GX640 Owners - Post Your Temps!

Well, the heat of the casing doesn't just depend on the heat inside. The GX640 gets rid of quite a lot of heat using airflow, so the outside doesn't get very hot. If you were to block off the airflow, then, as with any other laptop, you would have a problem.

 

So lets say I put this on top of the Thermaltake Massive23 ST notebook cooler, and put that on top of an old college Calculus textbook, and my room's temperature is around 75degrees fahrenheit which is 25.5555556 celsius... Will I have a heat problem? Or will I be good to go?

 

calculus is unnecessary...
you'd just be lifting your original config a bit higher...
3 inches higher = not cooler air.

the cooler + lappy will do...

 

As if calculus is unnecessary!
Even without a cooler you shouldn't have any trouble, but it wouldn't go amiss.

 

Ya Frys seems to have a good deal. The Thermaletake cooler for 30+tax, and you can buy it at a B&M rather than wait around for newegg.

 

I read the first few pages and then skipped to the end, so I'm sorry if this question has already been answered but:

my fan cycles continuously when idle, on for 5 seconds, off for 5 seconds, repeat. My temps seem average at CPU core 0 = 46c, cpu core 1 = 43.

Is there a way to stop this cycling?

 

You'll find that it never quite turns off, but it sometimes slows down to a very quite setting.

The only way we've found of slowing down the fan is downclocking and/or undervolting the GPU so it will run cooler.

 

Thanks LoC. I know it will not stop, it just goes from high speed to low speed. Can you provide a link to how I could go about underclocking?

If I go into the ATI CCC in the overdrive section, I can control the fan speed, is this a good thing? Also, the minimum seems to be 625 MHz, which is what it is currently running at. Is there another way to underclock?

 

Actually, 625MHz is the default.

The fan speed displayed by the CCC and GPU-Z doesn't seem to be the actual speed, and in fact there may be no way to access the laptop's fan control outside of messing with the BIOS.

See my post here for a good summary on underclocking the GX640.

 

Alright, so I did some temperature tests and this is what I have gotten so far:

Ambient Temp - 21C

Idle @ stock clocks - 59C when doing nothing, 62C when watching videos online (Gametrailers HD videos) etc.
Idle @ 300/300 - 49C when doing nothing, 51-53C when watching videos online (Gametrailers HD videos)
Playing Dragon Age: Origins at Max Everything and 8x AA - 75C
Furmark for 10 minutes - Reached 100C after 5 minutes and stayed at 100+/- 1C for the next five minutes (did reach 102C for a second or two on a couple of occasions). I noticed that as soon as it goes above 100C the fan kicks up a notch to drop it back down, and in all honesty I never found the fan to be loud or the heat coming out of the laptop to be terribly hot. Within 10 seconds of stopping furmark it was back down to 80C and then steadily dropped back to 61C over the next couple minutes.

I still need to test a more demanding game than Dragon Age, but that is the only PC game that I own ATM. However, overall I am quite impressed.

 

What's the ambient temperature where you are?

 

Just, WOW.
Judging by the "doing nothing" temps, you must be in a 25~30C ambient temp?

 

Nice update jordan, im happy to see your enjoying the machine, hmm i'm actually curious to know now if we can get it into the final fan stage (Possibly by bumping the northbridge heat up) to see if the max fan stage could control furmarks GPU temps,

 

Hey, sorry forgot to post that. I am in 70F / 21C.

Unfortunately, I just had a problem with the screen not turning back on after hibernating (on 10.4 drivers and powerplay is off). Looks like I will have to prevent it from going into hibernate until I figure out what causes it / it is fixed.

 

Interesting. Is it just hibernation, or normal sleep as well? I thought PowerPlay was the cause of all of these problems. Did you restart after disabling it?

It looks like your GX640 is a couple of degrees cooler than mine (2 deg less from ambient temps, 2 from your laptop, approximately speaking), which is nice.

 

Well I just put it into sleep and into hibernate, and both times it woke up fine, so I'm not sure what happened last time. I have set to hibernate if I leave it unoccupied for 15 minutes, and that is what it didn't wake up from.

 

Hmm, that sounds very worrisome. How does one get it to wake up? Or do you just yank out the battery and put back in then turn it on like normal?

