ASUS G73SW Owners' Lounge

You won't regret your purchase, this machine is a monster for sure! Some have had some minor issues but from what I've seen it's folks who have reloaded their OS from scratch (which I also did without any issues whatsoever). If you run it out of the box I don't expect you to find any problems. Welcome to the club!

Tom

 

The IBM Roadrunner on steroids?

Congrats on your purchase! Sounds like an awesome system. Hope it serves you well and keep us posted on your experience. It'll be a few weeks before I can claim official residency here. Cheers, Kelly

 

As far as I know, the 2630QM simply describes the chip, and not the supporting chipset. IIRC previous posters describe looking for things in the States and having to rely on there being stickers on the case saying "New version" or some such. A few have had to get their stickerless laptops home home and run a couple of tests to be sure that they have the revised version of the chipset.

Try going through some of the posts since about mid-March (when the revised chipset came out) and search the page for the word "sticker" - you should find posters who did, or did not, find one to tell them what they'd got.

You'll also find people with more experience than I have giving advice on what to do.

All I would do is to specify that I intended to buy a laptop with the revised chipset and hope that the dealer's self-interest or local consumer protection laws would see me right.

 

Here's the pic of what you need to look for.

 

Thanks - now all I have to do is to work out how to see over the web!

A propos, does anyone know anything about a UK company called "Asus Laptop" which, their website says, has no direct ties with AsusTek. I like their spec and their price, but would also like to know something about their form.

 

Just wanted to say hello as a new SW owner.

Also for future reference, on Clean installs of Win 7 and LAN issues, use the latest VISTA driver for the Realtek, Family GBE controller..

i had this issue for almost a week and finally found a solution.

 

justa4banger, congrats on your new machine!

Hope you enjoy the experience. This baby packs a lot of punch to it.

 

Hi guys, im new to notebookreview and just recently bought myself the G73SW with the 3D display, 2x 750gb HD's, i7-2630QM, 8GB of ram, and GTX 460M 1.5gb.
Im using the laptop straight out of the box, and was wondering why its a bit sluggish. for example when i power it up, and try open up google chrome, it takes its time to open, same with most other things im trying to run. i was also wondering how i can force it to stay at max cpu processing power, so that its constantly running at 2.9ghz. There are alot of random programs preinstalled i and was wondering what is safe to remove and wont affect my performance. Also was wondering if there is anywhere to find the most uptodate drivers for the laptop. Hoping that once everything is updated and all the junk i dont need is uninstalled everything will run as i hoped it would run.

 

First of all, welcome to the forums. I wouldn't suggest that you keep it at turbo boost, which is at 2.8GHz, since it will generate more heat. Can you check your Power4Gear Hybrid setting? That may be the cause of its sluggish performance.

 

My power4gear has stopped working after an asus update was run. i ran it from Asus Utility/e-Driver.
i was getting a ATK0100 error, and then reinstalled the ATK100 driver from asus's website. dont think its fixed though. Fn+ buttons are not all working right now also.

ok forget the last post, P4G is fixed, and ATK0100 error has gone now. Fn+ buttons all working fine now. I leave the laptop on High Performance all the time, and the bottom of the laptop doesnt get very hot, and the air being pushed out from the fans at the back isnt too hot unless im stressing the laptop with a demanding game. Will taking it off hybrid increase performance?

 

Actually, I think the best performance I got was using the Power4Gear High Performance setting. My basis is Crysis 2 though.

 

Nope, didnt use Live Update, should i give that a try? I used e-Driver which was preinstalled and is part of Asus Utility. I was thinking of downgrading to windows xp 64bit. ive had a much better experience using windows xp, and am not really making use of the 3D display and glasses so i though maybe downgrading to xp will give me a better performance. This Power4Gear and things like that arnt really appealing to me as i use my G73SW as a desktop replacement and preety much always have it plugged into the Mains.

edit: Live Update shows no updates required

 

I wouldn't suggest using XP since I don't think there are drivers for that OS.

