MSI GT780 Laptop Shuts Off During Games

[rak526]

I've had an MSI gaming laptop for about 8 months now, has worked great. While playing a game yesterday, it instantly shut off. Did it a couple a more times. I monitored temps and logged them using GPU-Z. Highest I've seen is 90 C. But it's shut off anywhere between 65 C - 90 C. Last one was running steady at 71 C. Vents are clean. I don't "think" its an overheating problem, but I could be wrong. Any ideas? Is my Nvidia GTX 580m beginning to bite the dust?

[Pehla]

use hwmonitor...,to chek all components temps..maybe is something ellse that heat up??

[stinger608]

Sounds more like a CPU overheating problem. I could be the thermal paste has a "bake out" issue. I would pull the cpu and gpu heat sinks, clean them, and reapply some good quality thermal paste and try it again. Also be sure to clean the thermal fan as well.

[rak526]

Just cleaned and put on some Arctic Silver. Ran hwmonitor as well a game in windowed mode, so I could watch the temps. Computer turned off with a CPU temp around 65 C and GPU around 73 C. Neither seem that hot. All other temps were below those. Fan was running at full speed. If there is no load, the laptop will stay on all day. There is no temp on hwmonitor for the SSD... could that be a problem?

[sneekypeet]

does it turn off immediately when the load is applied? How long is this running, and when it does shut off is it a more demanding part of the game when it happens?

[rak526]

The shut off seemed to be random, regardless of demand during the game. Not immediate either, would play for about 15 minutes before it happened. I actually found a lead on Google that led to me running a few malware scans. Turned up a PUP.Bundleoffers.IIQ. Deleted it, restarted and have been running the game for about 45 minutes now. Everything looks good. Although I have no idea where that file came from. Thanks for the help guys.

[rak526]

And back where I started. Temps were fine, and it just shut off again.

[rak526]

I just ran Prime95 for a bit, no problems. Then ran FurMark and shut off instantly. Restarted the laptop and ran FurMark without AA, ran for a few minutes, then still shutdown. Could it be the power cord? The supply gets pretty hot. Any clue on how I could check this?

[KainXS]

yea thats what I was thinking, does it cut off with the battery/does the battery charge at all, check your power cord with a multimeter if you have one.

[rak526]

Ran the FurMark test on battery, the laptop won't ramp up the clocks on the card so I don't think it's too accurate of a test. It does charge when plugged in. I'll check it with a multimeter, just have to go get one.

[[Ion]]

I've found on my laptop that running an intensive CPU & GPU load simultaneously is enough to actually drain the battery even while plugged in. It has a 65W adapter, and if I'm running WCG in the background and playing Portal/Portal 2, the battery drops at a rate of about 8%/hour. So it is possible that your laptop isn't getting enough power (what wattage is the adapter rated at?)
My Dad's Thinkpad W520 also shuts down randomly while playing games--regardless of whether it's on battery or plugged in. Temps seem fine--we're stumped.

[rak526]

Rated for 180 w. It is a pretty big one. Percentage doesn't drop while playing, stays at 97%. Haven't seen it above 98% in a while.

[rak526]

All right, did a reading on the power adapter, rated for output of 19V. I got 19.5V. I think that narrows it down to the actual card. I'll let MSI know what I found and we'll see how they want to do it. Once again, thanks for the help everyone.

[Jannelientje]

What is the conclusion? I have the same problem with the same laptop. I can add: I played Hitman: Absolution trough the end. Now I wanna start again and it turns itself off like if you would hold the startupbutton after a random number of minutes into a level. I didnt change any settings but I updated my videocard drivers a while ago. Could a driverupdate cause your laptop to use more power? :|

[werez]

You don`t have a power issue . The laptop would just switch to the battery if the adapter couldn`t supply enough amps . It`s either overheating ( and not necesarilly the video chipset itself , the mosfets might be the cause ) . Anyways try to downclock the card while on adapter say maybe 10% , and also the mem freq. if possible . That would also reduce the power consumption and the stress on the mosfets . I`m not saying it`s a fix , but at least you will narrow it down ..
You could also try to block a part of the exhaust holes , and see if the laptop will shutdown faster ( while in gaming ofc. )

[CJCerny]

Seems like you should pursue the warranty on this laptop. Hopefully, opening it and applying Artic Silver did not void your warranty.

[Jannelientje]

This is from the official MSi forum:

RE: GT780DXR CPU overheating problem. (FPS DROPS) (FIXED!)
« Reply #4 on: 14-October-12, 16:36:57 »
I'm very happy to report that the entire problem has been solved!

When I went to the shop where I bought my laptop they didn't want to help me because they wanted me to let MSI pickup&return fix the issue due to warranty.
I didn't want to wait for a long time to get my laptop for such a small and easy repair because I need my laptop every day, so I went ahead to fix it myself.
I used to build PC's for my profession so I knew what I was doing.

When I opened the backplate I noticed a slight build up of dust on both radiators from the heatsinks, in order to clean it properly I removed the heatsinks from the GPU and CPU.
I noticed that the original cooling pad of the CPU was not correctly covering the entire CPU and was smudged a bit over the edges of the core. I cleaned the CPU and GPU and both heatsinks up, re-pasted them with some proper thermal paste and re-assembled the laptop.

With the new thermal paste and cleaned heatsink radiators I now get very satisfying results.


