ASUS N71JQ Owners Lounge

This vibration sound near the touchpad seems to be coming from Hard disk. On mine the primary HDD did the same. I had it replaced by ASUS.
I removed it and RMAed it. ASUS sent me a new one.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-reviews-owners-lounges/456659-asus-n61jq-owners-lounge-388.html
links for a new wlan driver in the n61jq section. works fine on n71jq as same card

 

You can also find some new drivers for some other devices on the first page of N61JQ lounge:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-reviews-owners-lounges/456659-asus-n61jq-owners-lounge.html

The guys at N61JQ Lounge are very active.

 

Does anyone know if the N71JQ-X2 at Costco has dual 320GB 7200 drives?

 

I was told by one of the Asus resellers that the X1 an X2 models have single hard drives. I have not seen one of these models myself.

 

i think its similar to the X1 and only has a single drive.

 

Yes it does have dual 320GB hard drives. The only difference that I know of is that the X2 does not have BlueRay. I have one and if there is anything else you need to know just ask.

 

Thanks, I was hoping that was the case.

I just ordered the X2.

 

Hello,
can anybody tell me, how long the battery (6cell, 4.4Ah) lasts, when using the notebook for web-surfing/office work?
I've already read through all the pages, but couldn't find that Information.

 

Burner w/ TDK DVD DL does not work!!! Please post if you have any success with any other disc - I should have gotten verbatum. Using Imgburn 2.51.

 

Hello,

I was just wondering if anyone here plays the sims 3, and can tell me if it runs smoothly with all settings maxed out on this particular laptop? Thanks!

 

On which drive are you having problems?
Is it LG CT21N Super Multi drive?

On my N71JQ with LG CT21N, I have not tested with double layer burning so far, but I will try to test it for you soon.

 

New beta BIOS sent to Turbogear for testing, if it does fixed the FN+F1 and fan speed issues I'll post the BIOS here.

 

As usual thanks Ken for helping us.

I flashed the bios.
Here are my testing results:
1- The Fn+Esc key problem is fixed.
2- The fan cycling between 100rpm/3300rpm when idle is still there.
3- In the old bios v205 there was "ASUS EASY OVER-CLOCK" feature. This feature is removed.
I wonder why they removed it. I had it ON on v205 all the time and it caused no problems or overheating.

The fan profile is much worse than before.
Under CPU stress test, now the fan hovers at 3400rpm until all the cores of CPU reaches 81°C and then it blasts to 4000rpm. It stays at 4000rmp until temperature is little bit lower than 80°C and then it slow down to 3300rpm again. In effect it keeps CPU temps at 80°C or higher when under load.

I think ASUS misinterpreted our fan noise problem.
The problem was the fan cycling between 100rpm/3300 rpm when idle or at light loads.
They made the fan profile more nonlinear under full load.

With v205 the fan went up more linearly from 3300rpm to 5200rpm as temperature went from idle around 54°C to upward direction.
It did not stay at 3400rpm and allowed the CPU to reach 81°C before going to higher speeds.

Please Ken report it back to ASUS.
The problems that need to be resolved are:
1- Fan still cycles frequently between 100rpm/3300rmp at idle.
2- Fan does not go to higher speed until CPU reaches 81°C under full load.
3- I think "ASUS EASY OVER-CLOCK" was not to be blamed and should be brought back. Besides, it could be turned off in bios if somebody does not want it.

I think the fan turning on/off every few seconds when idle is smaller problem than CPU always heated up to 81°C when under full load before the fan goes higher than 3400rpm. With v205, even with 5% over clocking turned ON in bios the CPU temperatures were lower.

 

Great - Thanks!!!

 

Bummer that the new BIOS did not resolve the fan issue. Right now I'm glad I waited for this to be resolved before ordering. I do hope they'll get it right soon!

 

Hi Ken,
Now I am back on bios v205.

As indicated before the v206 solves the Fn+Esc problem, but does not solve fan frequently cycling between 100rpm/3300rmp problem.

The v206 makes the CPU run hotter.

When under CPU tress test the v205 makes fan go above 3400rpm faster. It does not allow the CPU to heat up that much as with v206.

