Sager NP7358 heat issues

I'm the new owner of a Sager NP7358/Clevo W355SS with an i7 4900Q. I also have been participating the ArcheAge closed beta, which is the most hardware-intensive gaming I've put the machine through so far. Performance is great - I'm not pushing it any, because frankly, normal settings are pretty enough, and I have never felt the need to find my limits the hard way - but in the course of normal play, I develop a serious heat problem very quickly - 90 degrees and over on the motherboard and very nearly that in the CPU. Are there any good ways to get those temperatures down? I've looked around the notebook for panels to pop off and give it some extra ventilation, but it looks like it's pretty much all or nothing in that regard, which is a really unattractive solution, but I'm really very uncomfortable with temperatures that high in my brand new notebook, particularly running (at 'normal,' or fairly low) settings in a game that isn't even out yet and I intend to spend quite a bit of time in after release. Any advice you can give me would be greatly appreciated, and I'm sorry if I've left anything out.

 

Does the fan operate in max speed? (Do you hear fan noise loud and clear?)

I found a weird problem with both of P170SM-A and W350SSQ - that the fan is only kicked off to max when I did 3D benchmark (I never played games on them); it won't go to 100% no matter how I stress test the CPU. And it's already hot enough with 4810MQ, I imagine your 4900 would be even higher.

If you have a similar problem, 90 degree is definitely normal, because the fan in auto mode is always 64% @ 2100RPM - I had that before I use ECView to fix the fan and now it's 100% @ 4300RPM. Afterwards both 4810 and 4710 would be around 80 when all 4 cores are running full, and 90 on stress test.


Here is CLEVO ECView and my patch / notification icon for it: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/756969-clevo-ecview-5-5-a.html



PS: If 4900 is like 4810 or 4700, you wouldn't need to find limits but you still have to tune because the original configuration really sucks, too hot and unable to keep up turbo boost performance.

 

The fan is definitely gets to running - it kicks up to higher speeds when I expect it to, everything sounds as I would expect - but I haven't checked to see exactly at what percentage of its capacity it is running. I'll try ECView and your patch for it, see if that helps any, and I'll get back to you on that.

Any advice for tuning the CPU? I feel that there are things I could do (undervolting a little, maybe?) to cut down on heat, and I'd even be willing to lose a little performance to do it, but I honestly don't know how - this is my first serious notebook and consequently I don't know a whole lot about fine tuning my hardware (I just upgraded from a 5-year-old Asus notebook with a Core 2 Duo). If you could give me a jumping off point, I'd appreciate it.

 

firstly which graphics card have you got?

whats your ambient room temperature as this sure can add quite a few C to the temps. just 2c higher than normal can add 4-5c higher temps. summer time is the worst for lappys.
good idea to raise the back of lappy up a little and also not have it too close to a wall behind as the heat will just bounce back.

try a different monitoring software which can be found in my sig below. core temps, hwinfo64, nvidia inspector (if you have nvidia card.

 

You should undervolt it by Intel XTU as much as possible without making the laptop crash/restart. My 4700 could undervolt 70-100mV, depending on the max turbo boost multiplier, but I also raise max current from 60 to 100.

Both of undervolt and current change are meant to keep your CPU staying longer in max power mode (and they do, very effectively). If the heat is too much for the system to contain even when the fan is at 100% (4300+RPM) and when you're NOT doing stress test, you should try to improve the cooling system (ex: thermal paste) or at worst limit the turbo boost multiplier.

I also found that setting multipliers of all cores to the same/4core value helps further undervolting and lowering temperature (ex: 36/35/34/34 change to 34/34/34/34, you get same performance in 4cores anyway).

PS: GPU might the least you should worry. It's just too cool.

