Surface Book 3 Overheating During Updates and Routine Downloads?

Anonymous
2020-05-27T20:43:15+00:00

First off, the specs are: 13.5"/i7/32GB/512GB/1650 Max-Q

Not sure if this will be the case for all users, but I am currently troubleshooting a issue with the Surface Book 3 going into a thermal throttle state from just restarting or trying to update even basic things. 

The first few days were fine - though attempting to run Minecraft didn't actually engage the dGPU for some reason.  Eventually got the dGPU to work by installing NVIDIA's GeForce Experience, or whatever it's called.

Then I noticed that the fan would spin up even when the SB3 should have been in sleep mode; I fixed this by just having it hibernate instead. Since then, I haven't heard any fan noise at all, even when the thermals were hitting well into the upper 90s C and even a few cores hitting 100 C.

Now, I can't seem to cool the thing off. I was trying to install Adobe Acrobat Pro and the latest Intel drivers (apparently one was released on 5/20?) the screen shut off and a little thermometer popped up (which I assumed, and later confirmed, meant that it had overheated and shut down to prevent damage).

Like I mentioned just above, now I can't seem to get the darn thing to run cool enough to even install it's routine updates. I have a box fan pointed on it to try and help, but even that doesn't seem to be effective. 

When last I checked (which admittedly was a few hours ago now since I'm trying a factory reset to see if one of the updates caused this) the CPU was capped out at 400 MHz, but it hasn't overheated since. It sure does take a heck of a long time to do a reset when your CPU is capped to 400 MHz. 

I'm hoping that this factory reset will fix the issue (hey, ya never know 'til ya try, amirite?), but otherwise I assume that I will likely have to warranty this particular SB3. 

Not really sure where I was going with all of this, I guess I was wondering if this is something that could be caused by updates and drivers or if there is a more serious hardware issue. 

I spent far too long trying to see if I could force the fans to spin regardless before just giving up on that. 

I'll add a link here that has a picture (would've done a screen cap, but it's in the middle of resetting) and some video showing what I'm talking about.

Thoughts or suggestions?

Surface | Surface Book | Power and battery

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-12-04T13:59:05+00:00

    Thanks for the clarification.  I set the UEFI battery limit as you suggested and anecdotally after one day seems to have improved the situation significantly.  I will report back to this thread in a week or so.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-12-04T07:58:33+00:00

    Hi Jeffery,

    The UEFI change is to stop the battery charging adding to the heating of the screen and hence the overheating problem.  Of course you only charge to 50% so I bought a big battery and can only use half of it.

    I notice my previous post to change the word c - rap to asterisks. I would rather effort were spent on fixing problems then there would be no need to use these terms.

    David

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-12-04T02:04:55+00:00

    interesting, I've had the monitor suspicion too - I'm driving an ultrawide Dell monitor while I'm at home, where this is mostly happening and where I'm working most often. it has happened in my office too once though, where it's just a 27" monitor but where I'm using the gen1 dock, which has some of these issues cited.

    BOTH monitors, though, also act themselves as hubs...oi, i did not need more wrinkles in this! lol 

    if i were within the return window I'd have ditched this thing by now. 1hr after i wrote this post, just some simple file transfer for 10 seconds or so jumped the temp up to 56C, ridiculous.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-12-03T19:14:33+00:00

    Thanks for the input David - appreciated.  Were you referring specifically to the Surface Book 3 overheating problem or the get 2 Dock/Ethernet problem with the supplied workaround?

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-12-03T18:40:58+00:00

    I was told the official workaround is to go into UEFI and turn on battery limit. It fixes the issue but means the screen battery only charges to 50%. Pretty **** really.

    David

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