*Official*P-7811 FX Info Thread

Good luck and keep us posted. Nice price.

 

Two quick questions for the Gurus;

I have the latter model P-8711 FX, of course only one 200Gb hard drive.

1) Is there a recommended maker or particular model for a second hard drive. I'm not looking for RAID stuff, just don't want to fill up the one pre -partitioned drive with pics, music, and games. I'd like to put them (at least the music, pics, docs, etc) on the second separate drive in case of issues with the OS and that partition. Is there a max size it can take?

2) What is the recommended laptop cooler to keep it cool. I suspect that I might be going somewhere hot and dusty (and unfriendly to Americans) so I'd like to make sure that my link with civilization and my escape from reality functions.

thanks

 

1) there are 500 gb HDD's. the WD5000BEVT 5400rpm is the recommended one with the current drives. 7200 rpm 500gb drives coming out any day now.

2) i dont have a 7811, but do have a 6860. seeing as how they have the same chassis, i recommend the NZXT Cryo LX notebook cooler. i regularly have idle temps between low to mid 20's Celsius, with my cpu temps never going above 50C under load and my gpu going above 68C under load.

 

best gpu overclock settings anyone?

 

Thanks for the info for the HDD.

I read the thread concerning upgrading hdd's; a couple questions from that:

1) The Seagate Momentus 320 gb 7200rpm is 3gb/sec but I think the thread says that the current chipset only supports 150mb/sec. Is there an upgrade to the chipset that will allow usage of the greater interface?

2) Can the p-7811 take 500gb? I know that the previous thread is old when is says currently supports 320gb.

3) Finally, after installing whichever, is there a reason to partion? I use 64 bit and have no intention to install 32bit or xp (64 bit seems to work so far for what I use). I plan on using the second drive for music, pics, video, and perhaps games as well (to relieve storage on the primary drive )

 

Don't worry about the MB/SEC. Really. The interface is the same, only the maximum theoretical throughput is different. You will NOT see a difference with todays hardware. Really. I have two 500gb HDDs in one of my 7811s RAID0 and WOWZERS BATMAN they work nice. Some ppl like to partition I do not. ONE BIG DRIVE for me. Personal preference.

 

My refurb has no Gateway Recovery Center program and apparently the recovery partition is hosed, so I have no means to create the recovery CD (pre-installed software and apps). I do have the OS disk.

Gateway keeps telling me to restore the program from the partition, then they just give up and tell me they don't support the 7811 anymore.

Does anyone know where I could find an image of the recovery CD or, failing that, could one of you 7811 owners winrar/archive the image and place it on rapidshare or such (I assume its too large to email)?

TIA!

 

gpu overclock settings comparison anyone? and their performance on 3dmark06? thanks in advance.

 

thanks for the info about the hdd's.

How much difference is there between a 5400rpm and a 7200rpm drive (decision to buy a 500gb 5400 or wait for a 7200rpm version)?

With the OS on the original 200gb drive, can I operate games and programs off of the second drive, say the 500gb 5400 rpm one?

 

was wondering about speed difference too. i do watch/transcode HD video. 720p for now. and i'm afraid if i get the 5400 drive, the video might be jerky.

 

seek time will be lower with the 7200rpm, possibly higher read/write speeds.

as for operating games/programs off of the second drive, if you install the programs on the second drive, you will be able to run them from there.

 

With the new 7805 out, and it being pretty much an exact update to the 7811, I thought about "dropping" my 7811 and jumping ship. I've decided to try to stick out the 7811, and if I can't get the temperature to stabilize, use my last resort. I've ordered the NZXT Cryo LX and it will arrive Thursday. Any other tips to keep my GPU cool while gaming?

 

I have been having an annoying problem with the fact that lately, no matter what my temps are idle ( 33-40 CPU and 38-45 GPU)...the fans still run all the time. Would the new bios fix this? I've blown the vents out with air and even took apart the bottom to clean the cpu one (GPU one is the one thats hard to). I've even put AS5 on it. Both of the fans go on together and pulse constantly. Is this just something I'm going to have to deal with? Going to have to suck it up and buy a laptop cooler?

 

^ AFAIK, 9C.05.00 causes the the GPU fan to pulse. 9C.08.00 and 9C.10.00 fix the pulsing, but the fans seem to run a little more constant. I just got over it. If you don't want it running 24/7, either get a notebook cooler and see if that helps or just don't run your laptop 24/7. Best solution I could come up with.