 

The NP7358 runs a GTX 860M. GPU temperatures have actually not become a problem yet, interestingly. And yeah, I've got the back of the laptop elevated with beer bottle caps (I could raise it a little higher, but honestly, surprisingly little heat is vented out the bottom - temperatures beneath are rarely much hotter than room temperature) and I have it a reasonable distance from the wall. Room temperature definitely isn't helping but it isn't bad - my house is kept no warmer than 65F in the summer and my room couldn't be more than 5 degrees (also Fahrenheit) warmer. I'll try your monitoring software, though - I'm currently only using a combination of Speccy and Speedfan, which really aren't perfect.

I'll try undervolting. No real experience with it but I'll play around and see what results I can come up with - shouldn't be too complicated. Unfortunately, the ArcheAge closed beta event just ended, and that has definitely produced the most problems for me (although I should state that the heat issues are in no way limited to that game), but I should have enough ways to test the results. I already have IC Diamond on so I don't anticipate being able to upgrade thermal paste, nor do I think there's any real way to improve through any sort of hard modification otherwise, particularly without voiding my warranty, which I plan to hang on to (for similar reasons, I'm going to try to avoid ECView - I'm sure it works well, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on the issue to trust myself with a program that is apparently so dangerous).

Thank you both for your help - I'll let you know what changes I'm able to effect.

 

Unfortunately, undervolting with XTU has made no appreciable difference in its own stress test or IntelBurnTest. I was able to undervolt by 80mV before comprising stability but was still registering temperatures greater than 80C during BurnTest stress levels high and above. Moreover, the temperatures registered during tests while undervolting were virtually identical to those registered at default settings.

EDIT: Despite passing stress tests, undervolting by 80mV proved to compromise stability once in a game. 50mV appears to be the limit there. Even undervolted I experienced temperatures greater than 90C.

 

90C is not high enough for CPU to throttle speed. You could monitor the CPU frequency in XTU to see if there a difference before and after overvolting.

My ECView patch is safe as long as you only check the fan speed from ClevoECView2.exe, and don't make any changes or open the config window. I rewrote some parts of code so it wouldn't need to do anything potentially dangerous to read fan speed and CPU temperature. My laptop is the same model as yours and it's been weeks.

If you confirm the fan is not at 100% when the CPU is above 90C, you can then report to Clevo or change fan speed in my program. We have two Clevo laptops (W350SS & P170SM-A) here and both have their automatic fan control broken - I assume it's simply by design.

 

I am tempted to report to Clevo already - clearly the fan is running as it is designed to, whether that is at the highest speed it is capable of or not. I achieved temperatures of 95C in the CPU and 93C in the motherboard last night without even trying to meet the hardware's potential - this system simply generates more heat than it can disperse at factory settings (even undervolted).

I'll (carefully) try your ECView patch. You're most likely correct, but I would be surprised to see that alone giving me the sort of 10 degree drop that I need to feel comfortable with this; frankly, this has been quite disheartening. The reason I selected this machine over much cheaper options like the y510p (aside from issues inherent to SLI) was the heat its infamously poorly designed Ultrabay generated, and here I am routinely producing those same temperatures in internal components. Thank you for your help and I'll get back to you with the results of the fan testing.

 

might be worth reapplying some new thermal paste.
did you go for the upgrade or the standard paste.

 

FWIW the fans in my P370SM never go 100% unless the CPU and GPUs hit throttling temp (CPU = 95C, GPU = 93C).

Oddly, if either GPU manages to heat up to low 80s while gaming, the fans do go into turbo mode after a certain amount of time, usually around the 2-3 hour mark. But the behavior is sproadic, and I've never been able to consistently reproduce it.

 

@RealGone: I'm very happy with the laptop despite the problematic automatic fan control. Because it actually lets you control the fan manually, other laptops have far worse stuff I'd have to worry about.

The fan performance seems non-linear. It's very loud and effective at 100% (4300RPM), okay at 90%, quiet at 80% and below. In automatic mode it's 64% but the RPM is actually 2200 - like half of full speed. Before I use manual fan control, the CPU can never stay at max frequency for more than a few minutes during stress test, and it could go up to 70-80C for single-core work. Now it can do stress test forever (4700mq, max 90C @ 3.4GHz and 80C @ 3.2GHz).

