afterimage and overheating

[Mili]

The biggest problem I'm having with my SP4 is that the screen sometimes flickers. It doesn't turn off, it just varies is brightness very quickly.

It also holds on to an after image, usually when gaming, making it difficult to see what's actually happening on screen. If I take screenshots with Steam, they are saved normally, without the weird watermark image from the previous screen.

At one time I didn't shut off Steam right away, as I couldn't save at the time, and when I finally did, the afterimage took a long time to clear out, even after restarting.

Though it usually happens with gaming, it has also happened to a lesser degree when running art programs.

The specs are 16GB ram and intel i7. The only reason why I got the strong (and consequently expensive) specs was so I could use for gaming, since the minimum specs would have been enough for art and web-design alone.

Right now even getting off Steam and the watermark fading, the screen still flickers. I have it out of its cover and have a fan pointed at it, as it sometimes feels warm, but cooling it off isn't getting rid of the flickering.

In the past I used to hear its inner fan but I haven't heard it much lately. I don't know if it's true but I heard that supposedly Microsoft updated it because people where complaining about the loud fan and there's been cases of it overheating all over the Internet. I didn't mind the fan's noise. If it is a buggy update, how do I get rid of it?

I had high hopes for being able to do web-design, art and gaming all in one machine, but the SP4 has been a terrible disappointment so far. At this point I'm just trying to salvage what was admittedly a bad purchase I regret. Any ideas?

 

[Exhile]

You should have gotten the Surface Book instead of an SP4 if you were to do some gaming because a Surface Book has an Nvidia GPU. Did you really think an SP4 was a gaming machine?

 

[Mili]

Anything with good specs can be used for gaming, I've never had trouble with past machines until now. Even the SP4 worked fine for gaming from late last year until now, when this problem showed up. Plus I didn't want a physical keyboard anymore, it's a personal preference, though I already have a detachable Asus. I don't want only a gaming machine, I want something easily portable that works as every kind of computer, (art, gaming, etc.) More importantly, you're not even trying to answer the question. Let's stay on topic.

 

[Exhile]

Perhaps someone else can help you but I still say you should be using a Surface Book instead of an SP4 for gaming, art or web-design.

 

[hughlle]

Perhaps someone else can help you but I still say you should be using a Surface Book instead of an SP4 for gaming, art or web-design.

You can use anything you like for gaming. If it plays the game it plays the game. I took my SP3 to a lan party a year or so back, and didn't have an issue. And gaming doesn't have to mean a AAA title on ultra settings.

And Mili, I've never come across this issue before, or even read about it. Personally I would be doing a reset of the device, or re-installing windows and seeing how things go.

I've used mine since launch as my main computer, and is used for gaming, films, photo and video editing (well not me personally, I can't draw a stick-man), pretty much everything you'd use a computer to do, and never had any kind of issue like this. Fan noise seems perfectly acceptable to me.