Official Sony VAIO F Series i5/i7 owners thread *Part 5*

Other than turning down the settings to 'down play' the actual performance of the laptop (keeping it cooler, meaning it needs less fan) there is no real solution.

The i7 gets exceptionally warm and needs the cooling for this purpose.
The i5 may be quieter though - have you seen one of those?

 

Unfortunately the model available in my country is with i7, I would choose i5 if I could, it's a pity, because other than the fan noise this laptop is perfect for my needs.

 

I will say this much: The fan isn't quiet. On normal usage however (music, documents, web) the fan on mine (i7 and 310m model F13) is not noticeably loud. When i start watching movies, running multiple applications or fire up the Adobe suite it gets a tad more loud.

At the end of the day, I honestly don't notice it that much - if it gets too loud, I just put music on or turn the movie up. There is hardly a time for me personally that I am working in dead quiet and will actually hear the fan.

By no means is it unbearably loud.

 

Yeah, it's a notebook cooler look at cooler master notepal u2

 

Just wanted to again draw the IMPORTANT distinction for the newbies between a Windows 7 clean install from a Microsoft DVD (actual disc or image) and a clean install from the F Series recovery discs or partition.

People using this laptop should follow the Joe Bleau's clean install guidelines instead of installing simply a fresh copy of Windows 7. I therefore always refer to it as "clean install".

It uses the already paid for copy on their system (recovery partition or recovery discs) and provides the necessary drivers needed for the system to function properly.

Just to note, you can even use this procedure if you want to upgrade to Professional or Ultimate.

 

and after installation you will also download tons of official addons and so on. I'd better install new Windows 7 SP1 and it will be faster and much more stable than an old one with addons and updates

 

For those of you with fan noise...are you in a dusty environment or an environment with a lot of cigarette smoke (or the like?)

I checked my heat sensors and fan speeds, and they were a touch (about 5C) higher than they used to be. I took out my vaccuum cleaner (with a plastic hose) and installed the fabric brush on the end. I then used it to clean the little bit of dust in the intakes on the bottom of the laptop. I did this while plugged in and running. I then moved the vaccum to the exhaust outlet and held it there for several seconds, allowing the dust to have a chance to be sucked out.

My new sensor and fan results mirror what I saw when new. I can no longer stress the GPU as I no longer have the progra in which to do that, but here are my results after several minutes of stressing all cores. Note that the F11 is sitting on a running U2 cooler on a wood table in a room that is 72F.





Here is the same test after being stopped for a few minutes. Notice the times and the temps, as well as the fan speed.



I can't ask for anything better!

Perhaps the noisy and hot machines are dusty or sit in an environment where smoke is gumming up the fans. Perhaps they are sitting on something soft where the intake grills are partially covered. Perhaps they are in a warm environment. Perhaps they are not being used with a good laptop cooler.

then again, perhaps the laptop is defective and should be replaced by, say, an Envy 17 or a Macbook. Everyone knows how icy cool those machines run, and they might even be less expensive!

 

I disagree and especially disagree with regard to the inexperienced user. The only MAJOR difference between doing a "clean install" and your version is that the service pack is potentially slipstreamed into the origin install.

You can achieve a very similar effect by downloading SP1 beforehand and apply it as soon as the "clean install" is completed. You likely will have a few more obsolete registry entries this way but the rest of the install should be very much the same. I agree that this will result in a more fragmented drive but that can be remedied with the built-in defrag without problems and very quickly.

As I said, it makes much more sense for newbies to stick to the original Sony installation environment and based on quite a few people's input performance is superior as well, likely because fewer generic drivers get installed by the initial install.

Just try to match your system against Willscary's published numbers and let's see.

 

Hold on dan smith! Do you get this high pitch noise only when you shut down / hibernate your laptop ? This does ring a bell! I had something similar on another laptop, it was a high pitched noise of 5 to 15 seconds, and it was caused by the hard drive. It also happened rarely during normal use when the notebook was not placed horizontally and large writes were in progress. Is this what you are experiencing? Which HDD you have?

I hope this helps!

 

Of course that technology improves quickly, but good products not necessarily follows it, and this is especially true for the consumer products line. I don’t think that 100% NTSC gamut will be an improvement from user experience point of view if the LCP panel remains on 6 bits/color channel. Also is the 240 Hz confirmed by Sony ? ( I saw mentioned only on forums and some other sites, so maybe I missed that ).