 

How, getting a notebook cooler, helps against the pulsing fan? Doesn't the cooler just add more noise? If we can't adjust the notebooks fan speed, then it doesn't help if you have a cooler.

 

I would think the cooler is a steady noise, compared to a pulsing noise, and the cooler keeps the temp down to where the fan doesn't kick on as often.

 

Well, if you think that steady noise will surpress the pulsing noise, then the steady nois must be louder So how that will benefit the person? Just upgrade the latest bios and you will have a steady fan noise
Just my 2 cents.

 

I just purchased one with Live Cash Back at Tiger for $718 total shipped. its a refurb.

but I would rather have this refurb than a new Dell Studio 17 with the intel GMA 4500MHD graphics.

that is for sure! and that one would of cost me $750.

 

Is this also true for the P-7805 and P-7811 ?

Hard Drive requirements - Serial ATA (SATA) Laptop 2.5" Drive, Sizes up to 320GB so far or Solid State Hard Drives. Chipset supports SATA 150MB/s so far although SATA 3.0GB/s is compatible but will not utilize the full bandwidth. 4,200rpm, 5,400rpm, 7,200rpm speed compatibility. 8MB and 16MB Cache compatible.

it wont utilize the full bandwidth of two 320gb 7200rpm wd black drives?

 

basically any 2.5" SATA hard drive will work in the 7811/7805 as long as it meets the height of 9.5mm instead of some 12.5mm drives out there for sale.

 

I don't know if any has asked this before, but is there any use for the empty mini PCI-e slot [one next to the WLAN card]? I was thinking of getting a mini PCI-e SSD drive, for page file purposes maybe.

 

hello, i bought this notebook for 750 and i keep getting lock out when play game for like 40 minutes.

after do some search i found this forum and updated bios to .10 and everything work great except the fan keep running constantly, so i decided to update bios to .12 but now there is no sound.

is there a way i can get the sound working? thanks!

 

dlk, just stick with 9C.10.00 BIOS.

 

does the 7811 FX use an AOU screen or the LG screen?

 

Just reinstall the sound drivers and you will be fine.

 

Mine has the AOU screen.

 

Whats the matter with 12 bios?

 

I had the same problem.
I found a hidden directory on the c drive called Acer that contained the preinstalled programs and installed the Recovery Center from there.

 

Actually, nothing IMHO. I just realized that I've been using 12 bios for the last few months

 

Lots of helpful info in this thread guys. Tnx! I've got everything I need/want installed and am loving the laptop. Saw this back when it was at BB but ended up with refurb from TD and only have minor issues which don't bother me much.

 

Hey guys, new to this forum but this seems to be one of the best places on the net for anything Gateway related.

Anyway, I recently purchased a refurbished Gateway FX P7811 from eBay and it arrived just the other day. For the most part the laptop works a treat and early teething problems, such as slow performance and a hot gpu I was able to solve quite easily, however there is still one problem that remains. The computer will randomly lock up while playing games such as Crysis Warhead, BF2142 and Command and Conquer 3. By lock up I mean that the screen freezes, the keyboard goes unresponsive and the sound is left looping whatever was last playing. Originally I thought this was a driver error, because after updating the stock drivers to 185.20 I was able to get away with playing 2142 and C&C3 for quite a while, however the problem still persists with Crysis Warhead and the longest I have been able to play this for is around an hour and a half before the thing locks up with looping sound. I have tried lots of different drivers (Beta 185.20, Nvidia 179.28 XFastest 180.70) and like I said the problem still remains.

Something interesting that I have noted is that changing the drivers/disabling devices on the computer makes a difference in how long the computer can go before it locks up. Now this could just be coincidence, but I get the feeling that it is linked in some way shape or form to the root of the problem.

This forum has been a useful resource for solutions. I have been monitoring the hardware constantly while trying to solve this problem, along with getting a Zalman 1000 cooler to solve the original performance problems I had. The graphics card is able to idle at 35, usually loads at 65 and has never gone above 75. The CPU idles at a cool 27 and has never gone above 40, while the harddrive idles at 44 and has never peaked the 55 mark. From this i'm pretty certain that it is not an overheating problem.