The v206 makes the fan stays at 3400rpm until every single CPU core is above 80°C. Under my stress test this required about 2 to 2.5 minutes.
With v205 fan speed goes higher than 3400rmp when at least one core goes to temperature higher than 80°C. Under the stress test this required about 40 to 50 seconds

With v205 the fan also stays at around 4000rpm longer after the CPU stress is removed thus making the CPU cool faster.

In my opinion v206 can cause heating problems.

I think v205 was better for use with CPU under full load.
What is need is to solve the fan cycling 100rpm/3300rpm when idle or at light CPU loads without changing the fan profile under full load.

 

Thanks Turbogear for testing the beta BIOS, I already forward your feedback to Asus and let's hope they'll get it right this time.

 

They will solve it soon.
What they released is a beta bios.
This is to be tested and reported back so that they can work further on resolving the issue.

The new bios does indicate that ASUS took steps to solve the problem. In the beta bios it is always like this that you will need couple of revisions before a final bios is ready.

 

Thanks Ken.

Still this bios is a good indication that they are working on the fan issue.

 

Thanks Turbogear.....that's good to know as I'm new to all of this.

 

I personally am very happy with my N71JQ-A1 even with the fan issue. The fan is not laud enough to be a deal breaker in my opinion. Also it only cycles on and off when you are not doing anything. When the machine is under load then it runs constantly, so unless you are using the laptop for a photoframe it just is not a big deal.

Just my opinion

Dave

 

Turbo,

Please make sure to let ASUS know that many of their paying customers would really like to have the OC options. This is more important to me than fixing the fan issue. At least one of our members has returned his laptop due to the lack of OC options.

It may be that they are just segregating features in the test builds to make debugging easier, but we need to let them know just to make sure.

All they really need to do to fix the fan issue is to set the bottom rpm in the fan profiles to something more like 1500 rpm in stead of 300 rpm. This would keep things cool enough so that fan speed changes would happen less often. 300 rpms is just too close to off.

Thanks for your good work

Dave

 

Yes, I reported that to Ken already.
Hopefully, they will put this feature back in the final version.

The OC feature is really nice.
I would also be disappointed if they remove it from the final bios version.

 

Thanks Rex.

I have read this entire thread and was getting ready to post a question on whether to send my N71 back to newegg where I bought it or to Asus for it's problems. I saw your post and called Asus to see what they reccommend and they just set me up with a RMA and a repair facility in my state(Indiana). I was still emailing back and forth with newegg. I guess Asus will take care of it. It only took a few phone menus to get to a live person and she was very helpful. Since I already did a recovery from the HD partition they said they would have to look at it.

The problems:
1. I have the fan issue. I found it odd that when I do a recovery the fan runs a nice even speed and then when it is done and windows starts up it starts cycling again. I also tried uninstalling stuff like Dave did (Power4Gear etc.) with no avail.

2. I believe I have a thermal issue. I never ran it that long while I was trying to get it setup and then finally I got a blue screen and it said unexpected shut down crash whatever. I then noticed that it would only run 2-4 hrs at basically idle before it would crash. Then I would start it up and just let it run the welcome demo and it would freeze after 45 min. If I restarted it immediatley it would freeze after 15 min. and I restarted it one more time and it froze after about 5 min. This is why I believe it is a thermal issue. I don't have any software on it to see the temps, but it is what I figure.

Thanks for all your help.

 

So does anyone else have the constant blinking HDD light (about once per second)?

 

Mine does that sometimes, usually when I first fire it up and let it sit. This is a Windows thing not a H/W problem. Windows does a lot of things in the background. I see it on other computers too.

I would not worry about

Dave

 

I've heard a lot of talk recently about the fan issue. Is it really that bad, across the board on all of the N71's, or are just a few having that problem?

Someone who has a Dell Studio described the nose from their laptop as sounding like a hair dryer on high all the time. That would annoy me, but I'm wondering if it's that bad on those who have fan noise on the N71.

 

Yeah; that needs to go back to ASUS. It could be a number of things. It is good that you are sending it back to ASUS, because they need to be aware of it. It sounds like either the hd or graphics card is marginal and fails when it comes up to temp.

NewEgg would just send you another one right away, but who knows what if anything gets back to ASUS. Based on Rex's feedback, you should get it resolved quickly.

Dave

 

I have worked on a couple of Dell Studio XPS laptops and the fan on them is much louder. I think hairdryer is about right. The Dell fan is not variable speed, it is just on or off. It cycles just as much as the ASUS, but it is louder. It is just like my old Sagar which was a great laptop except the fan noise was just too much.