 

Also CPU-Z shows idle core speed to be 798.2mhz which is surprisingly slow. Is this normal? it does increase as i increase the processor load, but should it idle at 798mhz?
I also have a print screen of all the programs that came pre-installed, and i need to find out what isn't really needed. May upload a screenshot later as i don't want to uninstall something which was in fact needed and end up causing further problems

 

Mine is the same. But I have the 2820QM. At full speed it goes to 3098Mhz.
Is it normal?

 

Must be normal then if we both are getting the same idle speeds. Thats one crazy laptop you got there gadefer.

edit: can anyone confirm the most upto date nvidia drivers?
im currently using: 267.76 for both 3D vision and Graphics.
Nvidia HD audio driver 1.1.13.1
and PhysX system software 9.10.0514

 

HOT HARDWARE REVIEW

Good morning all, a great G73SW review as I wait for the TNT courier

 

Found something weird with the build quality of the laptop. after having a close look at the keyboard i found that there is an inconsistency. If you look carefully there are two bumps. one is near the F2 and F3 keys, and the other is spread out over the F9, F10, F11 and F12 keys. with your nail if you press behind the F11 key you will probably notice that the plastic isnt fixed well onto the chassis.
i dont know if its just me thats noticed this, has anyone else seen this on their G73SW?

 

2630QM just indicates that it's the Sandy Bridge i7 CPU, Q stands for quad core and I believe M is for mobile. 2630 is the model number of the CPU. I saw a post after this showing the stickers that should be on your laptop showing it's the revised sandy bridge chipset with the fixes.

Tom

 

little "glitch" ive noticed as a heads up on the 3DE models

certain video programs were running really choppy, VLC really choppy even with SD playback, and XBMC as horribly choppy even in the interface. driving me nuts for a bit, and then tried the "disable 3d" button, worked like a charm, everything sped up and smooth sailing after that.

so just remember that's an option to try if you run into unexplainable choppiness

another little tidbit, firefox and IE 9 were running really slow, and i read in another forum to go in the options and "disable graphics acceleration", and that worked like a charm as well, although disabling the 3d works also.

enjoy, i've tried fallout NV and assassins creed brotherhood in 3d, looks ridiculous
just trying to get the setting ironed out. it's trying to run in full up maxed settings upon detection, but 3d chops it up. going piece by piece seeing what i have to get rid of, but makes sense as the GPU has to render x2 images versus 1

you could be running into the problems i described in my post above, try disabling 3d w/ the button and see what happens, also disable graphics acceleration in your browsers, that solved it for me

@ravivarsani

also, one other thing as far as drivers (just got mine yesterday)
make sure you go to the asus site and download the stereoscopic controller driver. I know it works out of the box without, but if you update to the new nvidia driver from their site (which i highly recommend) it will kill the functionality without that steroscopic driver installed first

other than that i didnt mess with too much, straight out of the box and didnt bother w/ a clean wipe. did install the usb3.0 driver as i'd heard thats a good idea, and i did install asus live update, but havent used it yet, mostly just to check every now and then later on down the line, but most of it was up to speed already

 

Yea and remember to get the latest nvidia graphics driver because a new one was released on the 14th i believe. 270.61 is currently the latest.
Ive turned off 3D completely, from the button and from nvidia graphics settings menus. it has helped. browser seems to all be running smoothly now aswel. i havent tried disabling graphics acceleration as everything seems ok now. I need a list of games to grab, preferably Multiplayer online games, but some singleplayer games are also great if anyone recommends any then that would be niceee. im gonna get that stereoscopic controller driver as yesterday i was trying to show someone the 3Dness of the laptop and i couldnt get the glasses to work. Must be due to me upgrading the drivers and missing something out. hopefully thats what i need because the laptop has a built in IR sensor which is required for the glasses to work.

After reinstalling the stereoscopic driver i have still had no success with my 3D vision glasses. i cant seem to connect my glasses to the laptop. the glasses are charged and so turn on and show a green light, however i dont think the laptops IR sensor is picking them up and connecting to them.

 

seems like the new nvidia drivers are bad. With me something simple like playing solitaire is not possible anymore even with 3d disabled.
before with 3d enabled it was working fine. in the settings it states that the program decides if 3d is being activated or not.

for the emitter try to uninstall the usb emitter driver and then manualy install the newest from the nvidia folder. that works for me always.

does anybody know when the new nvidia update will be out cos this one (270) was a bad one.