I know the easy solution to this is simply just to take it back to gateway for a repair or return, but not only am I a passionate problem solver but i'm also on the other side of the world and that makes shipping back to Gateway both time consuming and difficult to do. Also I don't think that it is anything really wrong with the hardware, in order to warrant it being sent back. This is based on the fact that I am able to get a Futuremark Vantage score of around the 4400 mark and the fact that it has never failed a benchmark test. It is only in games that it locks up, something that points to the configuration of the drivers, software or system. Below is a list of all of the things I have tried to resolve this problem and some of the things I have yet to check off, any other ideas I would welcome. Thanks.

Tried:
Cleaned up system of bloatware.
Variety of drivers, both beta and official. (Used driver sweeper while uninstalling)
Zalman NC-1000 cooler.
Updated sound, network, wifi drivers.
Disabled sound, network, wifi.
Updated BIOS to 9c.08.0. (Made a difference to GPU temps but did nothing for the lock up).
Removed all USB devices.
Checked ram using memtool.
Tryed E-Wrecked lock up solution involving Event ID 10.

Yet to try:
Playing on one stick of ram at a time.
Reinstall of operating system.
Baseball bat.

One more thing, does any one know of any incompatibilities between Norton Internet Security 2009 and the Gateway? Errors in the event log around the time when my computer keeps crashing indicate that a symantec driver could be at fault, but this is very loose because my AV isnt up-to-date at the moment and keeps complaining that it needs to be in order to be online. I'm using liveupdate now to see if it gets rid of the error messages. But yeah, anyone here running a P7811 with NIS2009?

Edit: Unable to reinstall Vista using the disk that came with the laptop. I keep getting a cannot find "E:/Sources/Install.wim" message, which is strange. The CD/DVD drive is listed as X:/ why would it look elsewhere for the install? Anyone have any ideas, really want to do a fresh install to be sure it is not a bad system configuration that is causing this game lock up, as much as i'd hate to find out this is hardware related.

 

I have Norton Internet Security 2009 on all my systems listed in my signature, also in Win 7, with no problems.

 

Mine does the same thing scape. I have scheduled a exchange with Tiger Direct, but I'm hoping to fix it before they get more in stock and then be able to cancel the exchange.

I've done a fresh install of Vista 64, applied thermal paste to GPU, CPU, reseated memory, propped computer up, tried NUMEROUS nvidia drivers, played with SM BUS drivers, basically EVERYTHING I can think of with ZERO luck. I have even tried, overclocking and even UNDERclocking the video card, both seem to have little to no effect on the issue. Used RiviaTuner to drop under volt the cpu, tried it with/without the second HD installed. You name it, I've probably tried it, and if not I'm GAME!

It's totally random, sometimes it will last 15 minutes in FurMark, sometimes 2 hours, which I think is the longest I have seen it go.

My CPU temps are great, 22-25 idle, 45-50 load. GPU temps are ok 35-38c idle, FurMark pushes it to 72c propped, not sure how high it would go if I didn't prop the back up.

It will freeze at GPU temp of 58c, or 72c. Temp doesn't seem to be the issue.

Things I think it MAY be:

Faulty GPU, it points to this as it only happens in graphic intense apps.
Faulty Power Supply, maybe it is getting bad voltage etc. Unplugging is not a good test, because the GPU slows down considerbly while on battery.
CPU, I mean it could be the cpu, does't seem like a good guess but who knows. It passes Prime95 like nobodies business, but who knows.
Memory, same as CPU doesn't seem likely, but as a core component anything is possible. Again Prime95 is no match for this machine.

What I am hoping for is that the new .17 bios that is seen on the new 7805's will be released soon so that I can try that one, I have noticed a difference in each bios revision so far, 5 was the worst, with 12 being the best.

Tigerdirect is currently out of stock so I have a little time, but I understand where you are coming from scape, sending these things back is a giant PITA and I'm local. I"m hoping someone can shed some light on our problem, and maybe provide a fix.

 

Hey Zoytoy, thanks for your input. Its nice to see that im not the only one with this problem. I've also come to the conclusion that it is hardware related. The wierd part I find about the possiblity that the GPU is defective is that you would expect some sort of slow-down in performance or other issues to be evident if the graphics card was defect in any way. I really think that we would see some sort of other problem if the card was really to blame, but by all accounts (HWmonitor, Prime95, furmark, 3dmark vantage, GPU-Z) the card is flawless.