For me the fan issue on the ASUS is not a big deal, because it is not that loud in the first place. From what I have read they all have it tho. When you are doing things on the laptop it runs more consistently and is not loud enough to be anoying.

Personally; I think some people are being to picky on this issue.

Dave

 

Thanks, Good to know.

 

After working with Turbogear regarding the fan speed issue I decided to post the beta BIOS 206 for people to test it:

http://www.gentechpc.com/Asus/N71JqAS206.zip

It's still beta but doesn't seem to fix the fan speed issue, so I encourage everyone who has the same issue to flash the beta BIOS and post your results so I can collect the information and send to Asus.

The good thing is it does fixed the FN+F1 issue.

 

I also want to enourage people to flash it so that we can help ASUS to fix this fan problem.

It would be interesting to see how is the fan behaving after you flash it.

It would also be nice if some of you can run some CPU stress tests before and after flashing the new bios.

In my CPU stress tests, the fan ran slower (at 3400rmp) for a longer time before jumping to 4000rpm which allowed the CPU temps go higher than with v205.

 

I am hesitating to get Asus N71JQ with i7 or (due to heat and noise) N71JA with i5.
Can anyone please report how big difference is between those two models in reality?
Is N71JA with Core i5 much more quiet with normal work and under load?

Thank you for the answers

 

The fan issue is not about heat or noise. It is about how often the fan switches on and off, or even more correctly how often it jumps from 300 rpm to 3300 rpm. I would be very happy with it if it stayed at 3300 rpms during no load conditions. Most if not all of the noise you hear is air moveing rather than the whine of a fan that is running at to many rpms. Go listen to the ASUS laptops at Bestbuy, the N71JQ is no loader than any of them. Buy from amazon.com or J&R.com they will let you return it if you are not satisified.

Best of luck

Dave

 

Is there a master package somewhere that would have all the drivers needed for XP?

 

People,

After 2 weeks of using the N71JQ the cyclic fan issue wasn't really obvious to me, so I have been monitoring its behaviour in Everest. This is how the CPU temp (deg.C) relates to the fan rpm in my system:

55C -> 100 rpm
58C -> 2200/2300 rpm
60C -> 3300 rpm
75C -> 4000 rpm
ca. 68C -> 3300 rpm
58C -> 2200/2300 rpm
etc.

When the computer is not used (only a few basis background processes running) it may reach 55C every minute or so and switch off the fan, however it will take only a couple of secs to reach 58C again and go to 2200 rpm. Noise level is still very low at that speed (Seagate 5400 HD is "louder"). At light usage the CPU temp is usually around 58C. At normal use, office stuff simultaneously, it will often switch nonperiodically between 2200 and 3300 rpm, triggered by the CPU temp/activity.

It sounds like some of you don't have the 2200/2300 rpm "silent mode"? I will leave it up to you experts to draw conclusions, but let me know if you need more info or whatever.

Here's my specs:
ASUS N71JQ-TY002X
2x 500gb 5400 seagate
4GB 1333MHz
and the "usual" beasty stuff , no blue ray
Bios 204
Window 7 Professional pre-installed
No clean install but removed most of the bloatware (kept P4G Hybrid)
Newest drivers including catalist 10.4


A few intermediate steps between 2200 and 3300 and/or a bit more spread in the start-up temps would be preferable I think, since it keeps switching at 60-58-60-58 etc now..

 

Thank you very much for the valuable information.
I will ask Ken to look at this and report it to ASUS.
It seems that some of the machines are behaving differently than the others.

My N71JQ is missing this 2200/2300 rpm mode.

 

I observed the CPU temps on mine and with 55°C my notebook already jumps to 3300rmp.
The fan drops down to 100rpm only when the GPU temperatures goes below 57°C.

The normal GPU temperatures on mine when no external monitor is connected and no 3D task is between 57°C and 60°C.
GPU temperatures with external monitor (1920x1200) connected is between 59°C and 62°C.
The fan remains at 3300°C almost all the time when GPU temps are above 58°C.

I am starting to wonder if this whole noise could be due to GPU temperatures?
Could it be that many of our notebooks have some problem with cooling the GPU?

@PaulW
Can you please report your GPU temperatures in the normal use?

