Nvidia 8600 overheating

[Eldd]

Hello, everyone.

I recently bought an Acer Aspire 7520; full specs of my laptop are as follows: AMD Turion 64 Dual Core TL 60 @ 2Ghz, 2Gb DDR2, on Nvidia 8600 GS with 512 RAM. Until a week or two ago, I could play almost all the latest games on the laptop, like Call of Duty 4, Devil May Cry 4, Battlefield 2 (which is a little older type of game) and laptop behaved perfectly, games were running almost all on medium to high details.. but I started getting lags, more and more, the back of my laptop case is getting hotter now, and it seems that my back vent for 8600 is getting smoking hot.

I monitored GPU temp with PC Wizard 2008, and it stays at 66 C degrees on standby, but in a game like Battlefield 2 it will spike up to 83-85 C or even more for CoD 4, at which point my game starts lagging for 20-30 seconds, then I can play normally for a few minutes, then lag again and so on.

I have no idea why this hasn't started happening only now (I have had the laptop since August 2008) because it used to run all right... I was considering of buying one Zalman NC2000 notebook cooler, but I am not sure if that would be of any help.

So any other ideas what I might do here?

 

[lostandwandering]

This is a known and admitted problem with some NVidia GPU's. I would contact Acer and see if you can get the card replaced or get them to fix it.

 

[Eldd]

I wonder if Acer will change my video card just for overheating or tell me to stop playing video-stressing games... and what if they change it and it is the same as this one... I think that for a while I will try to buy that Zalman notebook cooler and see if it works for me.

I just did a video card stress test with nTune, and GPU temp went to 85 C after 10 minutes... from 66 C.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Heat itself isn't necessarily bad even in that temperature range (my old mobile X700 reached mid 90s when fully OC'ed playing Oblivion without a problem), but due to the specific issue with nVidia chips its the stress of both high heat (higher than 85C IMO) but more importantly the heat cycle or cold-hot-cold that causes problems. And when the major issues appear, even nV says it's too late for a BIOS fix at that point the damage is done.

Don't bother with a Zalman cooler, all that does is push out the failure rate if anyting so that it would fail outside of your warranty. Contact Acer and have them address the issue. Telling you not to stress your laptop is ridiculous like telling someone not to watch videos on it because spinning up the optical drive increases the chance of failure. Or burning disks shortens the life of the burner.

Get it fixed now while you still have alot of leverage of the age of the laptop.

 

[theworminator]

Yeah, also backing getting it fixed by Acer now. If they are slow, you'll still be within warranty so they can't pull the "woops, out of warranty" card. They won't tell you to stop playing games, because it should be fully expected that people will play games on laptops, and that's within warranty. As long as you didn't mess with the insides, or overclocked or something, you're still covered, as far as I know.

 

[Eldd]

I am trying to contact Acer now and see how they'll address the issue, and I'll keep you posted. Thank you very much for your answers.

 

[Guest]

IMHO this has more to do with power-saving and thermal protection features on CPUs and
associated drivers than it does with the nVidia problem.

I have had this problem on a 2006 Intel Notebook, nVidia 7600, 2007 AMD nVidia 7600, and now a 2008 MBP nVidia 8600, the solution every single time has been the throttle the FPS somehow in game, or less safely, throttle the cpu down at the operating system.

What you are actually experiencing (IMHO) is the cpu getting hot and throttled, then cooling off below threshold, rinse, and repeat.