iBoolGuy

May be a boring reply BUT, I'm paranoid when it comes to my tech... honestly even anyone-I-know's tech. I think I was born paranoid careful when it comes to tech, like subconsciously careful.

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

You still have warranty? May wanna try that and contact razr anyways. But their support is crap so don't expect too much from it. Either way remove the battery asap and dispose of it safely immediately. If not possible put it in an airtight container that is not flammable. Razers laptops quality is too put it simply just bad. Sure they are nice in the first few month but a lot start breaking around the year mark and almost none live beyond 3 years. They cheap out on everything a lot to get the maximum profit and it shows. In the future just avoid them. You can put in a new battery from a third party that has good reviews and most likely you'll have it last longer than their standard one. Or go batteryless should be possible on it.

 

Your temps are hot so clean it out from dust thoroughly as every blade gets incredibly thermally crippled by just a little dust.

You made me worried.... I did not consider the dangers at all tbh, I was more worried about the laptop than safety!
 

I have two more days at work before I can remove the battery, guess I'm throwing the damn thing..

Hello, I think it's obvious at this stage that my battery needs a replacement. But I wanted to discuss it here to hear your experiences and see if I can avoid damaging the battery like this again.

So I've had my Blade 15 Advanced Model 2018 for 2 years now, it's been an absolute beast, gaming and work, home theater laptop, renderer, mf been put to work.
Mid its lifecycle, it began to run naturally hot, I remember it for the first year running the CPU and GPU at temps in the low 40's Celsius at idle. And those temps has risen up gradually over time. Nowadays it runs high 60's-mid 70's. GPU is always locked around 74C. Those are idling temps or with minimal CPU load, like chrome and Visual Studio Code.

That's heat, the major issue is the inflated battery though, the battery is so inflated that, 1) the touchpad doesn't click, and has horrible sensitivity, 2) the chassis itself is bent upwards and downwards, so the bottom of the laptop is bent out like its pregnant with a fat battery, and the lower part of the keyboard too, is the same way. 3) The laptop lid doesn't close comfortably, like, the magnets do not hold it from both right and left ends because of the pregnant battery.

Discussion: yes, obviously I'm replacing the battery, but is the sucker going to die out again soon? Is there anything specific I can do to prevent future battery from doing this? Should I not even bother and just take out this battery and work the laptop batteryless? Does the heat cause the battery to inflate? or vise-versa? the inflated battery causes heat?
I'm down making this a double topic, the battery and the heat issue, what can I do about the heat? Undervolting for example, I do not mind at all losing half my current performance for reducing the heat (and noise).

wait, so is it the screen itself, like the display flickering? or is there an external LED somehow on the side of the bezels of the display? I'm confused... 
if it's the former, you may just have a faulty screen that's having a rough time. if it's an external LED, then really you don't have a problem..

also, check the magnets on the left and right sides of the palm rests of the laptop, left and right of the trackpad. there should be magnets in the chassis of the laptop, get any magnet, and play around with it on either side of the rest pads, the display should completely turn off, *IF* you have the settings in windows to turn the display of when you close the lid of the laptop..

things you can check, seeing if you have some kind of bottleneck. Use any software (or the task manager) to check the utilization of your GPU, and the CPU.
The GPU *should* be at %100. I'm not really sure how demanding your game is when it comes to CPU, and I'm not familiar with the 9300H to be specific. But in any case, for starters, if the GPU isn't at %100, you have some sort of bottleneck that's causing it.

Second thought, how is the 50-70 fps? is it buttery smooth? or is it stuttery? choppy? do you feel some sort of input lag, or does it play completely normally?

If it's smooth, then your solution *should* be simpler. 
If it's stuttery and choppy, then that's a different story.

