Official Sony VAIO F Series Owners lounge *PART 2*

Note: link below added

UNIFICATION POST SONY VAIO F11 SERIES – ISSUES, FIXES, TWEAKS, REVIEWS


I just ordered an F11 from sonystyle. This is the replacement for the FW series. Mine should come with i7-820 Nvidia gt330 1gb 1920x1080 4GB ram and base hard drive.

ship date is Jan 14th.

 

Part one of the F series owners lounge can be found here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=448894

The old thread was getting to be too large for the forum server to handle.

Thanks.

 

Hope the mods can clean up some of the later posts that are essentially personal attacks, from the prior thread.

 

I recently had "display driver has stopped responding and has succesfully recovered" on my F11 on two occasions. The screen went blank for a few seconds and came back. First on Mass Efect 2 under 1hr of gameplay. The second on a small Autocad 2010 file.
Is this a software or hardware issue?

Spec: i7-820QM - 8GB 1333mhz ram - Nvidia GT330M (not overclocked) - 1920x1080 Display - 320GB 7200rpm drive - Win 7 Pro 64-bit - Blu Ray Burner - US Black version

 

I would recommend updating your display drivers from www.nvidia.com for the 330m GT and it might/should solve your problem. They just got released yesterday.

Release Date:

2010.03.02

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_drivers.html

 

That sounds exactly like overheating causing GPU errors. Since both ME2 and cad rendering are GPU-intensive I wonder if the laptop is being vented properly? - Not sitting on cloth for instance, maybe have the back raised. Check fan settings, it should be set for power, or higher fan use, rather than automatic which tends to favour quieter operation at the expense of a hot-running system.

Sometimes a professional graphics system is best served by updating the paste used for the CPU and GPU heat sinks.

 

@nizmoz

ok great! thanks and I hope this works. Just in case, if I get this again with updated drivers is there a possibility of it being a hardware failure? Just asking because I am still within my 30day return period.

 

@melodymaster

It's resting on a cold glass table with no obstruction to the vents. I've also set it to power and is plugged in. The two occasions it's happpened i've only been working on one application at a time. I could try propping it up.

EDIT: Never done any thermal pasting before and I assume my tinkering will void the warranty?

 

Nobody else has had trouble with games or rendering on the Sony-supplied drivers so that's why I suggested looking at the way the system is being used. And THEN indeed, considering all the yield problems Nvidia has had, one can consider that the GT330 might be buggy..

(edit) the glass table is good. I don't see a problem with venting then. Yup, try updated drivers, but as I say..

 

This laptop is eminently hackable and easy to disassemble. I'm sure we're going to see Faqs on changing the paste, and cooling mods (which is done by third-party providers of the F11) overclocking, upgrading the GPU and CPU, (a GT240 can be installed, somewhat faster than the 330, and there's Fermi) and changing the display, at the very least.