd probably try to use that combo (or the recommended BIOS 1.15/1.17 which, however, did not work for me although I didn't try them with those Omega drivers). -
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I decided to clean the fan and the vents more throughoutly. I even fully dislodged the fan from the cooling unit and made absolutely sure there's no dust left anywhere in the unit. I used Q-tips, a small paintbrush and compressed air for cleaning. I weared antistatic wrist strap to make sure ESD wouldn't damage the components. There wasn't so much to clean, but I just wanted to be sure that it wouldn't affect my temps. The paintbrush was the best for cleaning the fan blades, which were coated by a very thin layer of dust, which wont come off just by using compressed air. After all the dust was removed, I also replaced the regular silicon thermalpaste I had installed before to Arctic Cooling MX-2. To fully clean the old paste from the cores and to prepare the surfaces for new paste I used Arctic Silver ArctiClean set, Q-tips and coffee filters. Coffee filters are good to finalize the surfaces since they won't leave any lint, which would have negative effect on thermal transfer. For monitoring temps I used HWMonitor and to stress test the system, I used Intel TAT's workload test and ATITool's 'Scan for Artifacts' -feature.
After hour of idling the CPU cores were both at 41°C, while before the cleaning the idle temps were 45°C. I have disabled Intel speedstepping (=='Always on' -powerscheme in the powersettings) so the cores have maximum clocks (~1.83GHz for my T2400) even when idling. Of course, with speedstepping, even lower idle temps can be reached. After running Intel TAT workload test at 100% for both cores for about half an hour, the temps were at 65°C. Before they were ~70°C. When playing FEAR Combat for about two hours in a row, the maximum the cores reached was 66°C. So all in all the temps are about 5°C lower than before this cleaning process.
EDIT:
Now I also decided to undervolt my CPU. I used Notebook Hardware Control to set the voltage of the 11x multiplier (which represents the maximum clock i.e. 1.83GHz) from default 1.2625 V to 1.0625 V. Now the cores idle at 39°C. The maximum load temperatures seem to be at 58°C.
In short I think I can safely say that my laptop is not going to overheat anytime soon. I can recommend these steps I took to anyone who have overheating problems with their system and their system is out of warranty.
Xi 1546
Discussion in 'Fujitsu' started by Hillbilly, Jul 6, 2006.