Let's say it's smooth. The more rational assumption. There's probably a software bottlenecking your system, either the CPU or the GPU is being bottlenecked. Or, a certain specific in-game may be set to a high setting that just sh*ts on the CPU/GPU and causes performance to drop.
Software like GeForce, sometimes, I'm not really experienced with it so I don't fully know all the ins and outs and how it works, but, it could be controlling the performance of the laptop, or the settings of the game, if it had created an optimization profile for the game, it may be a cause. Or, limiting the performance by enabling some kind of, oh, I don't know, "battery mode", that one gave me a small headache once. From personal experience, and what I've done and what I would do, completely uninstall GeForce Experience, it's completely unnecessary for basic tasks, and doesn't affect performance at all (removing it wouldn't, is what I mean). Side note story, I once bought a laptop for a friend, it was Acer Helios 300, had a 1060 6GB in it. First game we tried on it, Far Cry 3, it ran on like 30-40 fps, he was so mad sad and angry, we went into GeForce and started looking around, and found that it had applied some weird V-Sync setting, we removed that and had around 100 fps at ultra settings.
So yeah wouldn't hurt to completely remove it, test, and decide from there. Or just check in it for BS.

Umm.. lastly, if the game isn't smooth or choppy, the problem may be more severe, like thermal throttling, or as one suggested memory could be very limited, or the GPU memory may be overflown, I dunno... some random hardware sh*t... who knows..

And uh... install some GPU and CPU benchmarks, and test both separately, and check if they're up to spec. Like 3Dfiremark everybody's always talking about, or the classic unigine heaven, or any random GPU benchmark you see have been tested on your specific model, and retest that. And same for CPU.

Lastly for the last time I swear, doesn't hurt to check updates for BIOS, triple check all bios settings, make sure there isn't some suspicious setting goofing around!

good luck, keep us posted! :)

On 1/24/2020 at 5:06 PM, Zando Bob said:

Just sitting at the desktop with your browser open? What are voltages and clocks like? Can you visually confirm the fans are actually spinning? 

Yes! Just sitting on desktop, with nothing open, with Instant Replay off, and absolutely zero GPU load, it would start, say, from 30C, keep climbing until the 75C, and stays there!
The voltages on the GPU core is 725mV while I'm writing this, nothing else open, the 725mV seems to be %75 of the way (based on the little speedometer graph), and in game it goes to like 1200mV. But, as the driver shows, it never goes below 725mV. The clock speeds are normal while idling (I suppose), they are very low, 50-150MHz. But the weird part about clock speeds, is the max boost, in every 5700 XT review I've seen, the card comfortably reaches 2050MHz and stays there almost all the time, only going down to like 1950MHz, my card goes down to the 1700's.. maxing out at like 1800's.
 

The fans are audibly and visually spinning.

One thing I did, I adjusted the fan curve, underclockd and undervolted the GPU, just to be safe. I started playing Fortnite, the fans weren't maxing out, my fan curve didn't push them to the max. So they were spinning at around 1800RPM, I opened the overlay information, the GPU Junction Temp was around 110C, and the GPU 'CURRENT' Temp (not sure what they mean by current, but I guess it's the regular temp we all know?) was around mid 80's C. I lost my shit... and allowed the fans to go to max, and continued playing, for the next 3-4 hours, the Junc temp was mid 90's, and GPU CURRENT temp was 75-85. So I guess it's... fine like this?

But I mean... the shitty situation, referring to many reviews, this card should run at %100 load, at 70C, and only 1300RPM fan speed.

I already submitted a ticket reporting an issue to AMD. But based on my past 3 experiences, they haven't replied once! So I guess as I mostly go about life, I only got "hope" on my side!

And btw, I tested with the 5700 XT alone, the Vega 64 being there or not made absolutely no difference at all! so there's that...

On 1/24/2020 at 3:22 AM, Zando Bob said:

Eeeeeh flashing the BIOS is something I'd avoid unless it's an RX 5600 XT with the oof one. Risk of bricking your card isn't worth it.

As for the temps, your card seems to be being funky with the fan profile, tried setting a manual one to have the fans come on earlier?

Yeah.. after I looked into BIOS updates, seems like it's something you wouldn't normally do as in Motherboard BIOS flashing, only in critical cases as you mentioned, where there's a major shitshow that you gotta fix or smthn.
Apart from that, yes, I just started the PC, started room temps, dead cool, low 20C, and the fan profile is active and adjusted, the fans kick at 35% on 40C, and here, I'm typing this, and the temps are still climbing, it's 56C now.

