P870DM-G Laptop shutting down issue.

Hi all , I have an issue that I figured I would ask you all about in here seen as you seem to know a lot more than me.

So I have purchased the above laptop in the title of this thread a while ago and to this point have loved it for the most part, however I noticed one issue the other day that I was hoping some of you guys could shed some light on for me.

Quick disclaimer (I am fully aware that these machines are NOT designed to be gamed on whilst on the battery power and should most definitely be used on mains power, especially if/when overclocked)

So here's my issue:

I was showing a friend star citizen on my laptop, a game which when run plugged in has no issues whatsoever running (despite being buggy and in v early alpha) when all of a sudden my laptop just powered off.

Upon rebooting I checked the Event Viewer logs and the only ones I could see were Kernel Power errors, also once rebooted the battery charge still showed 52% remaining.

Does anybody have any idea what is likely to be causing this.

I would expect that I'd get a message saying battery level low if anything not just a complete power loss.

I do have my windows power settings set to performance and my GPU's (dual 980M's set to Maximum Power)

according to Real Temp GT my temps are all in the low 40's at idle and my CPU is running around 4.2Ghz

Thanks in advance

 

This could be one of many things...

- Power failure (main board)
- Faulty component
- Overheating (unlikely; system should have sounded a thermal alarm first)
- Issue at AC adapter or with electrical outlet

These and BSODs are a pain to troubleshoot because of how vague they are.

Try to reproduce the shutdown. Run your game again, and watch your temperatures. If it occurs with normal temps, try another electrical outlet. Same issue? Try pulling all but one stick of RAM; test one stick at a time. Not RAM? Pull your mechanical hard drive if you're not running your OS off of it (I've seen faulty HDDs cause sudden shutdowns, though it's rare).

 

Not sure if I made it unclear , but I can rule out the Issue at an AC Adapter as my problem only happens when the machine is using battery power, not when using the AC adapter from the wall outlet.

Overheating is not causing it either my temps are stable when under load.

Could be a component/power failure Issue although I hope not, and this would be strange considering it works flawlessly when plugged into the wall.

I do have the Prema Bios installed though do you guys have any idea what sort of battery settings i should be using inside the bios??

 

If it never happens on AC then I think this is more likely a battery or main board problem (sorry, I overlooked where you said this occurred on battery and not also AC power).

Does it ever shut off on you on battery when not stressing the system (idle or basic use)? I'm not acquainted with the Prema BIOS, but hopefully someone else can direct you on that.

 

I bet the laptop is protecting the battery from damage which is an important thing in Li-ion since they get dangerous when they overheat. I'm sure there's a limit to how much current the battery will supply, maybe the stock BIOS throttles speed down but Prema has removed some of those limits.

I've sparingly used mine on battery and not done any intensive 3d games. I do set it to balanced power profile though. But it's not a stable experience, sometimes BCLK is locked to 71mhz one time it didn't even change when I plugged in AC (had to reboot), every time I (accidentally) run the battery completely out I have to do a NVRAM reset even after charging the battery back up

All my other Clevos throttle badly on battery from the factory (my P170EM in particular had slug mode - the CPU would throttle to 1.2ghz and GPU to 324mhz both about 1/3rd of stock)

Try setting your power profile in Nvidia control panel to adaptive and seeing what clocks your GPUs settle on.

I think the only battery related setting you can adjust in BIOS is the flexicharge level which is aimed at reducing long term battery wear

 

Nope, on battery it'll act just like the stock BIOS and throttle to safe values, otherwise it would kill the battery.
Did you check your battery health, maybe it's no longer good.

 

So I tried whilst running my machine in Nvidia's adaptive power management mode as opposed to Prefer Maximum performance which I usually choose.

Aside from running a few FPS slower it did exactly the same thing. Shut off the power about 20-30 seconds into the game. This doesnt happen on AC power at all. I have contacted HIDevolution for support, my warranty expires this month so hopefully they can deal with it before then, oh yeah , just out of interest what happens if you send your laptop in for service like a week before the expiry date , do they use the date the ticket was created or the date it arrives with them?