Especially when the fan is running around 2200rpm.

This would be very helpful to see if actually the GPU is behind the 100rpm/3300rmp fan switching.

 

You may be on to something here...

GPU temps (measured in CPU-Z) at 2200 rpm are between 54 and 57C when no 3D tasks are performed. At 57C the fan often goes to 3300 rpm, but this may also be (partly) due to the CPU which becomes about 60C there. At this rpm level the CPU temp often drops to about 55 without switching to 2200 rpm.

When the CPU temp increases to 75C in the stress test, the GPU heats up to about 64C, above that the temperature difference between the two will continue to be approx. 10 degrees.

Now my readings may be off be a degree or so, but it seems reasonable that both processors are driving the fan speeds, so a GPU problem may well be the cause...


Also, just for the fun of it, I overclocked the GPU from 650 to 800 MHz (processor) and 800 to 1000 MHz (memory) as in OCFreak's thread about the N71JA. No problems after 6 hours of Prime95 and a minor increase in temperature (max GPU temp during 3Dmark06 71 vs 72 degrees C).

Now I don't know how it will be after hours of gaming, I don't know much about gaming or OCing for that matter, so does anyone knows what a maximum acceptable GPU temperature is? I hate to burn this baby down..

The result:

 

Thanks PaulW for the info.
In my notebook the GPU temperarure never goes below 56°C.

I am starting suspect that there could be a thermal problems on some of the notebooks that are experiencing these fan problems.

Maybe some manufacturing issue. Maybe ASUS has not applied thermal past well enough.

I ran FurMark and within 4 minutes the GPU temperature was at 81°C and CPU at 74°C. The fan speed went up to 4200rpm.

@PaulW
Can you please test with Furmark (without OCing the GPU)?
It would be interesting to see how the GPU temperature varies.

Edited:
I run Furmark stability test for about 25 minutes the GPU temperature started to go up until 84°C (in about 15 minutes) and the fan was at 4200rpm.
After that the temperature went up to 86°C and fan ran at 4500rpm. Then the temperature stabilized at 84°C and the fan ran always at 4500rpm.

Thanks for all the tests. Your results are of very high value here.

 

GPU temps as high as 100 C or even more should not be a problem since the hardware is made to handle it, but personally I prefer i GPU temps are below 90 C.

I'd say you are perfectly safe with your temps.

 

Thanks for the info OC-Freak!


Turbo, there's clearly something going on, because this is what I got:

Time - CPU --- GPU --- RPM
0 ----- 57 ----- 55* --- 2300
1:45 -- 74 ----- 71 ---- 4000

A few seconds later the temps stabilise to 69C GPU and 71C+-2 CPU, fan keeps rotating at 4000 RPM.

*Min reported CPU temp in FurMark was 61C

Room temperature was 18 degrees

Hope this is helpful.

Edit: test duration was 15 mins.

 

So, i did a little testing myself, and came to similar conclusions. I think the GPU is the culprit, havent monitored during any gaming just web browsing and some hulu HD streaming, and whenever it hit 57ish it would ramp up to 3300-3400 and once it hit 55 it would wind down to 100, but never really stayed there since the GPU was mostly at 57-58.
...
this is from going from a sleep state to about a hour of playing dragon age and then just web browsing, a few days ago. and I do use a cooler.

 

Thanks a lot. :smile:
Yes, it really helps.

That's a big difference in the GPU temperatures.
I did testing at 22°C room temperature, but still the results should not be that different.

I hope these are no thermal problems on some of the N71JQ notebooks.

 

Yes it looks like the GPU on our notebooks is running too hot.
Now we have to find out why.
I hope we have not to send the notebooks back to ASUS.

 

I don't think its running too hot, I think its not properly utilizing the cooling fans, maybe its something that AMD could address in a driver or firmware update.

I really have no desire to to send it back to ASUS.

I have no issues with lockups or GSODs or any other issues that are related to the GPU or catalyst 10.4, (unlike I hear g73 owners have been having)

 

I ran Furmark for 15 minutes and my gpu got to 90 with fan at 4500 but according to everest the gpu fan is constantly at 30%.

 

my everest says the same thing, always @ 30%

what exactly does that mean? can it be changed? should it be higher/lower?

 

No the GPU has no separate fan. The GPU and CPU has the same fan.
I don't know what everest means by 30%.