ASUS N71JQ Owners Lounge

Ok as promised and a day late since UPS didnt deliver until after 7 pm and I was at work all night here are some unboxing pictures...the system is burning the backup discs now so figured it was a good time to try to get this started.

BTW....I love this laptop as soon as I unboxed it....the chocolate brown with the swirl pattern is AWESOME....the keyboard is great as well...not backlit but I never had one that was so not missing anything there. Screen out of the box looks good...will have to play with that. Havent played with sound at all yet.

Here is my basic config....only thing I changed from the standard that GenTech had was to add the IC Diamond cooling.

Optical Drive: 4X Blu-Ray Read/DVDRW Optical Drive
Webcam: Built-in 2.0 MP Webcam
Screen: 17.3 inch 16:9 WXGA+ 1600x900 glossy
Primary Hard Drive: 320GB 7200rpm SATA II
Secondary Hard Drive: 320GB 7200rpm SATA II
Dead Pixel Warranty: Standard Manufacturer Dead Pixel Warranty
Thermal Compound: IC Diamond 24 Carat Thermal Compound on CPU/GPU
CPU: i7-720QM, 1.60~2.80GHz, 2.5 GT/s, 45nm, 6MB, 45W
RAM: 4GB PC3-1066Mhz DDR3 (2GBx2)
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit System Recovery DVD
WiFi: 802.11 Wireless a/b/g/n
Bluetooth: Built-in Bluetooth 2.0
Windows Recovery Disk and Drivers CD: Included
30 days Zero Bright Dot Guaranteed: Yes through Asus
Packaging: Shipping with Double Box
Warranty: Asus 2 Year Limited Global Warranty
Accidental Damage Warranty (ADW): http://adw.asus.com
GPU: ATI HD5730 1GB GDDR3, DX11

 

Some more pics...

 

It's funny how one of the first things you did was take it apart. You gonna run it in RAID 0 (more dangerous to your data, but safe if you have a backup drive)?

 

Let me know what you want run and I will get it done for ya after I burn my disks....

Haha ya just the access panels...not brave enough to rip it completely apart yet heh.....

Raid - Nope just gonna use one for OS and programs and the other for data....long term plan is to replace the 1st drive with a SSD when they get a easier to swallow price wise and the 2nd drive if/when I ever want more storage.

Coming from a laptop with a total of 180 gb I think I should be good for a bit.

 

Congratulations!!! My in on transit in my city, on the delivery truck, so it should arrive pretty darn soon I think. The pictures look so great!!!

 

Sounds like a good plan. I really wanna do RAID. I'll take my 750GB out of my desktop and use it as a backup. Though I work with video files a bit, so it kinda makes sense for me to want a lot of HDD bandwidth.

I dunno if your RAID controller supports it, but you might be able to use something called JBOD (just a bunch of disks) to combine the two drives into one. I'm pretty sure it's fault tolerant (though you'd want to look into that) and would give you one big 640GB C:\ rather than two 320's. Though I definitely understand wanting to keep them separate.

I think most of us are curious about temps... specifically temps under load. The N71JQ should behave better under heat than the N61JQ since Asus is really good at using extra space to add ventilation.

 

Ya I think my wife thought I was crazy taking pictures of everything like that so I had to explain that I promised here to post some pics as soon as I got it.....btw burning the recovery disks is painfully slow!

Ya want to keep the drives seperate...would have gotten a smaller drive for the 1st one if it was an option and I'm sure I will waste alot of space on that drive for now.

Yup temps are important no doubt....I dont usually run benchmarking stuff so give me a list of what you want to see and I'll do my best to get it all done by tonight.

Have to sleep sometime as I just got off a 12 hour graveyard shift a few hours ago

 

Thanks for the pics and offering to run tests. Here's what would be good (imho):

• Passmark Performance Test Mostly of the memory, since we've seen the GPU and CPU tests from the N61JQ in other threads
• Crysis Demo with Fraps... If you could post whatever settings you use (the default is fine) with the native resolution (1600x900) and give us an idea of your framerate... plus temps while playing. I dunno what program people are using to track temperatures, though.
• CPU temps during some sort of stress test. I haven't done stress testing in a while, though, so I'm not sure what would be best to use.

 

Once I get the disks burned and the bloat off as best I can I'll start running some programs then.....if I disappear for 6 or so hours its my sleep cycle heh

Keep letting me know any questions you have or tests to run.

Didnt remove the bloat yet but here is Passmark results:

and Windows 7 Rating:

 

im in for one

thx cookieofdoom for linking the official thread for owners...

cant wait for mine to come in...sigh my eta is a few weeks

just missed the last one by a day

 

Looks like it gets a slightly better memory/CPU score than the N61JQ-X1

 

CPUZ - 1333 memory even tho the box says otherwise....good stuff

 

How is the build quality of this item? and are there any heating issues?

