Acer Aspire VN7-791G(V17 nitro black edition) throttling

Hello,

I own Acer v17 nitro black edition from about a month and I was very happy.
It did cover my expectation for hardware power combined with very good design.

However the laptop seems to have serious issues with the cooling.
I don't play very resource consuming games and in the matter of fact I play an online game which is about 5-6 years old.
During the in-game expirience I began to notice lag which made the game unplayable after a research I found that the CPU is overheating and there was a throttling which decreased the clock rate of the processor to 700 MHz.

CoolBoost is ON.

Active cooling is ON.

I even took the laptop to an autorized service and everything seems to be OK with the hardware cooling.

The only thing that helped and made the laptop usable for gaming is that I decreased the maximum CPU to 85%.
CPU now run at 2.2 GHz clock rate at most. ( Standard clock rate of the CPU is 2.6 to max. with Turbo Boost 3,6 GHz)

I don't believe that such expensive laptop should have such issues with such load.

Does someone have any solution for the overheating ?
Maybe someone from the Acer staff could help ?

I'm very from the product right now.

Accepted answers

All comments

-Justin

Rictus,

I'm uncertain of why it would just start happening randomly. I'm not sure if you have tried a system restore to before the problem started happening to see if there might be some sort of software corruption interrupting the cooling process. I know that you said you took the system to a authorized service center, I assume that means you contacted Acer and sent the system to them for testing?

Rictus

Hello Justin,

I am glad to see that there is feedback from the Acer team.

This thermal issue doesn't start randomly. It is happening when I play games (CPU and Nvidia Video are in use).

The possibility of software issue is removed since I did make a system restore and even reinstall the operating system(Windows 8.1).

The laptop is bought in Bulgaria and the representative of Acer here is the service center that I took the laptop to - 'Most Computers'. They took the laptop for testing and they confirmed that there is throttling of the CPU. They even ordered a new cooling and motherboard. Even with these components replaced the issue remained, so this proves that it isn't hardware malfunctioning but it is in the design of the laptop. It just cannot handle the load, the cooling isn't good enough to cool the laptop and the CPU is reaching temperatures 90+°C.

Best Regards,
Acer Customer

-Justin

Rictus,

Well, I know it's not the answer that you probably want to hear, but I would contact the service center again. The cooling system shouldn't have any problems cooling the hardware that came installed in the system at time of manufacturing.

marcmascarell

Hi,

I recently bought this laptop (early this year) and I have been experiencing the same throttling/freezing problem commented several times on this and other forums:

And sometimes (looks like due the above problem):

http://community.acer.com/t5/V-and-VN-Series/Acer-Aspire-Nitro-V15-Black-Edition-poor-wireless-internet/m-p/333896#U333896

At first I thought it should be me (my connection, the game engine, my game config, ...) so I tried to fix/speed up those things, without success because as noted here that was not the source of the problem.

Also updated BIOS, OS, GPU, .... still the same. I found on forums people saying to limit CPU to 80% which I also did, and gave just littler freeze time but still freezing.

It's a very frustating issue for all of us and no one found an "elegant" solution.

I bought this laptop because of its amazing quality/specs/price and I really was so excited to try my first "top/flagship-class" laptop... that said, this is not a cheap laptop and I cant not imagine how a flagship can have this enourmous issue that as you can see it not only affects me and so far I havent seen an official post from acer regarding this issue.

Acer, we desperately need help on this issue. Its not working as it should.

Thanks in advance,

Marc

Hemingway60

Hi marc,

You're not alone. My 17" Nitro came with the 950m which is basically an underclocked 960m. Therefore, my laptop was not designated as a black edition one and was not provided with the Acer CoolBoost toggle. Now I'm confident this is a software feature (seriously, you're just speeding up the fan) but the support team told me my fans are plastic and not metal and so don't support increasing it's speed (LOL!)

I've already suggested in the IDEAS section that Acer provides us with a fan control utility and they say they're working on it but I'm not sure if there's any truth to that. Go to this link Fan Control Utility and Kudos it, perhaps if we get enough supporters Acer would actually implement it.

All the Acer Nitro owners share the same sentiment, the cooling is simply inadequate because the fans aren't ramping high enough to keep noise down. Honestly, we all game with headphones, noise is the least of our issues. And slowing are CPU to stop throttling isn't a solution. I bought a quadcore i7 for a reason and that nullfies that reason.

Regards,

Hemy

blackice55

I got the exact same problem and I need to put the cpu max utilisation at 80%. But let be honest, I am pretty sure they are totaly aware of the problem and they not gonna make any change because they cant. I hope I am wrong because its not the first time I see this from a laptop oem.

marcmascarell

Well, I hope thats not the case too and Acer is trying to solve the problem.