 

my 270 driver is running well, everything seems fine, solitare opens fine for me? remove all your video drivers including the 3d one and reinstall them. what is happening when u open solitare? whats the problem?
im gonna try reinstall the usb emitter driver, but first i need to find out which one it is

 

If after the nvidia 270 driver upgrade you cant get the glasses to pair, the only way i was able to fix that, was restore the computer (just w/ windows restore) to a point before upgrading the nvidia to 270 package. I had to install the stereoscopic 3d usb driver first, then nvidia, tried it both ways, but that solved it for me

ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download G73SW

(select OS, then it's the first driver under "utilities")

Nvidias offical list
Game with NVIDIA 3D Vision
you just wanna stick to ready or excellent, but i hear its a pretty accurate list

 

i got everything working now, it was the stereoscopic 3d driver that needed reinstalling

 

Hi, I hope you are well, in 4 hours, I will be an official member of the G73sw's owners , then, I've never had a laptop and have never used the windows vista or seven, what do you recommend to be the first thing to do when i turn on the laptop?, fully charge the battery from the computer and then turn it on and use it? , or finish the battery factory and then charge it (on or off)?

Also, what antivirus do you recommend?, what programs are necessary to download; download updates through windows update, asus program or download them directly from the asus website?, any other recommendations?


Sorry for my English. Greetings.

 

Is anyone getting some slowdown with this nb?
I got some in F1 2010. The FPS is just great all the time, but for no reason (at random places) I got some slowdowns. And on the MSI Afterburn I see that they coincide with low GPU Usage.
How can I fix it? I'm using the lastest nVidia Driver (270.61).

Thanks =D

 

the 3D stereoscopic driver has been causing version conflicts:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/6952695-post225.html

 

Hi,

I'm really tempted to buy the G73SW-A1 model from Amazon, but there is a critical point i need to know first:

How does it feel having full-HD in 17.3" display? making it 1600x900 results in blurry unreadable text?

Hoping for a positive answer (if its not too much to ask, please make it with some screenshots), otherwise Im gonna wait until g74 get released and check the reviews. Thanks

 

Ordered a G73SW-A1 from Xotic PC last week, just have to wait for the build time now...

Specs:
i7-2630QM
IC Diamond Thermal Compound
8GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM
Cobalt Blue Backlit Keyboard Modification
Red Afterburner LED Light Package
120GB OCZ Vertex 3
750GB 7200RPM
Advanced-N 6205 Wireless

Can't wait!

Anybody else running the OCZ Vertex 3?

 

IMO, 1920x1080 on a 17.3" screen is the perfect resolution. Not too small really. I haven't seen a 1600x900 version yet so I can't comment on that.

 

Agreed, no idea why you'd want to drop the res, at that point just buy a unit that runs that resolution natively. The screen is HUGE so running 1080P looks just fine on it!

Tom

 

Good to know,

I currently have a 22" desktop in 1080p and it looks awesome, but my worries were than reducing the display in 20% would make it uncomfortable.
The g53 should be getting out of my list then, since 1080p in 15.6" seems like too much for my eyes.

And the question about reducing the resolution its cuz I'm always hearing how reducing native res results in blurry bad display.
This also affects the games textures/sharpness, in case some new game can't be played fine in 1080p?

 

Definitely. But I don't think you should be worrying about this right know.

 

The default text size on smaller resolution is small (100%) and on larger resolution the default text sixe is medium (125%). If this is not enough, it can be increased to large text size (150%) and much larger.

On my Acer Ferrari, I have it as 170%. It is under custom DPI.

However, the models of G73SW sold by Best Buy are 1600 x 900 higest resolutions, with the GPU being 1GB memory, rather than the usaul 1.5GB memory, thus giving lower resolutions.

 

But i only found bad things regarding BB in earlier pages, what kind of replace they offer for the standard panel (HannStar HSD173PUW1)??

Also, what settings do you guys use to play Metro/Crysis/AvP since lowering the res is not a good idea?

