ASUS N56DP Review and Owner's Lounge

My personal review and comments on the ASUS N56DP-dh11, which is the AMD version of the N56VZ (Excellent and lengthy N56vz thread):

Pros:

• First, as one of the few AMD Trinity notebooks with a matte 1080p IPS LCD, the screen looks very nice, excellent image quality. Note: there is a lower-priced N56DP-BH11 model with a lower-res screen.
• Build quality is good, there's no flexing or creaking to the chassis. Sharp-looking industrial design.
• Sound quality is outstanding, especially with the subwoofer plugged in.

Cons:

• Only one Mini pci-e connector internally (occupied by Wifi card), so no room for internal Cellular card or mSATA upgrade.
• Power brick is on the chunky side. It's the sort of detail you don't notice until you have to start moving it around.

Mixed:

• Some people will like the oversize trackpad, but it is very easy to brush against it when typing, causing random jumps and erratic behavior; I just use a wireless mouse and leave it disabled.
• The Chiclet-style keyboard may be a plus or minus depending on personal preferences, but everyone's using them these days. At least it's nicely backlit.

Other comments:

I was able to replace the default single-band AR5B22 Atheros card with an upgrade to a generic dual-band Atheros AR5B22 off eBay (Yes, apparently the same model comes in two different versions). The replacement does a/b/g/n + Bluetooth, and was available very cheaply ($16 off eBay). No additional drivers were needed (I uninstalled the drivers prior to installation, and let Windows 8 find the new card automatically), and no BIOS whitelist issues.

The AMD Mobility Radeon Verification Tool indicates the N56DP is compatible with generic Catalyst drivers; it was, but afterwards the brightness controls glitched (fixed with a registry edit).

Hard drive feels a little pokey, going to try swapping it out with a Momentus XT SSHD I have lying around.

In the AMD Richland Upgrade thread, there are reports that Trinity notebooks can be successfully upgraded to Richland CPUs; didn't see any reports yet of attempts using the N56DP. But, it's something to consider for the future.

Also, at the time of this review Microcenter is selling the ASUS N56DH-dp11 new for $499, cheapest price I've seen: ASUS N56DP-DH11 15.6" Laptop Computer - Black N56DP-DH11 - Micro Center

 

For what it is, this is a great little machine. I picked on up this summer for $599 for the express purpose of running linux on it. It's mostly good under Ubuntu 12.04. I'm gonna try 13.04 or 13.10 on it and see if that fixes the few remaining issues. The good news is that in 12.04 most everything just works, except the subwoofer. There's a bug on the ubuntu bug tracker with a work around for that. Note that while technically ubuntu supports secure booting I had to turn it off to get this thing installed with linux, and just threw away the windows OS as this machine is a dedicated work box anyway. My gaming laptop is an N56VZ so it's easy to switch between them since they're essentially the same from the outside.

I hope that with Ubuntu 13.04 or 13.10 or maybe later next year with 14.04 gfx switching and steam gaming will just work.

It's a shame this machine wasn't more popular.

 

Update. It is now running 13.10 and everything works quite well now, except the subwoofer. Something in the 12.04 to 12.10 upgrade broke it and it hasn't worked since.

But otherwise 13.10 is an improvement. Video works much better, function keys all work (the screen switch key used to hand all function keys in an unusuable state).

 

Did anyone up grade to a newer faster CPu yet? Also what about ram... I'd like to get some faster ram.

 

I upgraded my CPU to AMD-A10-5750m from ebay 6 months ago. Its working just perfect and also i am able to use AMD Smart Gesture, AMD Face Login and AMD Screen Mirror.
5750m is supporting 1866mhz Ram but when i try GSKILL 8GB RipjawsX DDR3 1866MHz CL10 Notebook Ram it works as 1600mhz. Some people said that Kingston Ram is working at 1866Mhz but
i cant try that because i can't find this product in Turkey. If anyone confirms that, i want to upgrade my rams to 8*2 1866mhz ram.
Also Amd Wireless Display is not working for me? Anyone knows something about it? Problem is my Wifi? Any product recommendation to replace wifi?

 

I do own an ASUS N56DP but the APU is the A8-4500 paired whit the HD7730m, has been looking in to upgrade to the A10-5750 but is unshure if the bios will recognise the A10-5750.

Is your N56DP recognise the A10-5750?
And if so, what bios revision is you using?

Frankly I can not understand why the bios in your N56DP is not recognise your 1866MHz ram, if the A10-5750 is recognized.

For the WIFI...
I did/do not know abouth the AMD Wireless Display, was looking for it since I read abouth your upgrade. Maybe my error as I has Win 8.1 as I upgrade from Win 8.0 directly when I got the PC.
Annyhow, I first noticed that the WIFI indicator in front of touthpad was not indicating any WIFI. The WIFI was turned on and I had internet and everything, but the indicator was off. That changed when I changed the bandwith from 20MHz to 40MHz in the routher, strange... Do not know why!

 

Just posting an update, I recently updated my N56DP to Windows 10. Everything appears to be working correctly, although the screen brightness controls glitched again, defaulting the LCD to low brightness. This was corrected using the same registry edit as before.

 

Update: Installed the Windows 10 Anniversary Edition update. Broke the screen brightness again, to fix it the brightness controls, I had to first re-install the AMD Catalyst drivers, then do the registry edit (trying to edit the registry first before a Catalyst re-install didn't work).

Update also broke the Function Key to enable/disable the trackpad. To fix that, I had to un-install and re-install the ASUS Smart Gesture utility, which is found on the ASUS website page for N56DP drivers (I used the version for Windows 8).

Also, I upgraded the hard drive to a Micron-brand SSD. Very nice speed upgrade, faster boots and overall my computer feels more responsive.