1 hour ago, Zando Bob said:

Yeah the Optional ones are hit or miss. Sometimes they fix stuff, other times they're absolute garbage. It's Radeon's biggest struggle right now. The hardware is there, just their drivers are really inconsistent. Once they get that fixed up, they should be in a much better spot. 

That is very true, I'm hopeful only because they show they've actually been working on them, things have been generally getting better.

With that said, I was just playing fortnite, and the card was silent, I put the Tuning settings for the card on Automatic, under automatic you can choose 'Underclock', 'Overclock', 'blabla', 'bla'. And there is 'Default', which is the natural default setting. I left it on that, and played for 40 minutes, opened MSI Afterburner, it was 93C..... I shut down the game, restarted the PC, and maxed the fans, then left the fans to idle, after 3mins of full RPM. Now it's idling at around 75C!!!

One thing yall may be able to help with, guide on upgrading the BIOS on those things? I checked the BIOS versions on the Vega cards, and it's older than the release date for the card. BIOS date from 2017! Those could definitely do with an update!

21 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Sounds like funky drivers. Are you making sure to run a WQHL version? They're usually more stable, but I have found the Adrenaline 2020 WQHL drivers are actually still unstable on my RVII (I still get random blackscreens with those and the latest 20.1.1 drivers). The only ones to be fully stable are Adrenaline 2019 WQHL drivers from mid last year. 

I never really tried that, I'm always at the latest drivers, and they really have resolving a lot of the annoying issues.. apart from mine apparently lol

11 hours ago, 191x7 said:

I would like to ask you to try something. One card at a time.

Take the second card out. Test the first one heavily.

Take the first out, put the second in and test that one.

If both cards work fine on their own, test a card in the second slot (but only a single card).

Your issues might be caused by Crossfire, the motherboard slot, one of the cards being faulty or maybe, just maybe, the PSU.

Hey bruverino, thank you your suggestion, I have a couple things to reply to:
I've always used only one card, the second was always plugged in, but no Crossfire, never, besides testing, so the second card is plugged in, and its main use was its HDMI port, to take in the AVR. Also mostly these days, to avoid these issues, I disable my secondary displays when I game, all of them, to eliminate issues, but the profile reset and heat crashes still happen here.

I also lived back in the day like 3-4 months with only one card plugged in, I don't exactly remember the details, but I remember the conclusion, it was that there was no difference in issues, bugs, crashes, freezes, hangs, BSODs, all of it, if it was going to happen, it showed that it still happened with one card. But again, a lot of this drama got resolved with updates, except for heat crashes and profile resets!

Also, whenever I open up my case to add something or change something, and when I take the cards out, I put them back in random order, so they must've swapped spots a lot!

Testing a card in the second slot? hmmmm... never even thought of that, interesting, but I have one more thing to add so hold up!

Again, to resummrize, I never use crossfire, my motherboard is a Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC, I would doubt anything at this point in my life, so will test that out! Lastly, the PSU was brand new, HX1000i!

Now the puzzle gets umm.. more confusing.... so today, 6 hours ago, I received my new 5700 XT. I waited so long for MSI to drop their Gaming X model, and that's what I got, I love MSI and their cards. Interestingly, this card, out of every single other AIB 5700 XT model, is the beefiest, heaviest, most ridiculously cooled card. In reviews, your typical average 5700 XT, would run at around 70 C, after an hour loop on Forza Horizon (4,5,6,7? not sure which one, but the latest), and the fans (of a typical average 5700 XT) would be spinning at an average of around 2000RPM. In the same channel under the same testing methods, the Gaming X 5700 XT from MSI, kept the card at 70C, with only 1250RPM.
It's really really efficient and silent, and that's the main reason I was interested in it!

