ASUS N71JQ Owners Lounge

I am also waiting on the resolution of this fan issue.

 

I hope they are listening! Please do contact ASUS directly with your questions/complaints, a little pressuring never hurts.

Recap of the issue:
A constant switching of the fan speed between 3300 rpm and 100 rpm/off, with a period of a couple of seconds. There's no intermediate fan speed level of 2200 rpm, which is the normal quiet fan speed in other N71jQs.

This issue happens with some people in every bios version, with some only during bios v205 and v206, and possibly not at all with other owners. ASUS seems to be unable to reproduce it in any of the bioses.


PS. A regular switching between 2200 and 3300 rpm with a period of about a minute is normal, this is not the on/off issue, but happens sometimes when the laptop is under medium use.

 

i wonder if this fan issue may do with manufacture date, it seems only recent owners are having the issue, I don't think I have seen anyone that has had there N71 longer than 3+ months have the issue.

 

That is true. My X2 from CostCo has 2 320 GB, 7200 RPM HDDs. As a bonus it also came with 1333 MHZ memory . As far as I can tell the only thing different from the A1 is no blue ray drive.


Mine also has the fan issue, but I don't really notice it anymore.

This machine has been able to run everything I throw at it (music production, no games) and I have been very happy with it. Plus CostCo has a 90 day return policy on notebooks so no worries there.

GGM

 

Well I have to admint I am ready to drop out of the N71 owners club. I got quick chance to see how my laptop is running after being repaired and it is no better than before I sent it in 3 weeks ago. The fan cycle seems to be a little less severe, but it is still locking up just running the Flash Welcome demo. I installed CPUID HWMonitor (1.16) just to get some idea of temps and it doesn't look like it is over heating. I am surprised ASUS INDY could not fix this problem. I told them this specific situation of how it was crashing and it still does it. How hard of test is it to let it play it's own welcome demo. Not to mention I was very dissapointed in there packaging when they returned it to me. I sent it to them in the original box from Newegg and packed well. They returned it in just the retail box, which got beat up in the process.
I really hope there is some way to get my money back and be done with this laptop. I guess I just got a bad one. I will wait until after the holiday weekend to contact ASUS again.
I am attaching a screen shot of when it locked up and a pic of the shipped box.

 

SAME HERE!

 

No I think that is not the case as mine is from the first batch. I bought it when they first came out back at start of February.
On the contrary I believe the first ones seem to have this problem more often than the later ones.

Ken told me he is waiting for a reponce from ASUS HQ concerning what they are doing with repect to this issue.

I still encourage someone from USA owners who has this problem to contact Ken Lee and agree to sending his notebook back to ASUS so that they can investigate the issue.

 

I got mine at the end of march, and it has a feb 2010 manufactured date on the sticker on the bottom. so thats not the case, mine may be a first batch N71, too.

the fan issue doesn't bother me, but would be nice to have it fixed. I haven't had any other issues with it, unlike some of the horror stories I am hearing about the G73...so glad I have no patience and did not pre-order and got this instead.

 

Mine also runs perfectly. It is a very nice machine except for this fan issue.

Does your not cycle between 100rpm and 3000rpm, or it does not bother you?

Which version of the bios are you using?

 

yeah it does cycle, but it doesn't bother me, except maybe at night when its too quiet in my house. my house is never quiet with 4 kids..and my cooler is just a tad louder then the N71 fans.

i am still running 204 bios.

I would still recommend this laptop to anyone.

 

Yes me too will recommend it to anybody.

For me also the fan issue bothers me only at night. During the day the office environment is load enough and at home my son and TV gives enough back ground noise.

Currently I also foud a new solution in order not to hear this noise when I am working at night. I bought Sennheiser CX 400-II Precision headset to listen to music while working.

I am working on having this problem fixed for the sake of whole community and besides I always like to have a perfect machine.

 

someone plz give me some ideas or help =/

my cores are running at 933. its OC'ed 5%. plugged in i checked anyway the power setting is on max performance. i have run video games and prime 95 etc. used logging software TMonitor and CPU-Z never goes above 934.

 

mine only does that at idle when i have nothing running.
just with web browsing..i get 2.4-2.6 single core.

are your programs running fine, though?

 

Yes I am still waiting for their response, they are willing to fix it it's just that it'll take time, I think they just couldn't duplicate the problem with their own units and they were using BIOS 206 and 204.

Give them sometime to figure it out.

 

My 1st N71Jq had the manufacturing date of March 2010. I was so lucky to be able to exchange it for another N71Jq, because the fan issue could be a problem of a bad series. This 2nd N71Jq has the manufacturing date of April 2010. At first startup even before I created a name or anything else the fan started cycling as before. So I am also desperatly waiting for a solution.

