Hey,
after my Vaio serving me for 4 years and starting to fail I got myself a budget Acer V3-772G, which looks awesome on the sheet, but straight out of the box it has been nothing but a nightmare. The following have been my issues with it and if someone can shed some light on them would be good as otherwise this thing is going up for sale.
1. Straight out of the box the HDD was misbehaving, hanging with 100% utilisation but 0MB/s writing speed this could go on for for a minute or so, the HDD response time in Task manager was 10-30 seconds; I guessed the HDD was faulty and replaced it with an SSD. Things got better, but to my surprise the extracted HDD was working fine on other computers and showed no signs of any issues. Never have had a SSD previously but still seems a bit slow at times, but that might be my imagination and overly high expectations. So what was the problem with the HDD?
2. Constant fan, even when being idle. Fan was on even when cool air was coming out, so why was it on? Rather often it went too hot for no reason at all, 0% CPU utilisation (reading PDF files) and CPU at 70C? I found a solution on a forum that down-clocking the CPU helps, and setting "Dynamic CPU Voltage Offset" and "Processor Cache Voltage Offset" to -100mV helped with the overheating issues and the fan stopped working pretty much when unnecessary, I was rather satisfied, until the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility went back to default settings which required setting them again, thus roughly once a week quick settings update.
I updated all the drivers from Acer support website and now even Intel Extreme doesn't help and it is running at 85C with fans on and hot air coming out; stress testing temperature charts going completely crazy; jumping from 50C to 100C in a second and then somewhere else as it pleases, that surely can't be possible!? So any ideas what might help?
3. It keeps forgetting WiFi passwords and usernames for my networks, all the time! Usually the first connection of the day (no shutting down meanwhile) or then sometimes randomly after sleeping. Help?
4. The reason for updating the drivers was that the GPU is being all funny, when I tried the Passmark Test, it ran the Intel 4600 as graphics processor and ignored the nVidia one, later started using nVidia for some tests. When as a test I installed a game, it still insisted on using the Intel 4600 instead of dedicated card. Updating didn't help. Am I missing something?
5. The screen sometimes stops responding, aka when coming from sleep or booting up. Happens roughly once a month and goes like this: wake/boot up, screen goes/stays black but is on, noting responds but the screen is getting brighter and brighter with eventually going all white, but not in a controlled manner more like the LCD filters fail to stop the light from coming through and just give up. Never seen this before! Also when it is working fine and going from a darker display to very bright one (aka dark background to white webpage) it takes a good 20 seconds for the lamps to adjust their brightness up, at the moment of switching white is rather grey and only overtime goes to white. No, I'm not talking about changing the brightness of the screen, but the transition from dark to light frame and following delay in brightness adjustment. The transition is very noticeable and rather annoying.
I don't operate in dusty environment and it is on a hard table to cooling access is fine and fans are reasonably clean! Meaning it is actually something causing excess heating rather than cooling failure. CPU utilisation running at 0-1% and nothing demanding running in the background. I really am stumped with what is causing the heating.
I don't play games on this, just annoying having high end stuff in it that doesn't seem to work but the constant fan noise is VERY annoying! I bought the high end machine so it would be silent.
I don't seem to be too lucky with my tech
On a side note, when I got it the chassis wasn't assembled properly, bottom and top halves weren't aligned correctly and are still a bit twisted as plastic deformed. The USB 3.0 ports are deformed still, the WiFi is intermittent, rather weak signal all the time. Screen has sometimes stopped responding by going all black then white, had to hard shut-down. Random BSOD sometimes etc. Space-bar key doesn't register all strokes and speakers are rubbish, though to be fair I had a Sony AW prior to this and it's a different league. Whole build is plastic and prone to scratches, build doesn't feel solid as solid, but is light for 17" . But again I had Sony AW with magnesium (?) chassis so I compare to that. I'm sure there are people who disagree with me and maybe I got the odd bad copy but this is what I think of this thing.
Hardware:
Acer V3-772G with FHD screen
Intel i7 4702MQ
8GB 1600Mhz RAM
Samsung 840 SSD 256GB
nVidia Geforce GTX 760M
Windows 8.1 Pro Updated to latest
Help?