During my time, I took out the Vega 64 in the second slot (it's been there for really long), and I opened it to change the thermal paste, and boy oh boy was it dry as hell over there, I reapplied the stuff. Then plugged the 5700 XT at the first slot, and the 64 in the second one (just out of being used to doing so, thinking of it now, I should've plugged the 5700 XT alone). Anywho, I start my PC, and I'm idling, doing nothing, was busy with a new keyboard playing music in the background on the PC, only Groove music running, I have an old app to monitor GPU temps, which apparently doesn't work for the 5700 XT. The Vega 64 was sitting at 30C the entire time, so I was expecting the same from the 5700 XT.
Until I went to the drivers, checking the settings of it and the stats and everything, and I FOUND THE MOTHEREFFER SITTING AT 75C!!!!!!! The fans were at 0RPM, and the card is on a death wish to fry itself to death on its first day! I maxed the fans to make it chill, and came here to cry out loud.........

Hello, good day, so I've had my Vega 64 since launch, and it's been playing games like a beast ever since. I've had countless problems with it, I think I faced every GPU problem (especially software related) with this card, it gave me nightmares, but regardless tho, when it worked, it worked really good.

One thing I want to note before going on onto my problem, I gotta say that, I have tried and worked around most of the problems I've had with the cards (I have 2), things like: slightest overclock on the CPU causes instability in any game, my AVR setup with the home theater and PC was a pain to work with, having dual monitors (technically 3, since the AVR through HDMi is considered a display), problems with the settings of the Vega itself, whether trying to overclock, underclock, playing with the fan curve, it was just always a pain in the ass. But, in AMD's defense, *most* of those bad days got resolved throughout various updates, they fixed A LOT of stuff!

2 Things remain unfixed though, and those are what I need help with. So, sometimes, if my screens turn off after 5 minutes say, and I come back to them and touch the mouse, they will turn on, but the GPU drivers will display a notification saying there was some link issue blahblahblah AND, this is the problem, the GPU settings were reset to default! Or, restarting the computer itself sometimes will reset the GPU profiles/settings.
Now, I don't care about those link issues, because absolutely everything else in the PC remains normal, other than resetting the GPU global profiles that I set. 
Why that's bad?
The second thing remaining unfixed, the default profiles for my GPUs are simply not able to apparently keep the cards cool. I start up my PC, undoubting and unsuspecting Bool opens up any given game, goes through the menu, waits for the game to load, map and gameplay load up, I'm in the world of the game now, give me 10-15 seconds of moving around excited to play, and boom, the GPU crashes.
The crash goes as follows: all displays shut off, the tach/load LEDs on the Vega all shut off, the fans on the card turn to 4900RPM. It's like you'd plugged out the GPU from the system while it's running basically...

So what I have to do from there is, stay calm and collected, not lose my s**t and break anything, restart the PC, go to radeon settings, load up a global GPU profile that slightly tweaks the fan curve, instead of the max default at around 1800-2000 RPM, I allow it to go to max. And then I run my games and play for hours without issues. (There are issues, playing with fullscreen, then alt-tabbing and going to another display is prohibited, that crashes the game (either Apex Legends or Fortnite, those are the 2 I been playing), but disregard those issues, I forced myself to get used to switching to windowed fullscreen whenever I want to alt-tab, and it's been fine.

So, what do you suggest? I heard that the Vega 64's stock BIOS settings have a safety threshold on temps at 85 degrees C, which my card apparently reaches in ease and proceeds to crash.

Is there a SOLUTION? Or am I better off sticking to my "workarounds"?

I'm not sure I understand your curiosity, but for me, monitoring all kinds of stuff going on in my PC, gives me an insight and understanding on how everything works and what's best for optimizing my settings, like fan curves for example.
One very important, and obvious usage for GPU % utilization, is to see if you're being bottlenecked or not, the other day my friend's laptop was overheating, and throttling, pretty normal for laptops, I wanted to examine what was causing more heat, the GPU or the CPU on the laptop, knowing that they both use the same heatsink, it's important to balance them to at least try and eliminate overheating. That's an example where GPU % and CPU % was very important to us.

If that usecase is too specific for you, then hear this, sometimes if I'm playing a new game, and I'm trying to see how I need to optimize it best, looking at GPU % throughout different areas and different parts of the game, looking at GPU memory, clocks, temps, all of it, gives a good insight on what parts of the game are intensive for the GPU, try putting an fps limiter, and test how the GPU % goes up and down in different areas of the game. 

I dunno.. it's definitely not necessary, but it's just interesting for me at least to look at.