On a funny note, if it will be too expensive, you can save some money on the 3D glasses, with this French invention:
The French Proposal: How to view 3D movies without glasses!

 

What is your current Power Plan in Windows ?
What are your CPU/GPU temperatures when you are rendering ? And if the temperatures are high then what are your cores frequencies ?

 

There are many other processes running in the background as already mentioned by others.
Also mentioning just “firefox opened” is very vague. Is it only one tab with, let say, google home page ? Or 126 tabs opened, playing youtube videos and flash content ? You got the idea.
Also check if your preinstalled antivirus application is not running a scheduled scan in the background. Or the windows indexing service just considered that it’s time to index your files …

 

necul,

The other day when I tried to look at your Imageshack posts, I immediately got one of those fake antivirus popups that claim your computer is infected. Luckily, I know how to get rid of them quickly and permanently.

Today I tried to look at these newest pics and the same fake AV problems occurred, but this time they were a bit more persistent and I had to work to eliminate every trace of them on my computer.

A while back I asked not only about your number of processes, but what they are. I posted about viruses and also about the use of torrents such as Limewire. Perhaps you had better take my prior post seriously. Do you have a torrent running on your machine, such as Limewire? Is your computer infected with a virus?

I am unhappy with the results of my clicking on your links. I will not even attempt to open another of them. If you want us to see something, post the image, not a link, here on this site, in this thread, within your post.

EDIT: This post still rings true, but I need to apologize to you because my post about torrents and viruses was not originally directed at you, but at dappolo instead. I am sorry for the screw up. Please check your computer processes for something that should not be there.

 

It was confirmed at CES 2011 that it will ahve 240hz. Its using that in order to help with 3d to produce less crosstalk compared to the 120hz panels.

And the improvement in the screen quality is only one of many. So far SB is getting extremely high ratings for battery life, possibly up to 6 hours just on the standard battery. Beats the BS we have to put up with getting 2.5 on the standard one. Hell, even if i carry around 2 of these batteries my F will still be less efficient and SLOWER than even the base SB processor. The webcam is also greatly improved among other things...

 

On James D’s request, I run my test on 6 CPUs too ( 3 cores with HyperThreading on ).
Initially I skipped this case because the Turbo Boost multipliers for 3 and for 4 cores are the same. But considering that my throttling is due to power and/or current constraints, and in this case one core is completely off, this should make a difference.

I updated my previous post too, with the new data:

And WOW!!! I had to take a screenshot to show this to you guys! This is what I’m talking about. Check the multipliers, frequencies and temperatures!





Unfortunately even in this 6 CPUs configuration the one core only and two cores only 100% load is throttling . The max achieved multipliers shown by i7 Turbo were:
1 core 100% load : 20.285x / 22x
2 cores 100% load : 16.193x / 19x

UPDATED 02-02-2011: Removed note to Sony. See my final test to know why.

 

Please show me where you saw that 6 hours? It is hardly to believe.

 

Thank you ReD2847 ! I read about BFI. I believe that the technology can reduce crosstalk in 3D, and also reduce afterglow. But witnessing lately how the products quality is falling, and how the technology is put in place, I have to see it before I believe these high ratings and praised reviews.

Ahhh, the camera in F1x … not much to say … I bought an external Logitech HD webcam and enjoying its RightLight technology .

 

@ZPerf: Yeah. Perhaps you really should change Windows before yell on Sony Check that: How To: Improve Low SSD Performance in Intel Series 5 Chipset Environments | StorageReview.com . You shouldn't look at SSD's performance but there are couple tweaks for processor in Windows registry

 

ZPerf,

From an article in CPUWorld:

"The Intel Core i7-740QM CPU is clocked at 1.73 GHz, or 133 MHz faster than slower i7-720QM model. The processor has two features that may temporarily modify clock frequency. Turbo Boost feature can increase the frequency when the processor is running within its thermal limits, and when maximum performance is required. How big is the boost depends on the number of active cores. The frequency is boosted by 133 MHz when 3 or all 4 cores are active, up to 800 MHz when two cores are active, and up to 1.2 GHz when only one core is active. Please note that these are maximum allowed frequency increases. The frequency boost may be lower if the processor is operating close to its Thermal Design Power (TDP), or close to its maximum temperature. Another feature that may temporary change CPU frequency is Enhanced SpeepStep technology. The primary goal of this feature is to preserve battery power at the expense of performance, and the SpeedStep technology achieves this by reducing core frequency and core voltage. CPU's Thermal Design Power (TDP) Power in this mode is lowered to 35 Watt. TDP of the i7-740QM under normal operating conditions is 45 Watt."