I would like to see Acer responding clearly to this issue, on what can we do without reducing our laptop performance or that they know about the problem and are trying to solve it.

At the moment I'm really enraged with what is going on... I don't want end in a bad way with Acer, but if they remain indifferent we will have to respond someway.

kochonnes

Hey guys,

I bought the V17 Nitro and also encountered heating problems but only while heavy gaming .

I found a way of dealing with this problem.

Under advanced energy settings change the values from 100% to 99% .This will disable turbo boost which causes the main issue with heating.

Acer forum.png

Next I installed this software to control the fan speed :NoteBook Fan Control. I created my own config file which I will upload for you : https://mega.nz/#!604FgRxB!pPIwGZraOCeOmwYu8hqBMzKnFHLjyxks6I6Eh65MJL8 . Keep in mind that you can actually harm your laptop with wrong settings so IM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED BY THIS PROGRAM. I TESTED IT AND IT HELPED WITH MY HEATING ISSUE. FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS PROGRAM FOLLOW THIS LINK: http://www.computerbase.de/forum/showthread.php?t=1070494 .

If you need help with setting up your own config file for your needs , try to search on forums but I will also try to help if possible.

Again : IM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED BY THIS PROGRAM. I TESTED IT AND IT HELPED WITH MY HEATING ISSUE.

If this helps solving your heating issues , please let me know.

marcmascarell

Hi kochonnes,

Thanks for your answer.

I already tried limiting CPU with no much success.

Now I also installed the Fan control utility you provided, but still dont get any difference... it's still freezing.

kochonnes

I dont know for me its only throtteling in energy saving mode but all other energy options its running at full speed

stockholmski

I too have the same problem with my VN7-591G with 860M graphics card.

Please Acer advice!!

yozone

Hey guys,

Let me share my experience with my Aspire VN-591G( V15nitro).

My spec :

GPU:GeForce GTX 860M

CPU:Intel Core i5 4210H CPU@ 2,90GHz

RAM:8GB

OS:Windows 8.1 Enterprice

External cooler: DeepCool DP-N8

To be honest don't know if my Turbo Boosting is on.

Running on Balance Power option.

I bought my laptop last year -(October 2014), I also bought my laptop from Bulgaria, but from different vendor. Till now I don't have any problems with overheating/lagging. I'm playing - WoW,LoL,Diablo,Shadow of Morder,NFS all of them are optimized by my GeForce application(except WoW I play it on Ultra)

Below you can find my temperature stats with running WoW on Ultra

It will be good if some other user with V15v share also his experience if he/she face same problems.For me everything is running ok.

Stats from AiDA64

AIDA64.JPG

stockholmski

Hi again, so I been trying to narrow down the problem. Just played CS:GO and at the same time had a look at the Disk Queue Length monitor. Seems that something happens from time to time so that the disk actually end up with too much in the queue. This could perhaps be the problem causing lag for me? Perhaps more people have the same diagnosis?

anyone have any idéas? Skärmklipp.GIF

Skärmklipp.GIF

kochonnes

Do you have a SSD or HDD or Hybrid Disk ? A hybrid or hdd mighr cause the laggss too

stockholmski

The disk in question is a HDD but I hardly think that can cause the lagging.

kochonnes

If the reading speed is too low it might cause laggs as the disk is no able to read data fast enough. Did you check your internet ?

stockholmski

The HDD should be able to handle it.

The problem is the same even if I am offline so it can't be the internet connection I think.

blackice55

the lag is cause by the thermal throttling and not the hdd. Once the level is loaded the game is only using the ram and not the hdd. This is why the only performance increase you see when you are using an ssd is the map or level loading speed increase for gaming. When an hdd is starting to have problem its more freeze than lag.

this image show what is happening in game when the cpu temp is at the maximum. At the bottom you can see: yes and no. The yes mean that one of the cpu core is getting trottle resulting in lag and big fps drop.

https://goo.gl/photos/E7Q6rNzzu3MvTVqu7

Yozone the temperature that you show are idle temperature and not ingame temperature at all. When you close the game your cpu is dropping is temperature very fast. If you want to be accurate you have to capture them ingame like I did on the picture. I can give you a link to a tutorial on how to do it if you want its very simple.

stockholmski

thank you for the input.

so the if it is throttling problems, any ideas on how to solve?

I tried to set down the processor percentage in the energy saving settings, so that the processor never hit "Turbo-mode" - but that didn't help either.