P-7811 FX (Gateway)

[MarineOne]

Well this is something I don't recommend for the faint of heart or those not mechanically inclined ....

If it were me, I would take it apart and do a remove/replace on the themal paste for the video card heatsink. Clean it up with some acetone and a very tightly woven rag (microfiber or better) and go with Arctic Silver 5 for the thermal compound.

Now this is what I don't recommend to everyone. Once you have it apart, I would also polish up the contact areas with some very very *very* fine grit sand paper. You need some very specific stuff to do this though.


Kris

[sushiboy]

Heat is a big problem with a lot of laptops. They just dont have adequate ventilation. Really your best thing do to would be to take it apart and put a high quality thermal grease under all the heatsinks and maybe engineer the ventilation channels a little bit better if possible. Ive done those things quite a few times.

If your not in to tearing apart your laptop (not recommended unless you have an idea of what you are doing - most of them are like jigsaw puzzles), then you can get one of those laptop coolers that attach to the bottom of your laptop and help pull the heat away. Most of them have like 2-5 decent size fans in them. I have a friend that was having overheating issues with his lappy but no longer is a problem since he put the cooler on. I am pretty sure newegg.com has them, but I am not positive.

[sushiboy]

yea here we go

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...0cooling%20pad

most of them are cheap and might be worth a shot

[Kenyth]

Well, I finally dug into this thing and started reading up on it in depth. There are two main problems it seems.

The cable connector that leads to the monitor is a weak point. It loses a good connection due to minor flexing of the case and cable. Reseating the connector helps, but many have found the cable simply goes bad after doing this a number of times. A new cable does fix the issue, and is a cheap enough part.

The other problem is GPU overheating. This problem doesn't appear to be Gateway's fault, but rather Nvidia's. Some driver hackers have tweaked the flash image and moved the GPU voltage down from it's default of 1.12 Volts down to 0.9-1.0 volts. The improvements have been remarkable on most systems. A 30% reduction in temperature and 20% increase in performance at stock fequencies is not uncommon. The process is a bit difficult and advanced, not to mention risking the BIOS of both the PC and the GPU. I'm trying to think if I should do this or not.

[Mizicke5273]

Before you flash the BIOS, I'd check out Rivatuner or other tweaking software as you should be able to change the GPU fan speed. This should probably help with the heat issue, as most laptops are set to keep the fan at the lowest minimum speeds, longer than it should, to reduce noise. By uping the speed of the fan, you could alleviate some of the heat build up. Worth a shot first, I'd say.

[Kenyth]

Before you flash the BIOS, I'd check out Rivatuner or other tweaking software as you should be able to change the GPU fan speed. This should probably help with the heat issue, as most laptops are set to keep the fan at the lowest minimum speeds, longer than it should, to reduce noise. By uping the speed of the fan, you could alleviate some of the heat build up. Worth a shot first, I'd say.

I have the Nvidia tuning program. It's called Ntune. I'll double check, but as soon as you start playing a 3D game the fan starts running high and stays there. On another note, they (Nvidia) say that 80C is a perfectly acceptable operating temp for this card. It sounds high to me. The tweak brings the card temps down to the 50-60C range.

[Mizicke5273]

80C is average for today's GPUs, I have an 8800 that hovers around ~70C in a heavily cooled case.

As for the fan setting, it's probably already set for to the highest speed then and that is good that it starts right away.

Really the only other thing to try, other than an external cooler, is to apply some Arctic Silver to the CPU and GPU as MarineOne mentioned.