Read it all here: Intel Core i7-740QM processor - BY80607005259AA (BX80607I7740QM)

Speedstep is EIST (Enhanced Intel Speedstep technology). Uncheck both EIST and C1E in i7 Turbo, then rerun. See if this helps. If it doesn't, then, as the article says, it may that another program is always running in the background and is using enough that your processor is approaching its TDP of 45 watts. Check your processes while running the stress test and see if anything else pops up as using resources.

I hope this helps.

 

While running the OS on 6 CPUs ( 3 cores with HyperThreading on ) I observed that the temperatures in Idle are very low! And as a result the fan is very silent. lol , I think nobody mentioned ‘very silent’ before for the F1x’s fan.



Of course less cores consumes less, so this also means longer battery life. And we could joke that turning the whole notebook off will consume even less . But if the run time on battery is critical and low performance is acceptable, than running the OS on reduced number of CPUs (cores) will offer a longer run time than any tuning/hacking done to the Power Plan settings in the registry. Not to mention that turning CPUs on/off is a documented, safe and few click solution. So if you are on a plane for example and you want to read some documents or watch a movie (use GPU for decoding!) this solution might help to keep your notebook running a longer time! Or if you are plugged in, you don’t need performance and you are tired of loud fan then you can give a try to this too. It might help.

Is there anyone, who would like to test this ? I don’t care much about the battery life, because I’m always near to a power plug, and I don’t have time to test this either.

 

Now I am really getting put off my the constant appreciation for the new model, stop putting down the current F series.

Zperf, Basically whenever windows starts their is an immediate high pitched noise all the time, sometimes it never stops. But when I shut my laptop of it comes out with some weird loud noise, also all the time. To me these flaws really turn me of the laptop. I honestly dont know what to do, I an still waiting for feedback regarding the grey line from sony.

On another note I would not pay over £2000 for the new laptop, plus I hate 3D.

 

Explain to me how you did what you did and I'd love to try it. Can it be worked into a power plan perhaps? That would be even better.

Anyway, I'm willing to see what happens.

 

Has this been this way since new?

 

Sounds like great advice to me. Now if people would use it.

 

It sure has been that the non issue of fan noise has seen a resurgeance. Some are valid issues, but most need to accept that a high powered laptop needs high powered cooling. My i7-720GM 310M combo has ZERO fan issues.

 

Hi tomcat, this situation has started over the last few weeks, the high pitched noise is always there when windows starts and there when windows shuts down. I am lost and am really stressed at the moment.

 

win+R - type msconfig - boot - number of processors

 

Warranty will fix you up then as this problem just showed up , and it is not normal
It will need to be repaired professionally ,so send it in for repairs and report back sonys findings

 

Thanks tomcat, I got a few problems which need fixing, whether Sony will actually fix them under the warranty I am not sure. I am really disappointed with this though. I will probably have to send my laptop in May due to me needing the laptop for university work.

 

hey I appreciate your help. I'm so not good at this computer language anymore (now with windows 7), but what is a power plan in windows ? and how can I see the CPU temperatures ? (and what's a GPU)
and how can I see the cores frequencies ? :-?? 4
thanks

 

A power plan in Win7 is a group of settings to make your machine run most efficiently under different circumstances. Click on your battery icon and then More Power Options to see all the plans available. You can change brightness settings, HDD on/off settings during idle, sleep/hibernate settings, and CPU settings for different profiles... or make your own.

You can see CPU temps in several programs and gadgets. I prefer this gadget.
OrbLog Blog Archive Intel Core Series – Sidebar Gadget

A GPU is Graphics Processin Unit. It's basically a CPU dedicated to processing graphics so that your actualy CPU doesn't have to take on that workload as well. You can see the GPU clocks and temps with this gadget.
OrbLog Blog Archive GPU Observer – Sidebar Gadget

There are other, more comprehensive free programs for delving into both CPU and GPU performance. I'm not really interested in doing that, so I can't refer any to you. I'm sure there are quite a few others here who can.

 

Interesting! I am trying to look thru my older posts, but the search tells me there are no older posts. I can look up the posts of others, but mine seem to be gone!

I was even able to look up omaroo and Joe, but I can't see my own!

Mod help?

