weird overheat issues with my m860tu

Hello everyone,
my Santech M860TU (an italian reseller of clevo products) got this big issue with overheating of Acpi and Gpu. i'll post all the possible info in search for help.
I bought the laptop without o.s. and Santech is a reliable and professional reseller.

Three months ago: never controlled gpu and acpi temps, but i was perfectly able to play Red Alert 3 without serious problems (just a bit of light slowdowns after several hours of play). most of the games ran maxed out and with optimal fps. i always use windows xp sp3 (a lightweight but complete modded version) and ubuntu intrepid ibex (which runs amazingly good). i was using stock drivers (176) at first and dox inf 178.

Two months ago: got Assassin's Creed from a friend. played it for half an hour, then the slowdown occurred. it was weird but i had a lot of things to do so i didn't care much. Compiz Fusion on my Ubuntu started to slowdown a bit under heavy load (i use a lot of transparency).

A month ago till now: i got the vundo trojan, so i formatted and reinstalled everything. Ubuntu still works very good and keeps 61° of gpu temp on normal everyday using. Never tried 3d games on linux so i don't really know how does it works under pressure. Now, the issues. I bought Race Driver Grid. Amazing game. Maxed out at top resolution it runs perfectly. After like 8-10 minutes of game the slowdown occurs. For 30 seconds or more, the system is very lagged, unresponsive, and running at 6-7fps. So i checked the temps with hdmonitor: acpi 91° - Geforce 95°. Too much, i think.
I tried a lot of games. Gta IV pushes the gpu to 95° (which i think is the slowdown alert limit of my GF9800m gt) in less than five minutes. Crysis in like 6 minutes. Left4dead runs very well with minor slowdowns (no 6-7 fps serious slowdown here). Football Manager 2009 slows a lot after an hour or so (and some of the new 3d fixtures view). Fallout3 and Mass Effect suffer of the same issue. Now i'm using the official nvidia 179 drivers for notebooks, but i tried all the possible drivers out there (dox modded, stock, nvidia beta drivers) and it happens no matter what. Even lightweight games like King's Bounty slowdown after some reaching high temps.

I updated the bios of my laptop and nothing else.
Reading around, these temps are not common, so i'm starting to think it could be a bad assembled heatsink and thermal paste.




I'll post all my specs later on. Now it's time to use my 1700 euro monster laptop to play some abandonware.


I hope someone could help me fix this or find the right way to investigate.

 

here come some of my specs. i'll add more if needed.

Inter Core 2 Duo P9500
2 Gb DDR3
7200 rpm hard drive 160gb

Geforce 9800M GT 512mb
Vbios: 62.92.34.00.18 (G92.bin)
Driver: Forceware 179.28 (Nvidia official notebook driver)

 

It does sound like there's a problem.. Do you hear the fans kicking in when you start overheating?

PS out of curiosity (nothing to do with the problem), if you look in Ubuntu nvidia panel does your card reach the max prformance levels? I could never get my kubuntu to use at max the 9800 gts o mine.

 

i don't know if it's the full speed but fans are working all the time while i play. i can't sense any difference between the fans under normal temp and the overheating time.


the nvidia control in ubuntu says it's in max performance mode on demand, actually underclocked all the time while everyday use. i didn't test it but i suppose it should work. maybe there is some profile config to do manually.

 

i think there must be a config file to change the powermizer profiles. honestly i never used heavy 3d things under ubuntu, and compiz is so light and powerfull that it should work nice on a geforce4.

 

The thing is, in my kubuntu install it says always max performance but if you look at the clocks it always stays underclocked. In normal usage stays in the lowest state 0 and if I wiggle around some windows or use glxgears to test it goes to state 1 (never reaching 2 or 3 - max). Also since i never goes to 3my 9800gts never goes above 40degrees in kubuntu so if you experience slowdow in your linux and 61degrees temps whilethe card in underclocked I'd look inside to see if the air vents are not blocked or something... You should not get 61degrees on a underclocked card (my guess is yours stays in the 1st power state with compiz like mine).

 

it sounds logic.

state 0 of performance. 58°.

i disassembled my lap yesterday and everything looks fine. nothing blocking the (only) big vent.

 

i was wondering why the acpi reaches such temps.

 

Hmm, my knowledge goes only as far as checking if air gets out from the vent (just put your hand on the back vent) and checking if there's thermal paste between the heat sink and the GPU (if you know that Santech allows you to disassemble that without voiding the warranty) in this cases so if both things seem to be ok I'd contact the reseller to explain what is going on.
I'm sure some of our more eperienced users could point you to some software to test everything but as you I use mainly Linux so I'm a bit rusty on the software part for the testing in windows .
Only help i can give now is to say that under nomal conditions the gpu should not go over 40 degrees and it games in my case (in vista) it goes at around 70 rarely 80.

 

glxgears for 3 minutes: the geforce reached only level 1 of performance. temp raised from the idle 58° to 67°.

 

Sounds like something is very wrong as you suspected, if air comes out, fans kick in and there's thermal paste on the GPU... I'd say a defective GPU? You could still try to put some thermal paste yourself if the warranty allows it and check the temps again maybe the one they used is not very good but in power state 1 on glxgears the temps should not go over 40 from my experience. I did now a fast test with ati tools in windows scanning for artefacts which I remembered is pretty intense on the GPU and my temps in 10 minutes slowly reached 68.

 

Have you found any solution to this problem?
I also have a laptop running Ubuntu 8.10 with Core 2 Duo P9500 - Dell E6400 with nvidia quattro NVS 160M. It gets overheated and stays on 800 MHz even when governor selected is Performance.
On Windows it works perfectly fine and Dell technicians looked inside the cooling system and told me that it's ok.
It must be LINUX drivers than.. either overheating CPU (or GPU? - they share 1 cooler) or just bad reading of ACPI temperatures or...?
Does anyone have any thoughts?