Also, will I have to deal with these problems if I'm not using the battery and only the AC?

What about setting the system to "Do nothing" when closing the screen? Will it be a black screen when I open it back up?

 

Temps so far...
CPU: Idle 48C
GPU: Idle 66C - Gaming during L4D2 85C - Crysis 93C + ??
Room Temp: around 62-66F

I tried playing Crysis at native resolution and about 2 minutes in it froze up, during the opening sequences. So I had to manually restart and I let it cool down, and tried again, loading the beginning save point, and again, after about 4 minutes everything started going green.. in a non Toyota Prius kinda bad way and froze.

 

Turn off powerplay and you should be fine. Honestly, I have no idea why that happened last time. I have put it into hibernate and sleep and open and closed the screen several times and haven't been able to replicate what happened. I had to force turn off the computer by holding the power button when it happened then turn it back on.

 

Got it patched to the latest ?

 

Yep, last night I put the resolution down to 1280 on high and it did okay. Max temp on gpu was 99C, and I played for about 15 minutes.

 

Here is some temps that I had.

The first is my temps when surfing on Internet with windows battery saver mode with 200/300 gpu clocks.



The second is my temps when surfing on internet with Windows performance mode with stock gpu clocks.



The last is my temps after 30 min of crysis gaming on very high settings with HD5870 gpu clocks. I had an average of 25 fps in native resolution without AA.

 

so low temps while serfing. how did u get that?

 

I really want to buy a 640 now since I really don't feel like getting parts on a 740 barebones, but the temps on this are really scaring me. Has anybody swapped the stock paste with AS5? Are there any fan adjustments? Idc if you can put the fan to 100% I'm used to really loud PC noises.

 

Like I mentioned, I put the battery mode on power saver and I downclocked the GPU to 200/300 clocks. This helps a lot. With That setting, I was able to have temps below 50C and my battery life was about 3h15 with the 9cells.

Also, the fan is 100% low everytime. So very quiet. I auto-downclock with AMD GPU CLOCKS tool at every startup, so it is always on low clocks, but when I watch movies or game, I put default clocks.

 

Can you lower the voltage ? (with lower frequencies there is no need to keep the same voltage)

 

Hmm. I have a GX740 barebones,

and I always undervolt my card- it works great, No BSOD whatsoever,

on Furmark and on SC2.

I undervolt mine to 0.925V.

Did not get the urge to set it to 0.9V...

 

ok Thanks
I always undervolt my processor, but never did it on the graphics card. It could be usefull

I've heard that the i5 are not unvoltable at the moment
It's a shame

 

Not unvoltable indeed.

 

Here is my lowest temp, done in a room at 22C.

 

I dont quite understand "undervolting." Is this done through a program, the bios, or through the command prompt or something else? Do you have to undervolt every time you boot up the comp, or is it a setting that stays even after you shut down and turn it back on the next day?

'Preciate it guys.

 

Always stays.



Do it through modifying the 'profile' file located at

C: \user\yourusername\Appdata\Local\ATI\ACE\profile

 

I had this bookmarked: http://forum.notebookreview.com/6194261-post112.html What do I do with it? How do I access that profile file--is it by opening it with Notepad? Also, what do I change those bolded values in buff-daddy's post to, in order to undervolt/downclock safely?

 

Question: how high temperature can a mobile gpu handle before you fry it? I'm reading 100 degrees celcius from the posts here, isn't that a little on the edge?

 

Ah mais tu parles francais alors (vu qu'on est en territoire hostile je vais quand même écrire en anglais )

You could try to lower the pci-e to x1, it should use less energy and you could also undervolt (you are @ 1,05v with 100/300 and you were @1v 200/300)

When you made the printscreen has it right after you plug it or has it really an Idle ?

 

Salut Salut!! ça fait du bien d'écrire en français...ouff, je ne suis pas le meilleur en anglais!lol

SO! How I can lower the PCI to x1 ?

I made the printscreen 10 minutes after I unplugged it (when the battery was almost full). I was surfing on web and doing office too during this time.

