Acer 5920G GFX Replacement

Hello everyone,

This Friday (which happened to be Friday the 13th..) the inevitable happened: my 8600M GT died after 3 intensive years of use. I know all about the G84/G86 defects and I praise myself lucky for actually getting 3 years of usage out of it.

The next thing I did was to bake my 8600M GT in the oven for 10 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius. This little trick actually worked! But I know this is only a temporary solution for this problem.

I immediately went on eBay and purchased myself an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 256MB DDR2 for 50 euro's.

I know for sure that this card will fit in my Acer 5920G since it's a MXM-II card. However I read about Acer laptops not recognizing cards without the Acer vBios. Now I don't know whether the card I bought actually has this Acer vBios preloaded, since it doesn't say anything about the BIOS in the description.

So I read alot about blind flashing the vBios to an Acer based bios. On techPowerUp! I found just one vBios for the card I purchased: techPowerUp! :: VGA Bios Collection: ATI HD 3470 Mobility 256 MB. As you can see this user has an Acer 5530G, which is newer than the 5920G.

So my question is: when my 5920G won't recognize the vBios on the card I bought, can I safely blind flash the vBios of that card to an Acer vBios?

 

Should be ok unless it refuses to boot at all.

You are aware the 3470 is considerably weaker right?

 

Thanks for your reply! Yes I'm quite aware of that. I wanted to avoid any G84/G86 GPU so I went for an ATI card. However, I only play Counter-Strike 1.6 and League of Legends. Both games aren't that demanding so I think I'll be fine. The 3650 (which is about as fast as the 8600M GT) was double the price at eBay. And for me personally, that wasn't worth it.

I expect to receive the card early next week, so I'll let you guys know how it went.

One last question: My current 8600M GT has thermal pads for cooling. The 3470 has a smaller chip than the 8600M GT, so the thermal pads probably won't make good contact anymore. Can I just apply some thermal paste, despite the lack of a heatspreader on the chip?

 

Funny that this happened to you...the 8600M GT in my FOUR year old 5920G died on Saturday 14th! Feel the same though - had a good run with this GFX and shame that I can't find a way to get a free replacement! (they were all defective, right?)

I plan to oven bake my card as well, so I'm glad that you got some mileage out of it - I hope too as well. From a few searches on the net I'll try and get an ATI HD 3650 DDR3 256mb or 512 DDR2mb from ebay.

I think that you can just apply more thermal paste. Maybe you've seen this page which goes through the GPU upgrade steps on the 5920G?:

http://www.theacerguy.com/2008/12/morris-aspire-5920-gpu-swapupgrade/

Keep us posted on how the GFX swap goes - I would be interested to know the results.

 

Thank you very much for the link you provided! It looks like the guy who wrote that also used thermal paste. However it seems that he doesn't have thermal pads for his memory chips. Should I just keep those memory thermal pads in place when I get my 3470, even though there's a chance they won't make good contact? Or would it be smarter to remove them?

Also I'm reading mixed posts of people with incompatible vBios versions. Some of them report that they do get a POST screen, and some posts report a black screen. If I do get a POST screen I'll be able to blind flash the vBios I found on techPowerup.

Anyway, I will keep you guys updated. There's nothing more I can do right now than hope for the best. If I'm out of luck I'll just put it back on eBay again.

 

I received my videocard today! Quickly went on and replaced it. Hooked it up to see wheter it was working and it did! I noticed that my fans were spinning really fast though so I checked HWMonitor. My videocard was running at 110 degrees Celsius!

So I quickly shut my laptop down, took it apart again and I noticed that I had to use even MORE thermal paste. This time I applied it directly to the chip instead of the copper of my heatsink.

The 3470 is idling at around 48 degrees Celsius right now, while my room is pretty hot. That's about 17 degrees cooler than my 8600M GT!

I'm installing the Catalyst drivers right now and I'm about to take it for a test afterwards.

 

@Rotter: nVidia 9x00M is also doable now, apparently (though the most problematic one, 9600M GT, has not yet been tested.) AFAIK the 9x00M series is unaffected by the 8x00M series lifespan problem.

 

Actually, the 9500M GS uses the G84 chip. So that one is affected too. However, that is the only videocard in the 9 series with a G8x chip.

I took the card for a test after installing the drivers. I let it run 3DMark06. Everything seemed to go well so I went downstairs to get myself a drink. When I came back my laptop had been shut off. That couldn't be a good sign.

I turned it back on and I noticed that my temperatures were all over the place, even while sitting at the desktop. It would idle at 75 degrees, and during a game of Counter-Strike it went up to about 100 degrees.

The extra thermal paste I had to apply to bridge the gap caused the problem. I quickly went over to a DIY shop just before closing time and I got myself a sheet of copper with a thickness of 0.6mm. I cut it into a square shape of 15mm by 15mm and put it inbetween the heatsink of my laptop and the graphics chip. There's thermal paste on both sides to conduct the heat.

My idle temps have dropped even more now to about 40 degrees Celsius. And while stressing the card the temperatures never exceed 68 degrees. Those temperatures are pretty amazing!

 

Hey Skire - that is brilliant news! I baked my 8600MGT last night and I am pretty pleased to be using my Acer again to type this message! I take it that you didn't need to flash the vBios - what is the vBios version? The copper mod was a good move ; I was going to re-link to an amazing post from this forum from someone who originally used a flattened copper penny as a mod for an HD4650!

I'm happy that I've revived my card but will plan to get a replacement for the inevitable. Were you able to re-use the original memory pads?

Anyhow, good for you on reclaiming your Acer!

@ .NetRolller 3D - aren't you the one who modified the SBIOS to run the GeForce 9600M GT on the 5920G? You're a legend dude! Between you and Kizwan's posts' on bioses a whole new world of potential has been opened up to us! If I get the 9600M GT, I may well let you know how your mod bios works!

 

The card has the following vBIOS: ATOMBIOSBK-ATI VER010.088.000.004.028771. This is the same vBIOS techPowerup has in their database.

I was lucky to have bought a card with the Acer vBIOS preloaded. Otherwise it wouldn't have worked.

I just left the original memory pads on the heatsink. Although I don't know whether they make good contact with the heatsink or not. If they do that's great, but if they don't I'm not really losing anything. Also I don't think that the memory chips on this card will become as hot as on my previous card.

 

@Skire: You usually do not need to have an Acer VBIOS for the card to work; e.g. ATI reference BIOSes will usually work too. Any BIOS that either hardcodes correct values for the 5920G or reads the MXM structure in a non-strict way (and ones that interpret it strictly as well, with the SBIOS mod) should work.
AFAIK Acer does not do subsystem ID checks before enabling the MXM card.
(The 5920G was believed to use either a blacklist or a whitelist to block the 9600M GT, but as we found out, it was "blocked" by a corrupted MXM structure.)