 

I got the upgrade to IC Diamond. All of the information I have seen about thermal paste suggests that the gap between the poorest and finest thermal pastes is incredibly slim anyway (provided that the thermal paste is correctly applied).

@aqd: My fans routinely kick up to 3500RPM. I haven't seen higher speeds, but I'm not quite positive that this is a ceiling yet.

 

So you have got my program and it's running fine?

Based on the noise it generates, the 100% @ 4300RPM is probably a lot more effective than 3500RPM, which is still too quiet.

 

I haven't set the fan to 100% yet, but I'm apparently going to have to. I broke 97C (!!!) in my CPU in casual use and was sustaining temperatures above 90 before I noticed and put a stop to it.According to your program, my fan maxes out at 3711RPM on its default settings.

Does anyone have any advice on what I should do, exactly? This has me very tempted to contact the manufacturer - I have performance to spare but generate way more heat than I can disperse; as I type this, I'm sitting at ~42C - but I'm not sure if I should approach XOTIC, Sager, or Clevo first. The only ways I can conceive of getting the temperature down to a reasonable level - assuming the fan operating at 100% does not miraculously give me 15C - would be to buy a cooling pad and completely remove the bottom of the case, and then it would just be a question of what would kill this machine faster - dust or heat.

 

Hey, I think that's not normal. When your CPU temps reach 90 C and way past it, check your Task Manager for apps which takes the largest chunk in performance. I have that experience before and found a culprit malware called 'dgen.exe'. After cleaning my laptop, the overheating issue was gone.

Try to update your drivers first (for Intel and Nvidia) and if none of these solves your problem, check the internal components of your laptop for defective heatsinks, etc that may cause anything weird on your laptop.

Sent from my W230ST using Tapatalk

 

It is not normal, but it is most definitely hardware. There is no malware on this machine - it is very new and plenty secure for what I do with it. The temperature jump is purely from the games I'm running (which, I must stress, are not particularly intensive in most cases and certainly not meeting the hardware's potential) - my idle temps are generally fine and even stress tests don't put out this much heat (though my GPU always stays cool, it seems to be part of the problem).

My drivers are always up to date. My only real choice is to check internal components, but I'm not sure exactly how much of this I can open before voiding my warranty and I don't know if I could recognize defective parts or poor workmanship otherwise; I've reapplied thermal paste before but that's the extent of my experience.

 

97C for casual use is much higher then it should be, you should only see the 90s when under heavy load. You can reapply thermal compound on the CPU if you're comfortable doing so and also check that the heat sink is properly seated at the same time. If it does need to go back to Sager to get checked out we'll be happy to help you set that up too.

You can also prop up the back of the computer a little bit to allow better air flow through the bottom, and always make sure you're using it on a flat surface, never a bed or carpet as that will block the vents.

 

I tried to get my friend's i7-4810mq to run at 4.0GHz today. It did work after I raised current limit to 100A and power limit to 120W. However the laptop (Clevo P17SM-A, bigger and workstation model) couldn't cool the CPU in time. Temperature raise from 40C to 95C within a few seconds in Intel XTU stress test, and got throttled.

You have a more powerful CPU yet smaller laptop model - I suspect even if you max the fan to 4300rpm and get the best thermal paste, without significant cooling enhancement it just couldn't work well.



Is it XOTIC? Maybe they have a solution to that.

 

It also depends on chip quality, voltages and the paste/pad job.

 

Hey Hutsady, thanks for the reply - I was hoping you'd see this. I treat my laptops more like desktops. It doesn't move a ton (I just need it portable for travel) and is always on a desk, propped up in the back - usually with beer bottle caps, which are surprisingly well suited for the task, but in this case I have it up a little higher to maximize the space available.

If it won't violate the warranty (could anyone inform me on precisely how far I can go before doing so?), I wouldn't mind checking the thermal paste and heatsink, but I think a more serious intervention is ultimately going to be necessary; if it has to go back to Sager, would you mind giving me a quick rundown of what that's going to look like?

 

So long as you don't damage it during a repaste you should be fine.

