Zepto Znote 6x24W - BIOS z14005e

If you have got a noisy fan, did you reset the BIOS? Press F2 during he Zepto splash screen to get to the BIOS setup and then F9 to reset. That should get the fan back to normal and may clear the upgrade problem.

Otherwise it is time to be opening the cover on the memory and removing one module and then checking what happens when you try to run memtest. Try each module in turn.

John

 

Yes i did reset the BIOS to default settings, and I still get the same error. I'm currently still on BIOS 14004 (This is the BIOS that came with my laptop), and I really want to upgrade to 14005e but I don't know if I should open up my laptop for this. It's working fine right now, doesn't seem like there is anything wrong with my RAM.

Isn't there some other program to check on my hardware that I can run in windows?

 

I'm short of other suggestions.

I hope Rene can make a suggestion about what can be causing the simple DOS upgrade programto trip up.

And BIOS z14005e is not bug free either. I had to reset it again this morning because the fan was stuck on fast again when I resumed from hibernation and the CPU temperature was about 30C.

John

 

shenky, sounds like you might have defective RAM. Have you tried testing the HDD for errors also? I've seen an error like that on a machine when trying to run the HDD test, and that turned out to be a defective HDD.

John, I've contacted the ODM about this issue you are experiencing with the fan and low temperatures.

 

I've had my 6024W for a couple of days now, and I have some serious problem with the fan. Since I read that many had problems with this, I upgraded to the latest bios (z14005e) as soon as I got the computer. But the fan keeps turning on without any reasons all the time. I usually have to reset the bios several times before it disappears, but it keeps coming back. I think I've had to reset the bios every day since I got it, and I'm starting to get really tired of it now. I bought the computer so that I could use it in school, but the fan is to loud to use the computer on lectures. Does anyone here have any advice to give?

 

Surely the BIOS update program doesn't need to go near the HDD? I also suspect the RAM. does the BIOS update program use the very first part of the RAM which is normally reserved and never used by Windows?

Use the monitoring facility of RMClock to check the CPU utilisation / speed and reported temperature. We need to first be sure that you haven't got something which is giving the CPU some work to do. Under light load you should get something similar to the attached. Also what does RMClock report on the CPU info page?

You can also use CPU-Z to check the basic properties of the CPU.

If the CPU load and temperatures are fine then he next step would be to visit the BIOS and try different DTS calibration settings (under the Intel menu).

John

 

Sorry, I should have said that I'm running linux However, the fan runs when I start the computer, and then never stops. The temperature never reaches 40 degrees. When I manage to get it to work as it should it turns of the fans soon after it has booted, and then doesn't turn them on until the temperature reaches 55 degrees. Now it's gotten even worse, cause I can't get the fan to turn off even when I reset the bios. I'm seriously starting to consider returning the computer if I can't get this to work as it should...

 

My fan too runs like crazy in Linux. I'm thinking I could start using my 6324W as an air conditioning unit because the air coming out from it is very cold . I'm considering downgrading the bios but there are some good things with the new bios. I don't get 2000 acpi interrupts per second anymore.

 

all of this seem to be about reducing the fan usage and saving battery life

but i want the opposite, i find that during heavy use the fans seem to kick in too late and stop before it cools down, leaving my 6324 very hot, i have even tried using a notebook cooler but it has not helped.

is there anyway to make the fans to kick in earlier and keep my notebook cool???
i dont care about noise or battery life

 

Have you looked in the BIOS?

It appears that the user can change the fan trip points. See the attached. You may want to lower the high fan trip point and see if that helps, although undervolting the CPU is the easiest way to get the temperature down by reducing the heat being produced.

John

 

ok thanks ive done that, but how do you undervolt the cpu??

 

Undervolting:

I use RMClock although it doesn't work properly with the Santa Rosa hardware. You will also need Prime95. Install and start RMClock and go to the monitoring page. This shows CPU speed, voltage and temperature.

Unzip Prime95 into two separate folders and start each copy of Prime95 and select the torture test with maximum CPU stress. Run these for about 10 minutes and note where your CPU temperature has got to (my guess is around 80 to 85C). Also see what the CPU voltage is at full speed.

Now you can set up RMClock to do some undervolting (but leave your 2 x Prime95 running). Go to the main profiles page and make sure Index 0 is set to the lowest available voltage (0.95V?). Then lower the voltage of the last index to, say, 1.15V. Then go to the Performance on Demand page, select the Use P state transitions then go down the list and tick each index value. Press the apply button. Then go back to the main Profiles page and select the current AC profile as Performance on Demand, then press apply.