7 hours ago, Mr. Question Asker said:

First -

See the supported CPUs here - https://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/supportlist.html (Yours is supported, so you should not face issues)

 

Second -

The software I use to display internet speed is NetSpeedMonitor

Download Link - https://www.softpedia.com/get/Network-Tools/Bandwidth-Tools/NetSpeedMonitor.shtml

 

(You will have to run the program in Windows 7 compatibility mode, it will work fine and setup rest of the things)

 

Ay thank you good sir! you're awesome!

Ah perfect, two questions.. actually 3.

How many cores does this app support?
Does it support AMD Ryzen CPUs? (I doubt it..)

And I need that down/up (supposedly network speeds), those are a fkn life saver!

4 minutes ago, Mr. Question Asker said:

I use core temp, using that you can display your CPU tempratures to the Windows Taskbar.

(You will need to drag it from the system tray, that little arrow)

 

I have attached a snap!

 

And this is the download link of that software - https://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

Thanks for the tips brother!

I love the simplicity of the old RealTemp 3.70, CPU temperature monitoring app. But that mf is old as hugh now, so what's another app, that does its functionality, and most importantly, has the ability to show temp as a lil number in the taskbar icons area.

2 minutes ago, stateofpsychosis said:

Unfortunately, it's really bad news for your 4690k and my 4790k as well.

We're not even getting a bios update most likely.

the patches for meltdown and spectre have been crashing haswell and bradwell systems and it's really looking like the manufactures are going to abandon us on this... 

It'll likely depend on the motherboard manufacturer.

It really sucks..

Though, it's a blessing at the same time because this means we won't experience the 5-30% slowdown the patches are supposed to cause, but it also means that we have a big wipe gaping backdoor in our systems. Hell, backdoor is an understatement. There isn't even a door with this one. Just a big gaping security hole.

 

The reason why this may cause an issue on AMD and not yours that you'll see is because these AMD chips have been getting the patch and it hasn't been reacting well. We haven't gotten a single patch yet.

Jesus christ.. every single warranty there could be has definitely run out for my build. What a massive shit-show this is.. is the 8th gen intel cpu's affected by this, too?

1 minute ago, stateofpsychosis said:

Well, let AMD look at it and get back to you.

Then we'll know more.

I'm sure this is all still under warranty anyways by the sounds of it so stop panicking

Unless you caused physical damage by like pulling a linus and dropping something, you're covered.

yeah that's our only hope.. my mind just has been on a roller coaster of tech and cpu emotions the past week, along with final exams that is  

3 minutes ago, stateofpsychosis said:

It's not your fault and it's not AMD's fault either if it has anything to do with meltdown and spectre.

This is hands down the worst cyber-security disaster we've ever seen.

Getting an intel chip wouldn't have helped him any.

Pretty much every single CPU from the last 15 years is effected.

You should read more about this.

It's a depressing disaster that sucks to read about, but you should know the details.

 

I don't think this has anything to do with it though.

 

Your friend also shouldn't be mad at you.

The issue happened months after you last touched the machine.

If anything, they did something silly to cause this.

hmmmmmm... wow.. but.. why didn't my 4690K get affected? and how could a "virus?" even come close to ruining a CPU? that's fucking nasty man.. I'm definitely gonna read about that.. and if I can even protect myself!

2 minutes ago, stateofpsychosis said:

Wait, you said the hard drive worked with another CPU in there didn't you...

hmm, well still try it.

Maybe it's got some sort of driver on it or something that's conflicting with the CPU in some way.

Still worth a shot since extra drives are never hard to come by.

I mean I thought about that as well.. but the PC never even gets to start on loading windows.. and that stupid CPU led is lit up all the time.. At this point, I just think AMD used a Logic bomb and this exact configuration of CPU and Board! I can't find any plausible explanation

2 minutes ago, stateofpsychosis said:

Okay, try another hard drive then. I think that one may be toast.

It really sounds to me like everything is working fine until you try to boot up a drive for anything. Could even be a bad or loose sata data cable.

well.. you sound like you didn't read further above, nor have taken a look at the videos I shared, I actually tried his ssd on my PC, and it totally works, and when I connect my ssd to his machine, the same exact stuff happens, I have a video on exactly that in the playlist I shared in the original post, take a look if you're interested! it's mind boggling!