 

Does this link work for you? I know that there's a problem with search right now but i don't know if this is related to your problem.
Anyway, this is a link to your posts.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/search.php?searchid=5589742

 

Yes, this link works! Thank you!

 

hey!
so I have my power plan on balanced mode (because I've kept my laptop plugged in like all the time because I use it as a desktop replacement) with the battery charged to a maximum of 50%

these are the readings from the gadgets you gave me:
http://postimage.org/image/lu38x6v8/

later edit: and this is the screen shot with what is going on during rendering:

http://postimage.org/image/34yvxssdg/

 

Ditto. Best thing about USB external camera is I don't have to move the laptop to show the grandparents wat the little one is doing I just move the webcam!

 

James D, Willscary, thanks! I really appreciate your help and feedback!

Considering that you guys are insisting on the EIST, C1E and other tweaks which improves CPU responsiveness/… when idle or under low load, I would like to expose the reason behind my tests and on what these tests are focused on. I will do this by an example on two F1x notebooks, one with the i7-740QM CPU and the other with i7-840QM CPU.
Both CPUs have the same 45W TDP. With the difference of the base frequencies and turbo boost multipliers as follows:
i7-740QM : 1.73 GHz, turbo boost multipliers of 1x/1x/6x/9x for 4/3/2/1 cores and 6 MB L3 cache,
i7-840QM : 1.87 GHz, turbo boost multipliers of 2x/2x/8x/10x for 4/3/2/1 cores and 8 MB L3 cache.

I marked with bold the important parts for my reasoning. If the same system is configured with the i7-840QM CPU and there is a full load on all 4 cores, then this CPU will happily run at least at 1.87 GHz (if not even better on 2.0 GHz or 2.13 GHz due to the up to 2x turbo boost). My CPU, the i7-740QM runs on the same system, has the same TDP and can’t reach the 1.87 GHz (1.73 GHz + 1x turbo boost). (Add to this that it also has 2 MB less L3 cache, so consumes and dissipates less).

My tests focus on showing this problem. For that, I push all cores to 100% load, so disabling EIST, or disabling C1E, or preventing the CPU from idling, or disabling the Intel processor driver (Intelppm.sys) to disable all the CPU power management entirely - will not help.
ACPI C1E power state is entered when a core is idle and the OS calls the HALT instruction on that core.
Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST) is a software driven stepping. The OS, based on the core loads and Power Plan settings, will request different ACPI P1 .. Pn performance statese.
But my CPU, with 100% load, is already running in its highest processor power state ( ACPI C0 power state ), and it’s highest-performance state ( ACPI P0 performance state ). If other processes are running and using the CPU (even bloatware), for my tests it doesn’t matter. The more the merrier ! That’s what I wanted in the first place, to max out at 100% the CPU load.
So all what I’m expecting in this condition, that the turbo boost will kick in. Based on my reasoning and the fact that the temperatures are well kept under control, this should be possible, but it is not happening . And that’s what I would like to know why!

I hope that this clears up the things a little bit.

James D, Willscary and others, could you, please, run the same test I did ( see image from my previous post). Use i7-Turbo 6.95, Real Temp 3.65, and some gadget which shows the CPU usage or TaskManager with the Performance tab open, Prime95. In Prime95 run the “Options->Torture Test…” on all the 8 cores (“Number of torture test threads to run” = 8 ). Please post or PM me your screenshot with the result. Thank you !

 

dan smith, could you record that noise and put up somewhere the audio file (or even a video if it helps to locate it) ? Did you identified from which part of the notebook the noise is coming from?

UPDATE: Sorry, I forgot to refresh the browser’s page, so I just saw that there are many other posts in the meantime! Tomcat57 is right, you should send the notebook for repair.

 

anseio, did you succeed to run the OS on 1 CPU for example ?

I also did a quick test, just for fun , to see if with 1 CPU ( 1 core with HT off ) I can play a Blu-Ray movie with Corel WinDVD in full screen directly from the disc on battery. Is this too extreme ?
The CPU usage maxed out, the VPU (Video Processing Unit on the graphics card) usage was around 45%. The movie played almost well. The audio has suffered a little bit and from time to time there was a little jump in the video (every 25..30 seconds). I dare to say, that this is the case when that extra CPU multiplier just might be enough, so the i7-8x0QM CPU, which I understood is limited to 9x multiplier on battery, might just play the movie fine (my i7-740QM is limited to 7x multiplier on battery).