 

Depends on the company. We go by invoice/anniversary date, not when the RMA is issued (people can abuse the latter), but we're flexible too; if the laptop is here and is a day or two out of the warranty period, we can usually get it covered. There's only so much of a grace period we're given, though.

 

So I thought I had fixed the issue but I just ran a completely different game (non intensive one , football manager 2017) and it was running fine until I moved the laptop from one room to the other (and thus unplugged it) and it shut off almost instantly. Can anyone recommend what I should do to troubleshoot it.

 

It sounds like hardware fault. I think you should speak with your reseller about it. You might have to consider an RMA.

 

So I initially spoke to my reseller about this issue on 2/1/2017 the laptop was purchased on 2/16/2016 but I thought I had resolved the issue.

I have just added to the ticket requesting they take a look at it but my warranty was only a year. I hope they honour the fact that the ticket was created before the end of the warranty.

 

They should

 

So I contacted HID and they approved my RMA so I have to package the laptop up and return it to them. I am in the fortunate position of having a decent desktop I can use whilst they are working on it/trying to solve the issue.

I REALLY hope they can get to the bottom of this issue!

 

It could just be the brick is not quite up to delivering full power and that needs a swap out. Hopefully something nice and simple

 

It's nothing to do with the power brick it's ONLY happening when it's on battery.

 

Hey, Martin. I have the same system, also with 980m SLI, and bought from HID (in January 2016). I've been having the issue with unexplained shut downs that is similar to yours, though only in part of the cases it would shut down quietly (it got worse from there and every once in a while out of blue it would start spinning fans & beeping, and then - shut down). It's been in diagnostics at HID for a few weeks now, but it seems to be coming & going, and it's still unclear what's causing it. Have you been able to get it fixed? Can you share with me what the issue was in your case?

 

Sounds like a similar issue to mine as for having it fixed , no, this is the second time I've sent it to HID for repair. The second time they received it on the 19th April 2017 and they still haven't returned it, it's now the 24th May 2017, this time they told me they needed to send it to the vendor for a new motherboard , then that the vendor needed another week to test it (this was told to me on the 9th May) it's now the 24th and a lot longer than the week they said the vendor needed. I would've just been happy with a store credit for the amount I paid so I could buy a working one.

I'm also going away soon and would like to have my near $5000 laptop for my trip but even that seems unlikely now. I for one will never purchase anything from this company again. At this point they seem to be just ignoring my messages or giving me generic bs answers to my questions, pathetic.

Good luck getting your laptop back/working I fear you may need it.

Martin

 

Well I received my P870DMG back for the second time since sending it away to HIDevolution (and them supposedly sending it out to the manufacturer to have the motherboard swapped),

1. Of course as soon as I received it back I went to set it up and test it but alas my WiFi card wouldn't work, it would see my WiFi networks but not connect to any of them. I decided to open up the PC and to my astonishment NEITHER of the WiFi antennas had even been connected to the WiFi card. After resolving this issue which I shouldn't even have had, I then proceeded to set my Nvidia settings as I like to (Prefer Maximum Performance and Single Display Performance mode) and off I went.....until the EXACT same issue happened.

As soon as I remove wall power whilst playing ANY game my power cuts out (this doesn't happen on wall power only on battery power). Tried it with wall power in when booting game and with game already booted same result.

SLI is enabled otherwise what would be the point in having an SLI machine?

It took me all of 10 seconds to reproduce this issue OVER AND OVER AGAIN, and it happens every single time HID have had my system for OVER 2 months and still couldn't fix it. This is beyond ridiculous now. Especially as I had been told multiple times things like, "yes we have received your laptop back we just need a few more days for testing , we want to make sure there are no issues left before we send it back" when they clearly are not testing it correctly despite me telling them EXACTLY how to reproduce it multiple times and even recording and providing youtube videos of what it does!