3 minutes ago, stateofpsychosis said:

I'm pretty sure AMD cpus were having trouble with the bios update for meltdown and spectre not a windows update if I'm not mistaken so I don't think that's it.

And then JESUS christ what does AMD expect from their fans??? My friend completely lost faith in me, because he wanted an Intel CPU in the beginning but I refused but to get an AMD CPU, and now I feel like shit.. this is so fucking terrible man.. I posted a post similar to this but less aggressive on their support forums, and not a single fucking comment.. let alone a customer service to help. It wasn't until I made a half-an-hour-in-the-making-email to them until they replied saying you can send it the Netherlands, they didn't even tell me what they want to do when they receive it.. might as well just take it and forget about me!

1 minute ago, stateofpsychosis said:

I don't think there was anything wrong with the CPU if you could get into the bios and see it's specs and all of that fine.

I also don't think you did anything to hurt it overclocking if you tried that months ago and this is only happening now.

 

Honestly, I'd look to software issues.

If AMD doesn't solve this for you, try booting with a windows USB installer inserted and use a restore point from there.

See if an update or something borked it.

YES! I tried exactly that, I put windows 8.1 pro on a usb, went to do a normal format, chose the usb as 1 priority from bios, and went on to formatting the windows. 

And I was so shock, I actually got to the initial install screen, where you agree to the terms, and enter a product key, and right after you format the disk, it starts copying the files, and then it goes ahead and restarts, right? when it tries to come back up? that death circle comes right back... 

2 minutes ago, Hugsy Malone said:

Very rare for a cpu to die, but it can happen

read on my last reply up there^^^^^^^^

On 1/30/2018 at 2:10 PM, TekSupport said:

Just putting in idea out there.

Could it have something to do with the meltdown and spectra flaw?

Try running the hdd on another pc removing that update through the windows update and put it back in pc.

I honestly have absolutely no idea what does "meltdown" or "spectra flaw" mean. I've heard and seen those couple of words around but don't exactly understand what they mean.

I know there has been a bug going on with Intel CPUs, Linus talked about it in a couple of WAN shows, but I don't remember that it affected AMD.

But on another note, there's this other Thread over here on LTT's Forums, where someone was reporting my very exact same problem, b350, and Ryzen 5 in general, and on that thread, there was over 20 comments reporting the same exact stuff.. so I know for sure that it's not the CPU dying all of a sudden. 

Also, on yet another note, I went back to amazon to convert my 5-star review to a 1-star review on both the MSI board and the Ryzen chip, and while doing that, I was checking the 1-star section of the review page, and on the Board's side, there was like 8 pages of 1-star reviews, 80% of them were people reporting my very exact problem. And further more, 40% of those 80%, faced the problem exactly 3 months after they built their system... 

It's an on-going issue, and just no one knows what's happening. 

I even tried to live-chat with amazon and tried to get them to return the board, but no luck at all.. :\

On 1/30/2018 at 5:01 AM, keskparane said:

It was just the way you write about it as if you've been the one using it for a month and a half. Then in the video you say he calls you with a problem and sends it to you. Made it very hard to tell who was running the PC. You'd be surprised how many times the problem can be found just by making sure the facts are clear.

 

Did you make any progress?

didn't honestly think it would matter much, thought it would be unnecessary confusion. Since I investigated with him heavily on everything he did. 

After taking the PC to MSI's nearest retailer (literally 150 miles away, and my friend took the pc not me), he tried another chip on the board and it worked (I don't know what exact chip he tried), and I believe he also said he our chip on another board, but it didn't work (Tho I think they still used a b350 of some sort, which seems to be the issue).

Anyhow, I contacted AMD, and the nearest AMD retailer around is in Netherlands, and asked them about the warranty, and they asked me to ship it to them to Netherlands, so they can investigate and see what they can do about it. 
I honestly don't even know what to expect, I'm really positive that the chip is 100%, I mean.. the CPU cannot just fry itself to death.. it was running normal temps.. it just happened outta nowhere!! :\