 

Compared to my Toshiba P105 that I owned for 3-4 years this thing is built like a tank.....feels very sturdy....keyboard is rock solid for me....love the chicklet style keyboard.

I havent ran anything too demanding...downloading crysis demo, vantage and 3dmark right now but the entire thing is cool as a cucumber so far with some warm air coming out the left side.

4 hours idle downloading, burning dvd's, and webpages:

 

Those temps seem lower than the N61jq

 

@ tarlyn

Can you please tell me which WLAN card is built into this device?

I want to oder it today from Gentech.

 

They are, but he's also using IC Diamond 7... I don't think we have any temps from an N61JQ with IC Diamond 7.

 

Network Adapter Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter

Straight from Everest

I know Xotic is offering a swap to the 5100 card from Intel.....I just stuck with the standard one.

 

Thanks.

I wonder if a 5300 half-mini could also fit into this device?

 

Could you post a picture of the desktop with the screen on? Also one with the main page of this forum open in an internet browser ( not maximized )

Cheers!

 

Crysis Demo for about 30 mins on Native No AA roughly 18-19 fps

Temps after:

 

Very nice, and very useful. Thanks.

 

Um like this?

 

Concerning the intel 5300 card, I have found the answer already.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=455111

It seems that N71Jq has only two antennas.

@ tarlyn

You had already a look inside the notebook. Did you see if there is a third antenna there?
Sometime ASUS install three antennas but one would be left unconnected.

For 5300 to work at full potential it needs 3 antennas.

 

Yup, perfect just wanted to gauge how much more real estate there is on the N71 vs N61. Seems I need to wait ( even longer ) for Asus to start shipping these things over here.

 

This is gonna sound stupid, but I dont have rewritable DVD's for my recovery, should i make a recovery partition? Which do I do?

 

The safest thing to do is to get some DVD's. Things could get annoying if the drive with the recovery partition dies.

 

As far as I know ASUS usually has the complete operating system on the recovery DVD. The drivers are on the driver disk.

So usually there should not be a problem if the hard disk dies.

 

First thoughts

1. Very very quiet, I barely hear a noise compared to my rumbley ThinkPad
2. Seems to be fast, although haven't had a chance to do much
3. Solid construction. I haven't carried it around much, but I notice minimal flex all over, and it looks great
4. The whole computer loos beautiful, from the back design to the matte keyboard and palmrest (a huge plus), and the screen looks great, super glossy
5. I love the start-up
5. I feel a lot of heat from the left side vent and above/below it, but not so much anywhere else yet. I do have a cooler to use with it once my ThinkPad is shut down so that could change things.
6. The powerbrick is HUGE! haha it's a beast
7. I think the screen looks really nice, and is completely different from my matte ThinkPad and matte Dell widescreen monitor for my PC. I hope I am happy with the res, but so far I think it looks just great. If you are worried about it, I wouldn't be, and at first I thought I would.

Overall, very happy so far with it! I have pics to come once I have the thing all loaded up and configured. I don't have a card reader on my current lappy, so I'm going to try out the one on my new one! Yay!

 

Thanks for the review.

How do you rate the sound and the touchpad?

You may also want to try the tweak below----

 

I like the touchpad, it does flex a bit while typing, but it's new to me, I've never used chiclet before in my life. Similarly, I've never really used a touchpad as I relied on my TrackPoint on my ThinkPad for the past 4.5 years! But I tweaked settings and so far it's been really nice.

As for sound, I am about to try, hadn't gotten around to it yet! I'm still trying to figure out why my C drive was my recovery partition, and now everything else is saving to it instead of the 2 other drives I partitioned out (D and E). I'll figure it out eventually. This is just a gigantic learning curve for me with W7 I've never used, chiclet keyboard, touchpad, two HDD, built in camera, etc. SO many things I've never had the pleasure of having before!

EDIT: The sound is darn good for being a laptop, and you can tell there's a sub, it improves the lows amazingly compared to other systems I have heard. I still think it's quiet though, weirdly when singing comes in? I did Donald's fix and it helped but the sound seems to come and go, weird.

 

Just received mine. I could NOT do a Bios RAID with this laptop, did not find the option.
There is However the UEFI option in the bios which im testing right now. I just wiped both hdd and enabled UEFI in bios, windows installed and is now booting for the first time.