I get the feeling that this could be a memory issue. From reading online I have found out that DDR3 has caused a lot of problems with both software and hardware configurations. E-wrecked's suggestion on one of the other threads, that a deficiency between the set speeds of the ram and the motherboard seems like a likely cause to me given that this problem only shows up in graphics intensive games. When you do a memory test using a tool, it checks the memory for errors, but the memory does not have any errors, my theory is that in graphics intensive applications the clock deficiency between the ram and motherboard is more significant because the CPU and GPU are occupying the system. When you do a memory test the CPU is only handling that process and so its probably that it can sustain the problems caused by the clock rate much better than it can when its running a graphics intensive application. Another idea I had was that perhaps the nvidia chipset drivers for the graphics card contain some sort of configuration that is causing a conflict when the graphics card is used extensively, though this is more diifficult to test given that its not very easy to find the chipset drivers for this build on the net.

Anyway, thats just a theory, but given that this problem is difficult to diagnose, anything is better than nothing at this stage. I'll look out for the updated BIOS to, I did see significant improvements in terms of the fans performance when I upgraded to 9c.08.00, but I am doubtful that BIOS can solve this problem alone.

 

Doh, double post.

 

Well we just ordered a new Dell here at the office, with some brand spacking new DDR3-1066 dimm's I'm feeling I may have to borrow a couple and give it a shot.

If that doesn't fix it, I'll grab a CPU out of my T61 and give it a go. That would narrow it down to Motherboard, Power, GPU.

 

Bah, I'm anxious, just went ahead and pulled 1 DDR dimm and a CPU from a PC here. Taking it home tonight to give it a whirl.

 

Cool, tell us how it goes. Fingers crossed here.

 

No luck Tried 1 new DDR3 1066 2gb dimm I pulled from a T400, and a P8600 cpu. still froze.

Downloading the forceware 179.28 for one last attempt :/

 

same crap

 

Dangit. I am currently on those drivers and the problem is still there. Must be the motherboard or GPU, or another random system setting that we haven't come across yet. What serial is yours? Mines a P2887. Im gonna stick with mine for the time being and perhaps take it to a local laptop specialist and see if i can get it to get repaired some time later. They do motherboard and full system repairs so there is a good chance that they may be able to find something, even if they will cost me an arm and a leg. Good luck with yours. It would be too risky for me to send mine back and the laptop works really well in everything else aside from this problem with games. (Which is probably a good thing since I have Uni to focus on this year).

 

Well I continued to play around more last night with it.

Did the following:

Disabled System Restore
Disabled NVIDIA HD Audio (I'm guessing this is HDMI audio)
Tried updating my PCIE Bus Controller's, not sure if I acutally did anything here or not. I want to play with this some more.

Got my longest Furmark yet after doing those, 2.7 hours! Sooo, I'm going to continue to try and disable devices, and update drivers. Still holding out hope on that .17 bios update as well.

 

Another update, mainly for Mr. Scapenz.

K, so I thought I had improved it with the above changes. No such luck, a reboot and a second run of Furmark proceeded to freeze randomly again , so I"m guessing I just had a lucky run with the 2.7 hours.

So, I decided I would look into the PCIE drivers more. I downloaded the latest ver from intel.com 9.0.1008 I believe, or something similiar to that. I installed those, and went through device by device and updated them manually as well.

I also went into NVIDIA control panel, enabled tripple buffer, set AA to app determined, and also set it to be single display optimized or something like that.

Furmark made it about a hour, froze again....

It has to be hardware, its too random.

 

Yea, thanks for that.

I've found that on the occasion I manage to get a good session in, the following time I try it on a reboot I will only manage around 5-20 mins. Now this gives the impression that something is being stored in the memory, or is heating up and so is more prone to locking up the time following a long session. I'm gonna test this theory out later, by taking note of the amount of time it takes to freeze up and try the computer both immediately after it does so and then also do the same but leave it for around 30 mins to an hour and see if there is any improvement.

I'm wondering whether, if this is hardware related, it would be best in the meantime to just find the best ways to prolong the freeze. For example, switching around drivers appears to have an effect on how long you can go without a freeze on the first try with the new drivers. I experienced this with the 185.20 drivers, where I was to practically clock Crysis Warhead in that time. The following reboot it was back to 20-30 mins.