CPU maximum temperatures @ 21ºc room temp with Turbo Boost and Cooler Boost:
Idle | small tasks | heavy tasks & gaming

Before: 65ºc | 79ºc | 101ºc
After: 48ºc | 62ºc | 85ºc


GPU maximum temperature @ 21ºc room temp with Cooler boost and Turbo Boost @ 700/1400/1700 overclock:
Idle | Heavy load & gaming

Before: 52ºc | 86ºc
After: 41ºc | 70ºc



As you can see the re-application of thermal paste has drastically improved my temperatures and the FPS drop problem in Battlefield 3 has been solved.
If anyone reading this is also experiencing FPS drops, check your CPU and GPU temperatures with CPUID Hardware Monitor: http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
When your CPU temperatures go over 85-90ºc you might have the same problem as I have and this is probably the solution IF you have tried everything else without success.
Do not try to fix this yourself if you don't know 100% what you're doing!

You think this is the problem? Im not an hardware expert but I replaced an Intel processorcooler in a normal (big) PC before, cleaned, applied new cooling paste etc., do you think I can pull this off on this laptop? =)

*edit*
The strange thing is: it didnt happen before.. but maybe some dust IS in there, that combined with the MSi fail manufacturing...

[werez]

Originally Posted by Jannelientje

What is the conclusion? I have the same problem with the same laptop. I can add: I played Hitman: Absolution trough the end. Now I wanna start again and it turns itself off like if you would hold the startupbutton after a random number of minutes into a level. I didnt change any settings but I updated my videocard drivers a while ago. Could a driverupdate cause your laptop to use more power? :|

After it turns off , can you imidiatley turn it back on again ?

[Jannelientje]

Originally Posted by werez

You could also try to block a part of the exhaust holes , and see if the laptop will shutdown faster ( while in gaming ofc. )

Did it. Didnt make much notible difference. i.e. Shut down MUCH more quickly. But the time it takes to crash is slightly different every time so its hard to find out.

Originally Posted by werez

After it turns off , can you imidiatley turn it back on again ?

It takes about 3 seconds before laptop responds to the turn on button again.

Also I notice that there are different forms of shutting off. Sometimes the screen turns black. and after 3 seconds it drops off completely, sometimes it drops off imideately. I figure I maybe shouldnt do this anymore because it could damage the laptop isnt it?

hope this information helps!

PS its awesome that you pay attention to my problems!

[werez]

After you turn it back on , does the fan run at full speed when booting up ?
it shuts down every single time ? did it ever restarted ? or hang with a blue screen ?
I`m asking because the screen going black and the laptop shutting down after a while is not good ...
Did it ever fail to POST after you turned it back on ? ( black screen ) .
Before shutting down do you see any kind of artefacting on the screen ? dots , missing pixels , lines , etc . ?

[Jannelientje]

Originally Posted by werez

After you turn it back on , does the fan run at full speed when booting up ?
it shut down every single time ? did it ever restarted ? or hang with a blue screen ?
I`m asking because the screen going black and the laptop shutting down after a while is not good ...
Did it ever fail to POST after you turned it back on ? ( black screen ) .
Before shutting down do you see any kind of artefacting on the screen ? dots , missing pixels , lines , etc . ?

Yes
Yes No No
No
No, just black/off

3seconds is not much for a bad overheat right? Did you see my big post (#17) do you think it could be that in my laptop the cooling isnt done properly either like in that guys case (and the original posters)? IT DIDNT happen before awfafawkfn this frustrates me so badly

[werez]

well you could try to clean it and replace the thermal compound and whatnot , but i have no idea if that voids your warranty .
Well to be honest i think the whole thing has something to do with GPU throttling . The voltage drops when the card reaches a temperature of lets say 80C or a full load and also the core speed . The drivers are also involved here . Also if the card fails to downclock when it should .

I don`t own a laptop with such high end graphics card so i can`t really help you .
But i would advise you to get Afterburner and try to lower the core speed from 770 to about 600 and see if that helps .

80C is not "that" high , and as you can see cleaning and replacing TC did not help the OP ...

[Jannelientje]

Im a bit afraid to let the laptop crash more times. I did it 6 times in total so far. I use Speccy to watch tempretures. Idle = 65 celcius I did it before during gaming (CS:GO, see below) and it was high. Maybe this information helps: I installed CounterStrike: Global Offensive a while back. The graphics were way too much for my machine (nonstop fpsdrops + screen reacted a second later to my mousemovement) but after tuning the grapicsettings ingame down it went to: perfect solid 60fps (i limited it to that) -> sometimes 2/3minutes of the lag i had with high settings -> back to solid 60fps. This was not in crowded area's or on any special event. it just happened sometimes. After that I updated my nvideadriver which I didnt feel the need for before. This fixed the problem mostly. The solid 60fps is held much much longer and the random-drop-periods are shorter & much less intense. So i was thinking: maybe the driverupdate is overruling a overheating-reaction of the laptop. And maybe for Hitman Absolution this ends up in a shutoffprocedure because the laptop doesnt get enough time to cool down. So it would be a coolproblem still if my thinking is right. But im NOT an computerexpert in any way but what is your take on this story?

[werez]

Is there a Power Management Mode option in Nvidia Control Panel ? What option do you currently have selected ? Adaptive or Max performance ?
If it`s set on max performance , try using adaptive and see if that helps ... I guess using max performance the card won`t downclock when it should .

[Jannelientje]

I searched for it and cant find it. Install old drivers and try if it is gone?

*edit* I also noticed permanent FPS drops in Company of Heroes, a game I used to play before the driverupdate. Its barely playable anymore on the settings I used to use. AND lower settings make no difference :|

I installed the drivers by first uninstalling the old ones -> Reboot -> Installing the new ones -> Reboot