Go back to the monitoring page and you should see that the maximum voltage has dropped and the temperature is going down. If nothing has crashed (or Prime95 may stop and report an error) go back to the main Profiles page and drop the maximum index voltage to 1.10V. Look at the temperature again. If there are no ill-effects then drop the voltage to 1.075V. Then 1.05V. Below 1.05V you are getting close to the limit, so go down one step at a time. Remember where you are at because at any time on of the Prime95s may report an error, or hour computer may BSOD and reboot. You might even get all the way to the minimum voltage without a crash.

The rule of thumb is that the safe voltage is 2 or 3 steps above the minimum / crash voltage. This is best confirmed by leaving 2 x Prime95 running overnight.

If you are lucky you may have have a CPU which is stable at 1.05V at full speed.

I hope the foregoing is sufficient. Report back on how you get on or if you need clarification.

John

 

ok i this has made a difference in the CPU temperature so thanks

here is what i found:
the lowest voltage availabe was 1.050v

it started with a default voltage of 1.350v (which is the maximum), this gave a temperature of 93.1 on the tourture test.

i then put the voltae down to 1.250v which reduced the temp to 89, then down to 1.150v with a temp of 87, and finally down to 1.050v which redced the temp to around 84

i left the tourture test on the whole time, but didnt give the 10 mins each time (only the first), but this shouldnt give too much difference? but even 84 seems a little high?? considering you said it would proberly start at about 80-85

did i do something wrong (and need to do more) or is this normal?
nothing crashed or rebooted at all

 

You are nearly up the learning curve.

Have you reset the BIOS recently? Although the latest version is better, it doesn't seem to be completely free of temperature / fan problems.

First, I wonder whether RMClock is misidentifying the CPU type. Go to the bottom of the Advanced CPU settings page and select Mobile. RMClock will then restart and should offer a lower maximum voltage range (and maybe a lower minimum).

I've not had any problems with Prime95 and Vista, perhaps because I have the dreaded UAC disabled (Start > Run > msconfig > Tools).

BTW, which CPU do you have? T7300 or something faster? I've just run my T7300 with 2 x Prime95 torture test for 10 minutes and the temperature stabilised at 70.2C for 1.10V. (Without undervolting my CPU gets up to 80C at 1.25V and dropped 20C in as many seconds once I stopped the test). I've got the X3100 GPU which shouldn't generate much heat. Your 8600M GT will tend to generate a little more heat but this should not be significant during a CPU test).

If you still can't get the temperature down into the 70's then I wonder whether your cooling system is starting to clog up. The bottom-mounted air intakes mean that your computer starts to function as a vacuum cleaner once the fan speeds up. Unfortunately, unlike a vacuum cleaner, there's no easy way to clean the muck out. Shine a torch in the fan outlet and see what you can see. Visit this thread for a nice picture of a clogged cooling system.

John

 

i have the T7300

Turning to mobile gives me a range of 0.937v to 1.237v

but should my fans really be at all clogged up considering ive had the laptop for less than a month and had a cooler under it pulling hot air away from it 90% of the time?

 

You shouldn't have a dust problem in less than a month unless you have been using the computer on top of a fluffy blanket or similar.

Reset the BIOS and rerun the torture tests with the new voltage settings and see what you get now.

John

 

ok i have reset the bios and set the CPU to being mobile.

the max voltage 1.237v gave a temp 85
1.150v 79-80
1.050v 72-73
1.000v 71-72
0.975v 70-71
and the minimum 0.938v 68-69

nothing crashed at all like you said might happen....i will take this as a good thing

but just to be sure i set it to be at 0.962v

the temp has dropped a long way so thanks

but it still gets v.hot during gaming....is there a way i can help cool the GPU down

 

You are lucky to have a CPU with such a low minimum voltage. Mine's locked at 1.0V. However, I would be wary of leaving the CPU at such a low voltage setting without leaving 2 x SuperPi running overnight as a full soak test. The lower the voltage then the bigger the chance of an electron not behaving correctly but it might take several hours for this to happen.

I'm not an expert in GPU tweaking. The problem of these powerful GPUs is that they do use a lot of power and create heat. You could try RivaTuner although reducing heat may mean some reduction in performance.

John

 

ok thanks for all your help

 

I see that BIOS z14005e has been removed from the 6024W ftp site and this message has been put in the change log.

