Acer TimelineX 3830/4830/5830 T/G

[quidamphx]

I see you are having trouble connecting this back together. I own the 3830TG so I cannot tell you what the difference is with the 4830TG, but if they are built anything similar there will be a ribbon cable for the keyboard and a ribbon cable for the "I/O board".

Gadgets and Hacks: Acer 3830TG-6431 Teardown

This link is a teardown of a 3830TG, do a search of the page for "I/O board" and you should see some images giving a relatively good idea of the type of cable you are probably looking for.

Make sure it is fully plugged in an firmly secured otherwise it might not work at all.

I hope this information will help you.

Also please provide the link of the Chinese teardown, it might allow us to further assist you.

I used the above link to repaste my 3830TG, and although it might be slightly different than yours, one thing to take note of is that by disconnecting the trackpad cable first and removing that section, you have better access to detach the remaining ribbon cables. (And reattach them!)

This allows you to make sure that you slide out the brown locking part and have the cable lined up perfectly. When I first put mine back together my F keys didn't work, all I had to do was remove and reattach the ribbon cable as it wasn't lined up perfectly.

[duykhang]

The I3 shuts the laptop down when it reaches 85C

[unclewebb]

ThrottleStop can not over ride the built in Intel throttling temperature. As mentioned, the Core i3 processors are set to start throttling at only 85C. There is no software or bios adjustment that is going to be able to change that hardware limitation.

[smrtphusr]

Good evening everyone,

Been lurking around for a bit and thinking of purchasing 3830tg.

Now ive gone to staples store and found i3 2130m version of the laptop. The BIG question is is throttling still going to happen on i3 as well or does this issue only exist on i5 versions?

If I do game on this laptop it will be older/less demanding games such as Warcraft 3 TFT, League of Legends etc...

Thanks in advance!

[Bronsky]

Unless you're getting it at a great price, I would wait for the M5 14" ultrabook.

[smrtphusr]

Unless you're getting it at a great price, I would wait for the M5 14" ultrabook.

I can get it for $430 tax in. (13% canadian tax )

[Bronsky]

I can get it for $430 tax in. (13% canadian tax )

Hard to say no to that price. Taxes are the price we pay for civilized society.

[quidamphx]

The thermal throttling limit imposed by Intel must be higher than 85C, and I know that can't be overridden. However, in the unlocked BIOS for the 3830TG the setting to start underclocking to cool down the CPU is set for 85C by default. My CPU suffered no throttling/underclocking when this was increased to 90C (which is also the max setting available). The system shutdown temperature is set at 100C by default, and this cannot be changed.

According to my log file my i3 was consistantly running at full speed while at 86C, something that did not happen before the BIOS change. I even did a burn-in test to make sure my CPU was under heavy load.

And to the above poster, throttling definitely occurs on the i3. But for $430 tax in it's worth a bit of effort to configure at that price. If you're playing older games then you won't even have to worry, Warcraft III isn't really a taxing game on modern hardware.

If 85C is when the i3s start to throttle no matter what setting is chosen, then the sensors must be off and I'm not really running at 86C. The BIOS reads the same as ThrottleStop does, but maybe it was causing premature throttling of my i3 (thinking it was at 85C when it wasn't) and that's why setting it to 90C helped.

Not sure if that makes sense, but I'm just going off what was logged.

[CoLDxFiRE]

Installed the i5-2540M today and boy does it make a hell of a lot of a difference.. Just seeing the clock speed go up to over 3Ghz made me so happy. However, what I really didn't expect is to see the temps drop drastically after replacing the CPU and applying Arctic Silver 5 instead of the stock junk installed by Acer.

I still can't believe what I'm seeing; the temps dropped to around 25-30c when the CPU is idle. Then, I played Skyrim for 2 hours with the laptop sitting on a cooling pad without turning on the cooler's fan and running at a x26 multiplier and the CPU temps only reached a maximum of 77c whereas with the i3 the temps went up to 85c easily on a x19 multiplier.

Still, it wasn't completely sunshine and rainbows as it seems that after reapplying the thermal paste, the pressure changed and now the GPU reaches 95C under load whereas before it only got up to 80c but then again I might be pushing it a bit too far by having it overclocked to 800/1000.

Overall, the upgrade was well worth it and it was $99 well spent for the 2540M. I'm in love with this CPU. Now I can run multiple VMs like there's no tomorrow. I'll post pictures later.

[codyrocco]

has anyone managed to boot from a second hard disk (inserted in the optical disk bay, via adapter) ?