A31p: Shuts Down, No F11, various troubles

[Skwit]

Hi,

1) first of all the most important: My A31p just shuts down after a while playing Battlefield 1942. It takes approx. 1h until this happens. It starts again without problems but yesterday after 20 minutes it turned off again.

Sounds like a thermal issue to me, but: I never had this before! I played a whole night with the Thinkpad without problems. Could it be video driver related? I recently updated the driver. Would cleaning the thinkpad (esp. the fan) be an option? Is there a way of monitoring the temperature of the video chipset?

2) After removing the battery, reinserting and powering up again there is noc "Press F11 for rescue.."-Message any more, the BIOS has lost all settings and the date is set wrong. Could this be an issue of the CMOS Battery?

When I setup the BIOS again, reboot and wait approx. 20s Windows boots and the F11-Message ist back again.

3) Again Battlefield: If I use a texturequality other than "lowest" I get pink (!) textures for my guns. Everything else is OK. Any ideas? A hidden "pacifist"-mode?

4) Sometimes I have a problem with screen corruption like described in
http://zurich.csail.mit.edu/hypermail/t ... /0280.html

Are there any solutions yet?

Christian

[a31pguy]

are you overclocking the card?

is your fan spinning up? try disassembly and blow out the heatsink and fan with a blow gun.

try running hmonitor to see what the temperatures are when running.

you should not be exceeding 80 C on CPU temperature. If it hits 90 C the computer will shutdown.

[Skwit]

No, I am not overclocking, the fan is spinning.

I logged the temperature while playing, it was between 80 and 86C the whole time, 84 at the moment of the crash. I will try cleaning the heatsink.

Christian

[a31pguy]

I'm thinking your going to need a new motherboard.

[Skwit]

Could you be a little bit more specific?

Christian

[a31pguy]

Only got a few minutes before a meeting - so I'll make this quick. Well - the CPU is definitely over temperature. Could be the fan/heat sink - but the ACPI bios should detect it and start to throttle back the CPU. It's supposed to throttle just before 80 C. So I'm thinking one of the ACPI Thermal sensors (there are three in the A31p) isn't working. You could also have some other damage - the P4-M CPU is supposed to take core temperatures to 140 C (in the lab). But the motherboard and other componenets probably won't take those temperatures. I had a Sony PIII laptop die - not because of the CPU but rather some capacitors sitting just to the side of the CPU. Just some reasoning here. Try cleaning off the entire motherboard. If it doesn't work then I'd call IBM for a replacement just in case.

[Skwit]

The throttling-back started at 85C, I watched with a monitoring tool. The CPU speed switched from 2 to 1.2GHZ, cooled down to approx. 80C, heated up to 85 again, throttled down, and so on.

This was yesterday.

Some hours ago I opened the laptop and cleaned the heatpipe/fan with.. what's the english word for "pressured air in a can"? Well, I used this, got a lot of dirt out of the fan.

Afterwards the CPU reached under heavy load max. 77C and didn't of course throttle back.

I'll try again tonight with Battlefield, if it won't crash, I'm happy.

And I really don't think IBM will give me a new motherboard just for some vague reason. I have to have solid arguments. This is no offense, but I have a detailled description if I call.

Christian

[a31pguy]

You'd be surprised! But if the system isn't under warranty - then you'd have to pay for it.


Ok - sounds like cleaning the heatsink helped. Here's another piece of advice. Use artic silver compound between the heatsink and CPU. This will also help cool it by increasing the contact area and thermal transfer rate to the heatsink.

I bought a external USB CPU fan that blows the air awar from the CPU. I built some Ultrabay fans - but they aren't as usuable as I thought. When I play Half-life 2 the CPU will get very hot. The other thing that helps is removing the left side Ultrabay device - this increase the air flow. You'll notice it will stay cooler longer.

Also I upgrade to the newest embedded controller and bios, video driver, and ACPI drivers.