I know there's at still at least one fan-related bug, but I wouldn't consider it to be sufficiently serious to merit pulling the BIOS because of the other improvements in the BIOS.

Is a further BIOS update going to be issued soon?

John

 

Well we pulled it down because our support was flooded with calls about fans running full speed after the BIOS had been put online. About 75% of the calls we were receiving where about this so we took it down because of that.

We are working on a new BIOS. I wish i could say right now how soon it will be released, but we have no ETA on it right now. The reason for no ETA is because we need a few other features and fixes implemented before we can release it.

 

The only glitch I've had with 005e is the fan coming on when the temperature is low (and the fan was running at slow speed). That has happened about 3 times in as many weeks and I have now discovered that a restart or hibernation - resume will clear that bug so there is no need to reset the BIOS. I think it was version 004 which liked to run the fan at full speed.

While we are discussing the BIOS, is there a way to change the temperature for turning the fan off? In 005e the default fan on temperature is 55C (see the attached) but the temperature has to drop to 45C before the fan goes off. Getting the temperature down the last few degrees takes a relatively long time so I would like the ability to stop the fan at 48C or 50C. Can this be done by any of the existing BIOS options?

John

 

I'm noticing constant HDD LED activity when I'm reading a CD or a DVD (without HDD writes). Could it be a bug in the BIOS ? It really seems like the LED for the HDD is actually showing DVD drive load.

 

That's exactly what I wanted to know when I started reading this thread. I've managed to undervolt my 6324w T7250 quite a bit at the moment and it works very nice when running at full power. The only thing that still irritates me is that the fan runs (slow but still) 70/30. I've noticed that when it kicks in at 54/55C it goes down to 49 or so pretty fast. Then it takes ages for it to go down to 46 and then switch off. I haven't found any way of controlling this but then again I'm no expert and is still a bit frightened to change things that I don't know about in the BIOS. Would be great if someone had an answer on how to do this, if possible.

 

I also tried to raise the temp when the fan should go on in BIOS. I just can't get it to work. I manage to change the settings but in Windows the fans still switch on at 54 C.

Is there something I could try to solve this?

The reason for wanting to change these settings is simply to have more time with the fan off. Would be great if it could be on for about 20 % of the time when doing regular surfing/office tasks. Now it's somewhere around 80% i think.

 

One of the earlier BIOS versions did raise the fan trigger temperature but I felt it made everything uncomfortably hot. The big drawback on BIOS 005e is that the exponential decay curve for the temperature. Dropping the temperature by half the amount only takes about 20% of the time.

There's been a rumour for several weeks about a further 6x24W BIOS update being imminent. Perhaps Zepto are keeping this as a Christmas present? Or maybe they keep finding more things to fix.

John

 

they could help me out with my audio driver as a xmas present to me, they havnt even replied in the topic, not even after that amount of calls for them...

Look here if you finally care to help me...

 

I've noticed you've been begging for help on that issue for sometime,
really sorry it's not been resolved for you.

 

Oh btw, about undervolting, I have my 7100 at 1V 9x (highest) and iv been gaming for several hours allready, now the fan rarely go on full speed, only on really dark and grassy places.

About the GPU, reducing the frequencies doesnt lower the temp, nor do OCing it a bit (not much). My 8600 is at 91/92C when gaming, all the time. Slightly OCd (like 1/6 of the bars in rivatuner over the default values

 

John, there's still being worked on a new BIOS for both 6024W and 6224W. They are now going to have seperate BIOS' so we are able to correct different issues seperately for each model. At the moment our Production and Quality manager is on vacation so the BIOS testing is on hold until he comes back next week. The ODM is still working on fixing issues ect. while he is gone.

Sprint, We've tried replicating your issue and have not succeeded in doing so as of yet. Also we've had customers contacting us about them not being able to install the Audio drivers, but we haven't been able to replicate that either, and it is pretty hard to make guides when we can't even replicate the initial problem.

 

Ok, now I am sitting and writing this on my new Zepto 6324W but I need earspeakers to drown the fan noice.
I am a little confuse.
Before I start to config the fan I need to have a temperature- program
that I can rely on. There are so many out there, what do you use?

For the moment I just surfing on internet and listen on music with vista (32bit), energy-save-mode=on(frequency=800MHz), DTS call on, bios=14005e, just a normal use.
According to Intel Thermal Analysis Tool my temp is between 49-55 C for both cors.