 

Reading all these issues about fan cycling problems only makes me sad. I bought my baby from xoticpc and I got to say that I don't experience any kind of fan ramping problems. But, than again, I had mine customized (added the option "IC Diamond Thermal Compound - CPU + GPU FREE w/ CPU Upgrade "). That was not really "free", since it costed me 35$ for some extra modifications, but in the end I find it totally worth it. So, until ASUS comes up with a solution, people with problems might give it a shot (of course, on their own risk, since this will for sure void the warranty). Another way to do it might be to contact the xoticpc guys and see if they can do just that for some money, without voiding the warranty.

 

No IC Diamond does not help with respect to this issue. I already investigated it.
I have applied the IC Diamond on both CPU and GPU for free.
Thanks to Ken who sent the IC Diamond 7 without any cost.

The temps under full load are about 4°C lower for both GPU and CPU with IC Diamond 7, but the fan cycling issue is still there.

It seems to be your second N71JQ?
If I remember correctly you dropped your first one and had to use ADW.

Which CPU did you upgrade to? 820qm?
It could be that your system runs hotter with the new cpu so it cycles less often down to 100rpm.
This could be the reason why you don't have this issue as this issue mostly happens on the lower temperature ranges. Otherwise your are among the lucky ones like PaulW whose notebook does not have this issue.

 

well the game runs slow. but not THAT slow not very playable tho if i get into a fight the frame rate drops like to nothing.

 

Which bios was installed on your 2nd laptop, version 204?

Mine is from April 2010 as well and doesn't have the problem in bios 204, but does so in v205 and v206.The randomness of its occurrence is just so weird.

 

Are you sure that maximum and minimum processor state in power4gear are 100% in the main window and under advanced?

 

Honestly I have no idea what changed or if i was doing something wrong. but now its working right. I had never seen this happen at all before. but in cpuz the freq changes and is reved up and the same in tmonitor. so idk if something was wrong and i unknowingly fixed it anyway whatever. its working and my game runs much faster. but i didnt change anything ?_? oh well

 

I also got mine from Costco and can confirm that its Possibility 2 (2x 320 @ 7200 RPM) and it also came with the faster RAM (as GGM said). So add that to Costco's return policy and u got a pretty good deal AND peace of mind.

I do have the fan cycling issue (sorry guys.. need the machine so i can't send it in for testing this issue ) when its idling but it stops once you give it something to do and it's really not that big of a deal (the ventilation fans in the library were louder when I took it there to work on a class project to give you some idea of the noise levels). And, once again, since its Costco you have 90 days to decide if it bugs you... that is if ASUS doesn't fix it by then anyway.

My only other issue with it was the minor vibrations from the second HDD, which was fixed by inserting a little piece of plastic under it. Thanks to whoever gave that suggestion here

Oh yeah ... still haven't had any success with the key combinations, but as I said before its pretty much a non-issue even to me at this point... would appreciate if whoever gets the backlit keyboard (once that is done) would try shift + z + x, see if it works, and tells me the results tho...

Oh and glad to hear you got it working amazingfly!

 

bios version is 204 en the date is 24-12-2009.

As a temporary solutions I play a cd with visualisation at full screen in windows media player. I set the sound on mute and then the fan runs constant at a bearable noise rate. On top of that I can run another program to read, write or surf the internet without the constant turning on and off of the fan.

 

Unfortunately, it's still my first N71JQ . It made up his mind to be still working and I had second thoughts about using the ADW. However, these days I decided to still go for the ADW, due to the reason that the marks of the impact with the floor are quite obvious and, after I pass the first year and something goes wrong with it, ASUS guys might not respect the regular warranty due to signs of misuse. I am not willing to take that chance, since I won't be able to prove them when the incident happened and that the laptop continued to work after that.
About the CPU upgrade, might be smth. related to the cooling solution, not to the CPU itself (I own the standard 720QM).
Since you say that already tried this cooling solution with no success, this means that I must be one of the lucky owners . My fan runs constantly at low, whispery RPMs and I only recall it ramping on 2 or 3 occasions, when playing some games. Now, I keep my fingers crossed and hope that the new unit I'll get performs just like the one I have right now.

 

I wish you luck and hope that the new unit does not have this issue.

Maybe the impact with the floor improved the heating solution. :laugh:
Maybe users who has ADW can try this solution. :laugh:

 

I thought I would mention you just made the 1000th post in this thread, congrats!

 

Thanks.
But we are not that active here like people in the N61JQ lounge.

 

They now understand more about the fan speed issue and I forward all of your request to HQ, still trying to convince them to put back the Easy Overclocking feature but no guaranteed.

 

Thanks Ken for all the great work.
I am very positive that our hard and long work on this topic will finally payoff soon.

For those of you who are still waiting on the order, it looks now that a solution will be out in the near future and maybe you can pull the trigger on it very soon.