Btw do you know anything about the video bios for the 9800m gts? Just another thing we could try. I know its risky flashing the bios for a GPU but its possible that we both got older versions of the video bios than others. This could explain why the new install of drivers has a bearing on the amount of time it can go without a freeze. Its possible that when the GPU does finally freeze on the new drivers, the error is kept in the videos memory, making it more likely to happen again in a shorter period of time. These are just theories, but its worth a shot if we finally get to the bottom of this. I'll post back later with the results.

Just curious, but have you tried running 3D mark vantage? My gateway is able to run this benchmarking tool flawlessly without freezing or crashing. Its only in games that it has problems, which is quite interesting. Perhaps its just luck, or perhaps the error made on my rig isn't as extreme as yours.

 

I can run 3d mark 1 or 2 times before it will start freezing. And it does appear like you said that I can usually get 1-2 hours of good performance on a fresh cold boot.

If I reboot from freeze, my time before next freeze is dramatically shorter.

Just installed Dox 181.22 giving that a go, also I put my power brick in my mini fridge, as it gets stupid hot. I wonder if it is overheating and shutting down?

btw I have the same model as you 2887.

 

Its possible that the brick is getting hot, adapters like this tend to. I think it mainly only does this when it is charging (power being consumed by battery and laptop), so I usually take the battery out of the back once its fully charged and the brick runs nowhere near as hot. The added benefit is that the battery doesn't get hot and start to heat up the back of the unit. I've found that the unit runs much better with the battery out when it doesn't need to be in.

This could just be random, but my unit froze a few times yesterday (needing a reboot) while just on my desktop. This happened after I plugged the mains power in because the battery was running low. There are actually drivers for the battery and ac mains, i'm gonna take a look and see if updating them will have any effect on the problem. Seems a bit of a long shot, but yea, worth a try.

 

Just a suggestion. Check the hdd temps. My 7811 got too hot and fried the Hard drive. It acted a bit as you are describing with the random freezes ect. until it finally gave up the ghost and just stopped working altogether. I did send mine to the repair center in Temple Texas. They re-gooped the heatsink, which if I understand you guys have already done that, and they replaced the hard disk.
I have to hope that a nice hard drive swap and a good thermal greasing will work as well for you guys as it did for me.

Good Luck.

Oh btw. The repair center did a pretty nice job taking care of my problems. No more overheating and no freezes to this point. The return time was good as well.

 

Just managed to get a massive 2 hour and 40 min session. It didn't freeze once. I had to quit it in the end because I had to go out. Im not convinced that it is solved, but I do think that changing to the XFastest drivers like I did made a heck of a difference to how long it could last. I managed 20 mins on the 185.20 drivers and it has yet to crash on the XFastest 180.70 ones I just reinstalled. Something else thats worth a note is that I defragged the system after I installed the drivers. I'm not holding out, I think I just got lucky. If you haven't tried defragging your system after you installed your drivers then I suggest you try it and see what happens.

 

Well my replacement should be here either tomorrow or Friday. I sure as heck hope I get a good one.

Thankfully i have my current one still so I can swap out the screen or anything cosmetic that would be wrong, I just need a working stable motherboard!

 

Well the new one was another 2887 which I was disappointed in, but the good news is that it works FLAWLESSLY.

Glad I kept my other one though, as this one had a horrendous screen with 2 dead pixels and the white blob of hell. Also the keyboard/touchpad was sticky, had all the stickers removed, and smelt of cheese. So swapped that as well .

Couple notes:

CPU is actually better in this one, I can undervolt this thing all the way down to .9000 on all multiplers and it ran Prime95 for 24 hrs.

GPU actually runs HOTTER than the old one? Old one running Furmark would cap at 72c this one will hit 81c (Back propped up, not even going to try it not).

This new one came with the same power adapter as the old one, but it does have the beefier heatsink installed. CPU runs actually a little warmer at idle than the old one (Old:21-23c idle, New:consistent 26c), maybe my application of Artic wasn't as great on this one, who knows?

Finally, after almost 3 months I have a working nice looking P-7811fx. If I wouldn't have kept my old one for the screen etc, I would have still sent this one back.

TigerDirect/Seneca Data really needs to get their crap in order, these units are so hit and miss it is really sad.