 

I play Crysis 2 in extreme settings. Real eye candy.

 

Greetings. Waiting on my first laptop as well. Here are a few links that should help you on your way. Let us know how the beast is treating you. Cheers!

The ASUS Info Booth
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/122632-asus-info-booth-read-before-posting.html

What do you need to check for a new laptop?
http://forum.notebookreview.com/notebook-dummy-guide-articles/149627-what-do-you-need-check-new-laptop.html

Asus Support For G73SW Notebook
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Knowledge G73SW

Best Free Antivirus Software
Best Free Antivirus Software

Asus Bloatware Guide
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/380681-asus-utility-bloatware-guide.html

Guru of 3D
download from Guru3D.com

The SSD Optimization Guide
The SSD Optimization Guide | The SSD Review

Notebook Dummy Guide Articles
Notebook Dummy Guide Articles

 

Are you guys playing Team Fortress 2?
I got some pretty big slow downs at 1080p with everything at high. Is it normal?

 

This thing will play most things at best quality 1080p. Not all, but most, and those it doesn't you don't have to drop quality much. Remember, it IS a laptop after all! I'd go for the 1080p panel, actually, I DID LOL. I got the 3DE, the panel is higher quality than the standard 1080p (which is a very good panel in itself).

 

I'm hopefully ordering an XA1 in a few weeks and I had another quick question. I will be primarily be playing Oblivion, but haven't been able to find much information about how it performs on the G73. From what I've read, Oblivion doesn't really utilize multiple cores, so would performance be subpar considering the relatively low core speed? I'd like to be able to max out graphics and use a small selection of mods, can anyone who's played Oblivion on a G73 tell me if that should that be possible?

 

I am going to purchase the asus g73sw 3de. I was wondering if the upgrade fom the i7 2730qm to the i7 2720qm is worth the money. it was 399 for the upgrade on the site I was looking at. I also wana make sue the Nvidia gtx 460 graphics card is good enough. I'm going to use it mainly for watching movies and gaming (starcraft 2, COD black ops and fallout). I also have never bought a nice gaming laptop before and I dont know if I am using a good website, I was looking at xoticpc. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

One of the great things about the i7 is that if you have a single threaded application and the other cores are idle, the system will overclock the one core considerably to improve performance. In single core applications the CPU will clock over 3GHZ.

Tom

The laptop out of the box should play those games just fine. Your call on the CPU upgrade but for gaming the video card is more important and I'm not sure how much benefit, if any, you would get from a CPU upgrade. The 460m in these laptops fare pretty well, you can find benchmarks on a bunch of sites for the SW and even more for the prior JW version which had the same GPU and should for many games give simliar performance to the SW. Watching movies has no heavy requirements, I play Starcraft2 without issues, and I doubt you'll have any problems with COD. XoticPC has a good reputation, I bought my 3de from them last month.

Tom

 

Is the g73sw-3de capable of duel graphics cards like ive seen in some of these other new laptops? If not is the graphics card upgradeable and is it easy to do myself?

 

Really, its the 3D panel much better, why?
Besides being matte, the 120Hz are more easy with the eyes?

 

when playing in 3D ive noticed 120hz strains the eyes alot less, and im able to play for longer.

has anybody fixed the laggy webcam problem? ive seen alot of people complaining that the webcam has lag. its supposed to be 3megapixel, but its really laggy, like less than 5fps

 

Yes it is and most importantly for me it's a lot brighter as well.

Tom

No it's not. The video card can actually be removed and replaced but there are issues with doing so, look back in this post for more details.

Tom

 

What is the difference between the G73SW-QHDA1-CBIL and the G7SW-A1? The specs I am looking at are identical.

 

Someone???

 

hey gadefer, ill download Team fortress 2 onto my G73SW, and should have it running by tommorow hopefully. are the slowdowns occuring on Multiplayer or Single player? or both?
Ill let you know if im also getting slowdowns.

taking not that your laptop is a beast compared to mine.... im guessing theres a problem with your drivers. because TF2 can run well even on old hardware. ive got a 2.0ghz~2.8ghz i7 2630qm 8gb of ram and the gtx460m 1.5gb. i dont have the SSD either