 

Hoooray a milestone!

 

BIG thumbs up to both Ken and Turbo for trying to make them see the light!! You guys acted with a dedication we haven't seen since the fall on Christianity!

 

Oh no, don't get me wrong, it's been working just fine since day one I bought the laptop. Although now I reached the conclusion that now I'm going to lose the customization on it (the cooling part, since the ADW will be covered by ASUS, and not by XOTICPC ).
If you want to take the good part in my experience, though, I can tell for sure that ASUS builds some damn sturdy machines. My laptop fell from almost 2 meters high and except for the scratches, it's still working fine (the only problems I could see were the scratches, some small debris between the display and its protection screen, and loosing the palmrest cooling). So, if you ever need a hammer, well, these laptops can do the job just fine...
I'm glad for setting the milstone with the post #1000, I'm just sad that it was not a very happy post...

 

Annoying me again...
Since I didn't still open the laptop's back cover, and I want to keep my secondary HDD before sending the unit for the ADW, can someone tell me which one is the secondary HDD and which one is the primary?
Thank you very much in advance!

 

As far as I remember, the one that is connected to the middle bridge in the cabin is the second HDD.

 

Nope, the one in the middle is port 0. At least it was when I put the X25-M in there yesterday

 

So it seems for you the the boot drive is the one that is connected in the middle.
I check on mine and as I said above the boot drive is connected to the side. The middle one is the secondary drive.

But it could be that I switched them at some point as I have opened the NB twice already.

In reality it should not make any difference. You just have to switch the order in the bios.

 

Indeed shouldn't matter because of the boot order in bios. But if you want to know for sure which HD is which you should take one HD out and check (or listen )

My guess is that the SATA port numbers are the same across all laptops though: 0 for the middle HD, 1 for the optical drive, and 4 for the HD on the side.

I know these numbers by heart now because installing the SSD was a pain:
1) partition clone with Clonezilla -> OS failed to start
2) partition clone with Acronis True Image -> misaligned partition on SSD
3) Asus recovery not possible on the new drive (?)
4) New Windows 7 install using the ISO method as decribed here worked:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/mic...links-just-like-vista-before.html#post5437866

However with method 4 it took me a while to realise that you had to activate the windows key on the underside of the laptop by calling a phone number..

EDIT: Calling microsoft and activating the code is actually unnessacery if you read the post behind the link well! (unlike me)

 

For me it's hard to mix them up as they are not twins.
The data drive I have is 500GB.

 

Yep; this matches my experience as well.

Just so everyone knows, you should never image to a SSD; do a clean install, because Windows 7 will configure itself differently for this type of device. The byte allignment will be handled during the install process and things like defrag, (which is bad for a SSD) will be turned off by default.

Thanks for the tip on the ABR Tool.

Dave

 

Does anybody know how to fix camera FPS? It's like 1 frame/second and it's TOTALLY unusable. Please someone!

I have the first one from ASUS's drivers list for cameras. Please somebody.

Thanks!

 

Try with driver v5.8.54000.204 from this link:
ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Support-

 

I said I did in my post, sorry If I didn't write it properly. It still works slowly. Is your camera working correctly? :S

 

You may have a defective webcam. I don't think many people are having this problem, in fact you are the second in this thread, try emailing the first poster and see what he did (somewhere around page 80-90).

 

Thank you all, guys for helping me!
In the mean time, I got some great news from ASUS, who will cover the ADW. There are only minor details to discuss with them, namely to see if I can get to keep my main board - it doesn't seem to have any problems at all - , so I won't loose the cooling upgrade (as an extra, I am happy with not having fan issues with it). Another great thing for my is that they can ship it back directly to Afghanistan, where I am now, so I won't have to spend too much time away from my laptop. Will inform you about the outcome.

 

I'm getting the N71JQ-A1 tomorrow, and I have a question. I searched and couldn't find the answer...

I know some models (outside the US?) have TV tuners. Do the US models have the antenna port blocked or is the antenna missing altogether? I was kind of hoping it was the first one, since I'd like to install one.

I've had some laptops where they left that kind of thing in and just put a rubber stopper in the port, but I can't tell from the pictures what the deal is with this one.

 

In the TY003 (European model) the antenna port is missing altoghether and there is an empty spot on the circuit board where otherwise the jack would be. Chances are this is the same for US models, but I can't say for sure.

 

I can't agree more. Cloning/imaging is pointless, go for the clean install directly.

Credits for ABR tool go to Turbogear.

 

Hi guys,

I bought a new Asus N71JQ-TY002X (manufacturing date April 10) and, although I am very happy with the laptop, can confirm that I also have the cycling fan issue.

I hope, with all the effort this community is putting in, that asus will find a resolution for this soon