Same activitys but in High Performance=on(frequency=2000MHz) The temps is between 57-63C.

Is this normal? Can I still decrease the fan speed and tolerate a higher temp?

Is there more temperatures that I need to check, apart from the core temps?

I have turn on and off the DTS calibrate, and realy dont feel any difference.

Also tryed som fancontrols program but with no succsess, because the fan didnt change the speed.
The fan is switching sometimes from min to max, but some times its just blowing for no reason.

//Thanks Niklas

 

Is the bios in the first post the newest for my 6324W as well?

Regards,
CreX

 

CreX, yes the z14005e of the newest official BIOS for the 6324W at the moment.

 

Okey!
Thanks for the fast answer!

I just bought my Znote 6324W. Is it updated allready then, or do I have to update the BIOS? And how do I update Znote BIOS? Last time I updated a BIOS were by using ASUS update software on my desktop and before that, floppy disks.

Regards,
CreX

 

You download the .iso file, burn it to CD as an Image-file via burner programs like Nero and then you make the laptop boot from the CD during boot up (just like when installing Windows). Remember to have your AC adapter connected and turned on, and then the BIOS should update itself.

I would recommend you to wait for the next BIOS update if you do not experience any abnormalities and the machine, for some reason, is not already updated.

 

Okey, thanks man!
So there is an update to be released very soon?

Regards,
CreX

 

We are testing some of the last things on the next BIOS release, so should be no more than about 2-3 weeks until the next BIOS release.

It will be announced here on the forums when the next BIOS is released.

 

@niklas555: The temperature range you are seeing is normal. However, the fan should only need to run at its lowest speed to maintain that temperature when the CPU & GPU are under light load. If the fan is noticeably noisy then something is generating a lot of heat which needs to be blown away.

You can try using RMclock to undervolt the CPU. People have reported a 10C drop in their maximum CPU temperatures after undervolting. However, RMClock is not yet fully compatible with Santa Rosa and you may hit problems as discussed here and here.

John

 

Are you not getting huge performance drop after undervolting?

CreX

 

No. The CPU speed stays the same, but the voltage at each speed step is lower. For example, at 10x I am using 1.05V and not the 1.25V which Intel coded into the chip.

John

 

And this is god for not getting higher temperatures ofc.
But is it necessary?
My Znote 6324W's main purpose is to run games by the way.

CreX

 

Oki thanks for the answer.

CreX I also play games (and then I want max parformance and the fan can go max) but I am also using it in my studies and if I am just sitting and reading some pdf files or doc files, then I want it quiet.

Now to my biggest problem!
Maybe wrong thread for this but I it seem that you guys have some knowledge about zepto. Just tel me if I should change thread!
Oki when I am done with my playing o studies and I want to close the laptop(not turn it off), the laptop will go in to sleep mode or enrgy save mode. (I dont know the right name in english for the mode.)

I put the laptop in my zepto sleeve and then into my backpack. And after a while I am starting to feel heat on my back, the laptop has started by it self!!!
Take the computer up and its damn hot, and this have happened maybe 7 times now. I think it will take damage if this goes on.
Whats wrong, is this a problem that you know ?
Should I create a new thread for this problem? couldnt find any thread for this problem

Thanks niklas

 

Make sure you use hibernation before putting the computer in a bag. I suspect that you had used suspend / sleep and it is easy for any software to wake up the computer (probably searching for an update).

Hibernation dumps the RAM to the hard disk and then the computer is turned off and should stay off. (I think it happened to me one, but the computer was on a desk). However, there have been a few reports of Vista computers waking up from hibernation so it is worthwhile searching through the task scheduler and making that no scheduled tasks are allowed to wake a sleeping computer.

It is relevant to this thread since it serves as a reminder to Zepto to ensure than the BIOS does not allow any program to wake a hibernating computer.

John

 

Will it come out next week?

 

Unfortunately not. There were some complications with the final release we got for testing, so the BIOS has unfortunately once again been postponed.
Expected release as of now at some point in January.

 

Any news on the bios for 6625 ?

 

It's the same for that but I believe the 6625WD BIOS is closer than the 6x24 version right now.

 

Sounds great, thanks for the news

 

Noooooooo!!! We want it first!!

 

I get my 6224W delivered in the next couple of days, so I am eager to boost the performance and battery life before my festive trip.

I must say also that the Zepto team are just 100% customer focussed with sales & aftersales of Laptops therefore being the best I have seen this year!