First impressions :
1)Seems solid, nice keyboard, dont like the clicking sound on the mouse pad tho
2)mine is definetely black, not brown unless im getting colourblind lol
3) i tried removing all screws on the bottom but i think you need to remove the keyboard to remove the bottom to gain access to the GPU/CPU to change the thermal paste.
4) did a quick Prime95 before i reformatted and got to 75 degrees on stock paste.
5)The sound of the intergrated speakers are horrible as of yet, didnt mess around with the settings much but didn't sound good compared to the Studio XPS i just tried.

Ill keep yall posted, ask questions if you want !

 

How long did you run Prime95?

 

about 10 minutes 8 threads will do more testing after i get all these drivers installed

I can also confirm that there is Throttling while on Battery. No throttling occurs while the laptop is plugged !!

This was posted somewhere else but i tought i'd confirm.

And man, this thing is Fast as hell, i've been unzipping the drivers with winrar x64 and wow, it really flies !

 

Good to know. Sounds like 75 is probably the top for CPU intensive things. That doesn't sound unreasonable at all with a laptop. Tarlyn got to 72 playing Crysis for 30 minutes (with the IC Diamond stuff). All in all it sounds like the unit runs cooler than the N61JQ.

 

How bad does it throttle on battery, does it get a locked multiplier and ghz?

 

which i guess, was expected, as it has more room for cooling

 

I just ordered mine from Gentech.

I took all standard things except that I opted out for intel WIFI 5100 instead of the aethoros WLAN.

Ken confirmed that this only has two antennas so 5300 cannot be used.

I will in the future replace 5100 with Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200 when they become available at ebay.

I will replace the secandory 320GB 7200rpm harddsik with a 500GB Seagate 7200rpm myself. I have one that I am currently using in my M50Vm.

 

One thing i don't like is how the fan stops and then goes noisy, then stops, then noisy every 30 seconds or so. it's like there is no middle point where it just stays quiet but still runs.

I really want to put the thermal paste on it but i dunno how to fully remove the bottom cover. Anyone that has done it can send me some directions/tips on how to do it ?

Jp

 

I've got no idea, but you might try PMing one of the resellers. They do it all the time.

 

I think you will void your warranty if you do it on your own, but I'm not positive.

 

Hrmm I guess I am kinda used to noise with 3 boys running around and my color wheel on my DLP needing replaced but I can barely ever even hear the fan....unless I am specifically thinking "Is the fan running right now?" I never even notice it turning on and off.

Technically yes that would void your warranty since you would have to remove the neat little sticker to get to it. 5150Joker (the AW freak) was on the G73 thread and even posted an email he received from ASUS saying that even if you messed with the CPU if the issue you were having was not related to the CPU they would still warranty it but of course you would be taking a risk since the policy says they wont.

So do at your own risk with a hope that everything would still be covered but for sure any issues with the CPU would not be warrantied if you did it.

If it matters to anyone I just ran the Memtest86+ and the ram was Kingston 1333 and even after 57 mins of that running the keyboard was still barely even warm and only in the upper left near the exhaust.

Love the cooling of this laptop so far.

 

I just put my N71 order in yesterday with Powernotebooks. Added 160 GB SSD and Intel 5100.

Does anyone have a battery life estimate yet?

 

Hrmm havent done it yet but I suppose I could....I'll unplug now and do it....will do full screen brightness first on High Performance and then will do it on the energy saver plan with lowest screen brightness.

Ok on High Performance settings and the screened turned all the way up I got 90 mins out of it before it had 5% left and saved windows to hibernate.

This was doing things like email....surfing webpages...installing/removing programs.

Will recharge battery and do the energy saving settings with lowest screen setting to see how it compares.

Battery time on energy saver settings with lowest screen setting was 2 and half hours.

Vantage Score - 6268 PCMarks

Going to attempt to OC the GPU with AMD GPU Tools 0.9.26 as another user had great results with it.....will let you know what I am able to do.

Ok after way too many hours of adjusting this is the best I could come up with:

Speed 780 Memory 1000



About 1500 points better then stock.

New PC Mark Score under same settings:



Passmark Results:

 

Thanks tarlyn, +rep added.

 

Ok last one...Crysis Bench all High Settings at 1023x768

Thanks been up all night messing around....

Off to bed then SuperBowl!!

 

crysis benchies are amazing

 

I would love if you could put up a youtube video of it running tarlyn Just opening and closing some apps on the desktop and games, plus a 360 to show ports etc?

 

Thanks for the info bro...I passed it along to the N61JQ owners also.

 

Yeah thanks for the info in the N61JQ lounge tbrocato. Those scores are a lot better than I expected out of this GPU. And I'm even more surprised that this can play Crysis so fluidly at such high settings.