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napoleon_jo
n00b
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2014
- Messages
- 1
Hi all, first time poster, I thought I'd put this up in case it helped someone else.
I've had a Sandy Bridge Sony VAIO VPCCA (VPCCA290X) since June 2011, and the whole time I've had it I've had very infrequent problems with it just totally freezing and requiring a restart, probably once a month. I couldn't get this to repro on Linux and passed memtest just fine, so I chalked it up to a driver issue (first gen AMD hybrid graphics = bad news).
I installed Windows 8 a bit ago (to get a newer GPU driver, Sony has released one for win7 and one for Win8.1), and the freezing became far more frequent, at least once an hour when the PC was idle, but never when it was under load. I had no luck hooking up to the kernel debugger, and now I saw that it froze just as often with Fedora. Next clue: Windows 8/new Linux distros are more power friendly, so the fan doesn't spin up as much. Less fan spinning up to cool the CPU = less airflow through the chassis.
Searching for the issue only gave me "for parts" eBay listings of the same laptop with the same problem, so I dug a bit deeper. The fact that this only happened when the PC was idle made me suspect that something inside wasn't getting enough cooling when the fan wasn't spun up. Setting the fan to 100% made the computer stable again, so this confirmed it. Opening it up, I saw that the board's PCH (4W TDP) is totally naked and without any direct cooling, so unless the fan was moving air over it, it would just cook.
This was confirmed by letting the laptop idle with a fan blowing on the PCH:
http://i.imgur.com/fmF0gIS.jpg
Sorry I don't have more pictures, but the fix:
I took a spare RAM heatsink from an Accelero GPU cooler (eg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835186054 ) and glued it to the PCH with Arctic Silver thermal *adhesive* (don't use paste! you need adhesive!). Fortunately, there was enough space in the chassis to fit the large'ish heatsink.
Not the heatsink I ended up using, but here's how it should look:
http://i.imgur.com/XO1Vdci.jpg
The diagnosis was more difficult here because there's no temperature monitor for the PCH, so you can't use a tool like HWMonitor to notice it.
My next step will be to try to use sysinternals' ProcessMonitor to watch how the VAIO fan controller works and see if I can use it somehow to keep the fan above minimum speed, just to keep things cool enough. If there's interest, I can post that here too.
I've had a Sandy Bridge Sony VAIO VPCCA (VPCCA290X) since June 2011, and the whole time I've had it I've had very infrequent problems with it just totally freezing and requiring a restart, probably once a month. I couldn't get this to repro on Linux and passed memtest just fine, so I chalked it up to a driver issue (first gen AMD hybrid graphics = bad news).
I installed Windows 8 a bit ago (to get a newer GPU driver, Sony has released one for win7 and one for Win8.1), and the freezing became far more frequent, at least once an hour when the PC was idle, but never when it was under load. I had no luck hooking up to the kernel debugger, and now I saw that it froze just as often with Fedora. Next clue: Windows 8/new Linux distros are more power friendly, so the fan doesn't spin up as much. Less fan spinning up to cool the CPU = less airflow through the chassis.
Searching for the issue only gave me "for parts" eBay listings of the same laptop with the same problem, so I dug a bit deeper. The fact that this only happened when the PC was idle made me suspect that something inside wasn't getting enough cooling when the fan wasn't spun up. Setting the fan to 100% made the computer stable again, so this confirmed it. Opening it up, I saw that the board's PCH (4W TDP) is totally naked and without any direct cooling, so unless the fan was moving air over it, it would just cook.
This was confirmed by letting the laptop idle with a fan blowing on the PCH:
http://i.imgur.com/fmF0gIS.jpg
Sorry I don't have more pictures, but the fix:
I took a spare RAM heatsink from an Accelero GPU cooler (eg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835186054 ) and glued it to the PCH with Arctic Silver thermal *adhesive* (don't use paste! you need adhesive!). Fortunately, there was enough space in the chassis to fit the large'ish heatsink.
Not the heatsink I ended up using, but here's how it should look:
http://i.imgur.com/XO1Vdci.jpg
The diagnosis was more difficult here because there's no temperature monitor for the PCH, so you can't use a tool like HWMonitor to notice it.
My next step will be to try to use sysinternals' ProcessMonitor to watch how the VAIO fan controller works and see if I can use it somehow to keep the fan above minimum speed, just to keep things cool enough. If there's interest, I can post that here too.