There is one more step when running ‘msconfig’ ( System Configuration Utility ):
On the “Boot” tab you need to choose the “Advanced options…”, then check the “Number of processors” and choose the CPU count from the list.
To switch back, you have to just uncheck the “Number of processors”. But probable you already found that.

I don’t think that this could be done using the Power Plan setting. Maybe, by tuning the power parameters in the registry, something close can be achieved, but I’m not sure that it will shut the rest of the cores completely down.

 

Not to mention, that the USB cable in my case is long enough to put the camera a little bit away from the notebook, and being hooked up to the TV through HDMI, I put SkyPE in full screen there, and let the grandparents have fun with the kid, while I can work on the notebook .

 

necul, nice background image !

The OrbLog Intel Core Series Sidebar Gadget by default is not showing the temperatures. To enable that, right-click on the gadget, choose Options. You should see the options page like in the image:
http://blog.orbmu2k.de/wp-content/p...arGadget_91EE/IntelCoreSeriesGadgetScreen.jpg
Press Install Driver. Accept the User Account Control message popped up. Hit OK. Now you should see the core temperatures on the gadget instead of “Core #N”.

Download i7-Turbo ( direct link). You need just to extract it in a folder an run it. This will show you the core multipliers. For the screenshot will be enough.

Run your rendering again and when experiencing your problem take a new screenshot with all these applications visible.

 

ZPerf,

I use Everest to stress and i7 Turbo to show clocks.

Here are the results of my normal stress tests, which stress the entire machine, including the FPU, memory and cache:



I then continued the test with all stresses turned off other than the CPU stress test:



These are all 4 cores and hyperthreading active. I have the 820QM.

You can see the difference. Not only is there a difference in multipliers, but the temps all went down when I stopped stressing everything. Are you stressing all of your computer, or just the CPU? Perhaps that makes a difference? Perhaps this would lessen the wattage that your processor is drawing?

I hope this helps!

 

ZPerf,

In this post, you are reaching your turbo max with 3 cores running, but you can't get there with all 4...

I noticed in your snippit that the bottom widget shows your voltage at 41.49 watts. Perhaps you are reaching your TDP before all 4 cores can get to 14x clock speeds. You are quite close with 3 cores. Maybe the TDP is your limiting factor.

By the way, although the 820QM (my processor) is rated at up to 100C temps, if you read the white papers, that is only for short term peaks. The sustained temp rating for my processor is only 79C, so people who are running these stress tests ang going over 80C for several minutes should be worried a bit!

 

Zperf, the noise comes from the fan as well as from the speaker grills from what I can tell. I will be aiming to send it of in the future. But the whistling sound seems the major flaw in my opinion, and I know many people have got the whistling noise like me, whether as bad, I am not sure.

EDIT- Whenever I turn of the display, and then turn it oon by moving my mouse the high pitched noise starts, anyone get this problem as well. I am really annoyned with Sony at the moment.

 

Hi i have the VAIO f12M0EB but im having an issue.

For a whole the bluetooth seems to have disappeared, and i mean, as if the laptop doesnt have it. Almost anyways.

I can see the Bluetooth tray application running in task manager however none of the detections pick anything up anymore. Also None of the links to any of the bluetooth software actually work now.

Typing bluetooth into the start menu now only has one option (where there used to be several) "Bluetooth". Clicking on it does absolutely nothing.

Going to the vaio smart network and clicking on bluetooth device settings in it does nothing. It also lists nothing next to "device name" or "address"

Its really bugging me as ive recovered the drivers time and time again to no avail. Its bugging me what this could be caused by

And yes BT is turned on etc lol.

EDIT: After some searching, i decided to try the generic broadcom driver. It recognised the device but failed half way through saying the windows bluetooth stack could not be started. How do i get it to start?

 

try to do the same without plugging AC adapter. If it changes something then it is jack problem

 

same problem even with AC adpater plugged in. On another point just dropped my phone on my laptop, think might have damaged the laptop. I honestly want to give this back now.

 

I actually thought that problem may disappear with AC adapter off. If you can send it back - do it

 

I think I'm going to send my Vaio in, it could use some other love but I've noticed lately that the fans are cranking up a lot higher than they ever did before to keep the temps normal. Computer's clean, too XD (I think the fan might be clogged) >>

 

Wait...so does the noise stop if the display is turned off? Are you positive the source of the noise is the fan? It might be the LCD inverter making the noise.

Just my 2 cents.