Cheers,
Alex
after my Vaio serving me for 4 years and starting to fail I got myself a budget Acer V3-772G, which looks awesome on the sheet, but straight out of the box it has been nothing but a nightmare. The following have been my issues with it and if someone can shed some light on them would be good as otherwise this thing is going up for sale.
1. Straight out of the box the HDD was misbehaving, hanging with 100% utilisation but 0MB/s writing speed this could go on for for a minute or so, the HDD response time in Task manager was 10-30 seconds; I guessed the HDD was faulty and replaced it with an SSD. Things got better, but to my surprise the extracted HDD was working fine on other computers and showed no signs of any issues. Never have had a SSD previously but still seems a bit slow at times, but that might be my imagination and overly high expectations. So what was the problem with the HDD?
2. Constant fan, even when being idle. Fan was on even when cool air was coming out, so why was it on? Rather often it went too hot for no reason at all, 0% CPU utilisation (reading PDF files) and CPU at 70C? I found a solution on a forum that down-clocking the CPU helps, and setting "Dynamic CPU Voltage Offset" and "Processor Cache Voltage Offset" to -100mV helped with the overheating issues and the fan stopped working pretty much when unnecessary, I was rather satisfied, until the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility went back to default settings which required setting them again, thus roughly once a week quick settings update.
I updated all the drivers from Acer support website and now even Intel Extreme doesn't help and it is running at 85C with fans on and hot air coming out; stress testing temperature charts going completely crazy; jumping from 50C to 100C in a second and then somewhere else as it pleases, that surely can't be possible!? So any ideas what might help?
3. It keeps forgetting WiFi passwords and usernames for my networks, all the time! Usually the first connection of the day (no shutting down meanwhile) or then sometimes randomly after sleeping. Help?
4. The reason for updating the drivers was that the GPU is being all funny, when I tried the Passmark Test, it ran the Intel 4600 as graphics processor and ignored the nVidia one, later started using nVidia for some tests. When as a test I installed a game, it still insisted on using the Intel 4600 instead of dedicated card. Updating didn't help. Am I missing something?
5. The screen sometimes stops responding, aka when coming from sleep or booting up. Happens roughly once a month and goes like this: wake/boot up, screen goes/stays black but is on, noting responds but the screen is getting brighter and brighter with eventually going all white, but not in a controlled manner more like the LCD filters fail to stop the light from coming through and just give up. Never seen this before! Also when it is working fine and going from a darker display to very bright one (aka dark background to white webpage) it takes a good 20 seconds for the lamps to adjust their brightness up, at the moment of switching white is rather grey and only overtime goes to white. No, I'm not talking about changing the brightness of the screen, but the transition from dark to light frame and following delay in brightness adjustment. The transition is very noticeable and rather annoying.
I don't operate in dusty environment and it is on a hard table to cooling access is fine and fans are reasonably clean! Meaning it is actually something causing excess heating rather than cooling failure. CPU utilisation running at 0-1% and nothing demanding running in the background. I really am stumped with what is causing the heating.
I don't play games on this, just annoying having high end stuff in it that doesn't seem to work but the constant fan noise is VERY annoying! I bought the high end machine so it would be silent.
I don't seem to be too lucky with my tech
On a side note, when I got it the chassis wasn't assembled properly, bottom and top halves weren't aligned correctly and are still a bit twisted as plastic deformed. The USB 3.0 ports are deformed still, the WiFi is intermittent, rather weak signal all the time. Screen has sometimes stopped responding by going all black then white, had to hard shut-down. Random BSOD sometimes etc. Space-bar key doesn't register all strokes and speakers are rubbish, though to be fair I had a Sony AW prior to this and it's a different league. Whole build is plastic and prone to scratches, build doesn't feel solid as solid, but is light for 17"
. But again I had Sony AW with magnesium (?) chassis so I compare to that. I'm sure there are people who disagree with me and maybe I got the odd bad copy but this is what I think of this thing.Hardware:
Acer V3-772G with FHD screen
Intel i7 4702MQ
8GB 1600Mhz RAM
Samsung 840 SSD 256GB
nVidia Geforce GTX 760M
Windows 8.1 Pro Updated to latest
Help?
Cheers,
Alex
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