This has been one of the worst consumer experiences of my life and I for one will never shop at HIDEvolution again.

 

So It also appears they swapped out my G-Sync capable 980m GPU's for non G-Sync ones too, unless I'm missing something, I've looked everywhere in the control panel for the set up Nvidia G-Sync bit and cannot find it anywhere, I have tried the original drivers and the latest Nvidia drivers.

Such a Clusterf**k.

 

Please check and post the GPU HWIDs in device manager for each one...

 

I checked the hardware ID's and they are as follows:

First Card:

PCI\VEN_10DE$DEV_13D7&SUBSYS_08701558&REV_A1
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13D7&SUBSYS_08701558
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13D7&CC_030200
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13D7&CC_0302

Second Card:


PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13D7&SUBSYS_08701558&REV_A1
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13D7&SUBSYS_08701558
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13D7&CC_030000
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13D7&CC_0300

Thanks,

Martin

 

Those are non-g GTX980M

 

Yeah the guys at HID are telling me they can flash a bios to them to make them G-sync, I was under the impression that the actual cards are different.

 

They can't be cross-flashed like that...

 

Well the re-seller (HIDevolution) is telling me to have them remote in to have them flash a bios to the cards (my cards were originally gsync) but they swapped them out for some reason when they did "repairs" the first time I sent it back to them and now I have non gsync cards. What a joke.

 

They will have to pick-up the system to swap cards.
If you have a g-sync system than it's called P870DM-G (P870DM is another model).

 

Yeah on the bottom of my case there are two models listed it says Model: P870DM then under Product Code it says: P870DM-G.

That means this is supposed to have G-sync cards right?!

 

It depends on what is written in the system BIOS or rather how it was ordered in the beginning.

 

Well i definitely ordered a gsync model. I'm not sure I want them flashing my bios if its going to brick my laptop.

 

As I said, the GPUs can't be flashed to g-sync models, they will have to pick it up to change the cards...

 

Well It's going to have to wait for a couple of weeks now as I'm going to the UK tomorrow and need my laptop whilst travelling, thanks for the advice prema btw, you know the Product code is that the ACTUAL model I have or is the Model number : I'm referring to whats on the bottom of the laptop. My product code states it is the P870DM-G but the model states P870DM i would assume the model part means the family its part of and the product code means its supposed to be the G-Sync version.

 

Yeah so I figured out what it was, I had previously had HIDevolution upgrade my laptop from the regular cards in the original order to the gsync modules (i found a previous ticket) and when i sent it in for the power issue repair they obviously went off of the old order and hadn't updated it to reflect the fact that my machine now had the gsync modules. Really poor form.

 

My issue has become even worse now. Whenever I run any multitude of games the laptops screen goes black with the game still running in the background (after between 10 mins to 40 mins of playing) with the games sound still playing, then out of nowhere the fans speed up to what must be close to maximum speed but the laptop is completely unresponsive to any input from me. The only way to get it up and running again is to hard reset the system.

I have tried this with even non intensive 3D games such as Football Manager 2017 and This War of Mine, I have tried it on adaptive power settings in the windows power scheme and balanced in the nvidia control panel (I prefer to game on max performance and single display mode) also tried with and without SLI to the same result.

After speaking with Ted about the issue I am sending it back into HIDevolution to have them swap out my GPU's for the G-Sync ones that I had upgraded to from non G-sync ones earlier, at this point I'm thinking and hoping that its a bad GPU or pair of them because I cannot fathom why this is happening if not.

Temps are good across the board and on the GPU's when gaming barely reaching into the mid 60's in the non intensive games i mentioned and up to around 70 on more intensive games, on the CPU highest I've seen is mid 70 and that's pretty rare for the most part.

Oh ALL of the above is now happening when the unit is plugged into AC power. Weird Issue!

 

I had that symptom before I bent my heatsinks back into shape, i think they were not contacting the vrms on the top of the gpus properly especially on my slave card

If your laptop has been apart a few times its something worth checking.

 

They should be able to check that all out when it goes back and they test it