Asus G73JW Owners' Lounge

I'd like to know the answer too.
Where do we get the SiBeam adapter?

 

Has anyone that has purchased the G73JW with just the regular HDDs (7200rpm) swapped out one of their drives with an SSD and have seen improvements over the 7200rpm HDDs? If so, which SSD did you choose to install?

I'm debating on venturing back into SSD but can't decide on which brand/model- either the OCZ Vertex 2 or the Intel X25. I am primarily going to be using an SSD to maximize gaming and the OS, all other programs/media/etc will go onto the HDD in the other bay. Size will not be the issue being that I only play L4D series and SC.

I did notice that the intel x25 has very good reviews but what fends me away from it is the write speed vs the write speed of the vertex 2.

Any pointers or advice in the SSD world? BTW, I had a terrible experience with SSD back in early 2008 but thats old technology now and things have vastly improved but I'm still reluctant on which brand to get.

thanks for taking a look!

 

Memory Express in Canada. They have them on sale right now.

 

I used my Intel 80gb ssd I used in my last laptop. The difference is night and day. Asus sucks though and you can't use recovery cds to reinstall windows on ssd.

 

jm821 I removed one of the 7200rpm's and replaced with a G.Skill Phoenix Pro 120gb. As Jaycalgary said - the difference is incredible.. Definitely the single best upgrade you could make.

 

How did you install Windows then?
Did you have to order/buy original Windows CDs?

 

Does anyone use a cooling pad? How well does it help with the cooling compared to no cooling pad?

Any suggestions for one that fits the JW better?

 

im using a zalman 2000.it doesn't need one though, i didnt buy it for my g73jw, its actually for my g51j, but am not using my g51 anymore, my rough calculation is g73j is 4-7 degrees lower with zalman.

 

Crucial SSDs are great. Their read/write rates can get up to 335/235 mbps I think which is very good! They're a little more expensive but it's worth such great performance!

 

Your Order Has Been Submitted!

With much debate, and research, I have settled with XoticPC thanks to the great help from Brett.

Now to wait for them to finish the modifications, and to send it on it's way to my place.

 

How to mute the volume in G73JW?

 

Fn + F10 = Mute

 

Thank you jhan1. so we have to press fn +f10 for mute. i have heavily gotten accustomed to pressing the mute down on my dell inspiron.

I have two questions:

1. Is there no separate button for mute?

2. Is the touchpad multitouch?
Multitouch in the sense the ability to pinch, swipe, rotate or scroll through images on the display screen with a simple brush of the finger.

Iam going to order it so i just had these two quick questions.

 

I don't see a dedicated button for mute. Everything needs the Fn key. My old Dell had dedicated buttons but this is not a problem at all for this laptop.

I don't use the touchpad at all but I think you may have to get a different synaptic driver for all that stuff to work. But don't quote me on this.

 

Alright. i appreciate your great help. Thankyou.

 

thank you to all that have responded about SSD. I think I have come to the decision of getting the vertex 2 over the intel.

Sleek- I love G.skill memory, however my first SSD was with them (back in 2008) and it gave me the biggest headache in the world. But then again, that was 2008, things have changed. I did take a look at the reviews of the Phoenix Pro and it seems really good, they are just hard to find now (its part of a combo purchase now on newegg)

thanks for all the positive responses, off to go shopping!

 

Wow, I'm averaging about 50 fps is Resident Evil 5 on directx 10 with all settings maxed at 1080p. This thing truly rocks!!!

I used afterburner and got my GPU core to 1350, the shader at 1458, and the memory at 729. Is this good?

Whats the max safe temp for the GPU on this thing? I got my clocks up even higher, up to 1403 Core, 1515 shader, and 757 memory. In furmark it only got up to 79C, not sure how much hotter is safe for this thing.

 

do you mean 757 core, 1515 shader and 1403 mem? mine is 782/1564/1450

 

No, it says the Core clock is 1403, Shader Clock is 1515, Memory Clock is 757. Reading it off of MSI afterburner

Update: Got the Core clock to 1450, Shader to 1566, and Memory to 783, don't know if I'm going to try it much higher than that.

 

how did you get a core clock so high?!

 

I have heard this before on this board or one of the other g73jw boards, but I think that msi afterburner sometimes gets the core and memory switched around. I remember the poster did a reinstall of afterburner and it was corrected.

 

@sleek or for anyone for that matter

Did you do any ssd tweaks/optimizations to your ssd? I'll be doing a fresh install of win7 and wouldn't mind if you (or anyone) listed any tweaks/optimizations that are recommended for an ssd.

Thanks a bunch.

Ordered the vertex 2 120gb today and will be getting it tomorrow (1 day ship, thank you amazon).