 

Even though I do not know french, al Romantic "Tongues" derived from Latin, Spanish not being that far away;

So, I'll reply with spanish, you might catch a bit
Si, hablar otro idioma en el foro es como caminar en territorio hostil; mejor nos quedamos con el Inglés por los momentos!

On Topic:
Those are sweet temperatures, guys!

 

Powerplay can do it, so there must be a way to do it by ourselves.

Mais sinon j'ai pas bien compris pour les températures, c'est vraiment les temp en idle ? Même s'il reste allumé pendant 1-2 heures les températures ne montent pas ? Parce que la ca me choque un peu

Falar inglés num forum é chato mas não se encontra melhor site do que este no que toca os portateis, mas faz bem de vez em quando encontrar alguem que fale uma lingua mais compreensivel


EDIT : OMG 3 languages in the same message

 

So no, the temps are around 40C at those settings and they stay there while doing office/surfing. So, with x1 PCIe and lower volatge, it should be better!

 

But how did you get it down to 41C in the first place? I have only managed 48C. Are you using a notebook cooler?

 

Hey, I was wondering about all of this too. One thing I was concerned about is permanently editing that profile to a point by accident where the voltage is so low it always results in a BSoD upon startup, effectively bricking the laptop.

I did find this handy-dandy Undervolting Guide which uses programs that control the voltage instead of permanently editing a profile, so that if you do BSoD while testing voltages, you just restart the computer and everything is back to normal because the program is no longer running. Once you have everything figured out you can set the program to run on startup so you don't have to set it up every time that you start the computer.

However, some of the newer comments say that this does not work for the new iX series of CPU's, does anyone know if this is true and if so if there is any comparable method of undervolting?

 

If you mess with bios, you can brick your laptop, if you undervolt via software, and you encounter the problem, a simple safe mode boot up should work.

 

Yeah, that is why I am staying away from it because as far as I can tell there is no software that works with the iX series of CPUs.

EDIT***** To make this statement more clear:

I am staying away from undervolting by editing permanent settings for fear of bricking my laptop and as far as I am aware there is currently no software that works for undervolting the iX series of processors.

 

Is this true??

 

Such an epic statement to take out of context.

 

Hahahaha, you are definitely right. Maybe I should make that statement a little more clear so people don't come into this thread and be like "?!"

***As far as I am aware there is no UNDERVOLTING software that works with the iX series of processors.***

 

Well, I did a 15 minute FurMark run (Fullscreen Xtreme Burning; I think that's as bad as it gets).

Graphing Script Output:
938 lines of GPU data from 2010-05-12 10:43:38 to 2010-05-12 10:59:29
940 lines of CPU data from 2010-05-12 10:43:38 to 2010-05-12 10:59:30

Measurement : Min/Avg/Max
CPU Core #0 [°C]: 54.0/78.8/87.0
CPU Core #1 [°C]: 50.0/72.3/86.0
GPU DispIO [°C]: 57.5/83.0/88.0
GPU MemIO [°C]: 64.5/99.0/105.0
GPU Shader [°C]: 59.5/88.9/94.0
CPU [MHz]: 1197.0/2372.3/2527.1
GPU Core [MHz]: 625.0/625.0/625.0
GPU Memory [MHz]: 1000.0/1000.0/1000.0
CPU Load [%]: 0.0/20.1/48.9
GPU Load [%]: 0.0/95.8/99.0

FurMark Screenshot:


Graph generated by my script:


I don't have a thermometer at my current location, but the ambient temperature was probably around 22°C. As you can see, the temperatures had essentially stabilized, so running it for longer probably wouldn't have brought things up much. What's important to note is that although the MemIO temperature was at 104°C , the Shader and DispIO temperatures maxed out at 94°C and 88°C respectively.

 

Is that too ridiculous of a temp for MemIO? The other temps don't seem too bad, especially considering you're running Xtreme Burning for 15 mins.

 

I can't say, but although I wouldn't want my laptop running at these temperatures for long periods of time, I think MemIO can handle significantly hotter temperatures than the other parts.

The fact is that the GPU didn't throttle or shut down, so I would think that the card itself definitely doesn't consider these temperatures to be dangerous.

 

Lack do you still have stock pads on the GPU?

If so its definately running hotter due to the pads inability to transfer heat as fast as the paste.