 

As Meaker mentioned you wont void the warranty as long as you dont damage anything. You can take the whole notebook apart if you want to.

If it has to go back to Sager under warranty they will cover 3day guaranteed shipped instead of just ground. Once its back to them they usually quote 5-9 business days which will depend on their work load at that time.

 

Alright. Thank you. I'll poke around inside in the next day or two and see what I come up with. I'll let you know the results.

 

Check that the heatpipes are functioning normally.

 

I opened it up earlier tonight but didn't go very far; the heatsink and pipes appeared to be properly seated, I saw no visible indication that they were not operating as intended. I did not go any further to examine the thermal paste because frankly I would be shocked if that were the source of the issue, particularly having paid for a thermal paste upgrade, and my understanding is that even poorly applied thermal paste should not account for the sorts of temperatures I am seeing. Does anyone have any further advice?

Hutsady, I guess I should go through the RMA process through XOTIC?

 

I would go ahead and open an RMA request under the "Contact" section on our site. We'll then pass it along to Sager to get your RMA set up.

 

Thanks again, and thanks to all of you for your help.

 

You managed to get any solution for your heat problem?

 

He returned the unit for repair.

 

Are you having similar issues?

 

I don't know. I have to perform some tests, I just ran some 3DMarks (which I don't recall the temperature) but I think I got my CPU max at 100º during some stress testing.

With real gaming I only tried Dota2 for 30 minutes and the middle part of the chassis/near the LCD got hot which seems to be normal from the reviewers. I also didn't check the CPU temp though.

I will try to test later today. Was just asking the solution, that if in case I had the heat problem and was an easy solution I could apply it myself.

Do know what should be the normal/safe CPU temperature for a gaming like DotA2 which I guess is taxing on the CPU.

 

100C is definitely higher then it should be. Run the test as you plan on later today and us a program like HWMonitor and let us know your readings.

 

So I ran Prime95 for like 10 minutes and my CPU temps hovered around 73º. Then I also started Unigen Valley and CPU temp went to 95ish max 99. GPU was around 66. I then turned Maximum Fan Fn+1 (it didnt turn auto) and CPU temps lowered to average 83C. After closing Prime and leaving Unigen I got 65ish on CPU.
After closing both tests I got 53~.
After 30 minutes idle ~40.

How are these results?

I will try later with gaming.

Another question. Highperformance or Balanced have any impact on this?

EDIT:
I have tried Dota2 for 35 minutes and had CPU 73 AVG (Max 80) and GPU 60 AVG (Max 62).

 

Those temps sound right where they should be. Nothing to worry about.

High performance will get you the most burn. But its very rare when any program will stress a CPU as much as Prime95 does.

 

Thanks for the info. Which temps should I start worrying about during Gaming/normal use?

 

Once you start seeing 90C on gaming/normal use then you'll want to look at alternate options. One of the easiest things to do is apply new thermal paste like IC Diamond. Also keep your vents and fans clean of dust and other debris so you keep proper air flow.

 

Also try propping the back of the machine up even just an inch.

 

Yeah I am been using Bottle Caps, but I think I'll get a stand with a fan.

 

The fan itself wont have much impact but it is perhaps a little more practical.

 

So after playing Dota2 for an hour I get some high CPU temps. Average 83 Max 95. GPU Average 62 GPU Max 66.

Should the fan air be blazing hot? I mean the chassis is hotter than the fan air, it's just a bit warm.

Also how far from wall should the fan be?

Also, the machine is new (1 week).

 

You would want a few inches clearance at least if possible. Temps seem about right for the system. You can re paste and undervolt if you want to help out more.

 

I also started to notice this noise YouTube. After 20 mins of dota2.
Maybe I sould get back to the reseller.
If you cant hear it it is similiar to this one:
CPU weird noise - YouTube

 

Your video is private. You will always get a slight electric hum from the power circuitry.

 

Should be public now.
The noise I am talking about is more of a clickity/buzzing than an hum (i.e not constant)
You can hear it better on the second video on the second half.