 

ok, I reinstalled afterburner and you were right jhan, the speeds are now: Core 835, Shader 1670, Memory 1500. I take it up much more and get artifacts. I think I found the sweet spot. Arethese pretty good speeds compared to others?

Also, does the Twin Turbo actually do anything beneficial at all? It seems that I actually lose a few fps with it enabled for some reason.

 

Hows your temps on Furmark with those clocks?

 

Stays at 79c or less at core 825, shader 1650, and memory 1500. Anymore than that and I get artifacts it seems.

 

is it even possible to disable turboboost or get rmclock working?

 

HI everyoneWhen i press lil harder on WASD or ctrl -shift ( on the left side of keyboard) i hear some noise.Anyone has problem with keyboard like me ? YouTube - Keyboard

 

i had those sounds before on my new keyboard, but its gone now.

 

Nocturnal,

Those are some good figures with that overclock... How do you like it? Are you running stable at the moment? I was reading on some way to overclock the cpu with a setfsb program and wonder if it would do much other than probably void the warranty. Are you seeing some performance increases with the new core clock speeds? Thanks in advance.

 

What is exactly twin turbo mode does? I tried to activate it and run a test using performance test 7.0 trial ver. and the result score is even LOWER.

What is the best driver for 460m currently available? Can I just install it or should I uninstall the prev driver?

Thx.

 

Keep twin turbo off. It keeps the cpu at full power and seems to give lower gaming performance for most people.

Best drivers right now are here: NVIDIA DRIVERS 260.63 BETA

Go to control panel, uninstall nvidia drivers, restart and install the new drivers.

 

Most people? So, there are some who are actually get better performance? Does that mean I got defected g73jw?

thx.

 

I haven't heard of Turbo actually helping.

Not sure, but I think this sounds like a software issue?

 

What about JH's turbo? Is that increased its performance?

 

I did a little reading up on turbo vs OC (overclocking). Not really advice, just some facts I found regarding the two. You should not enable turbo if you plan to do any hard overclocking. It can cause blue screens. Overclocking can actually give more of a boost compared to just using turbo.

Turbo can shut off if the cpu temperature gets past the threshold, which won't help as gaming does increase the heat significantly.

I'm no expert, just a few hours of researching around the net. I'm not saying I know which is better, but I think if you want more power, go with overclocking as long as you keep the cooling monitored.

 

Hey guys, this might be a noobish question, but on my old computer I had a TON of old patches for the games that I played on my hard drive. My question is, when a game updates its patch, can I remove the old patches so they are not taking up HDD space? Or must I keep them because the patches work off one another? For example World of Warcraft or some other MMORPG or MMOFPS. I am trying to find ways to keep my HDD as less cluttered as possible. Like someone said to always remove old drivers, restart, and install the new drivers every time. Well to be honest, I knew nothing about that and just always patched over the old patch/driver. Any advice and other ways to save on space and performance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

If you're talking about WoW specifically, then go ahead and clear the blue x.x to x.x updater files, and also get rid of everything inside the update folder for now.

I lost about 6-7 gigs by clearing out those old patcher files.

 

The performance after I overclocked the gpu is great, it took my scores on furmark up to 3200, and I get an average of 50 fps in resident evil 5 at 1080p with all settings maxed and AA at 2q or whatever it is. I am definitely impressed, and really do think that this gpu is a contender for the 5870.

 

What settings are you using?

 

I did the Nvidia beta driver upgrade... am waiting to see if I notice any difference... Are people selecting the HD audio driver option during the clean install as well?

On that note, and I thought someone else mentioned it previously, but I can't find the reference... it seems to me that when I first got this rig I had to keep turning the volume down because the sound was so great. However either I've gotten deaf or something has changed because lately I've been watching DVDs with the volume cranked to the max and wanting more volume. Has this happened to anyone else? Are there driver updates for the sound system?

Thanks!

 

So I got my vertex 2 120gb this morning at 9am from UPS/Amazon (1 day shipping) and I've been at this for 8hrs already and I cannot get windows 7 to install on my g73jw.

First thing I did was plug it in with an external to check if it was preformatted, which it wasn't, so I formatted to ntfs and my hdd with windows 7 read the drive with 111gb (normal and automatically labeled it E), windows even installed the vertex driver as a removable device). Then I removed both HDDs, installed the vertex 2, booted into bios, checked to make sure achi is enabled, and proceeded with the 5 disc recovery. Installed ok, but when it rebooted, it said to insert a bootable drive. -?-

2nd,3rd,4th,and 5th time around I tried it with win7 home prem (retail), oem version, upgrade version and win7 prof (all 64bit) and the win7 install does not recognize the drive when selecting where to install.

I have plugged the drive back into an external and tested on 4 different comps and laptops and they all recognize it!

I'm stuck and this being my 2nd ssd (if you've seen my earlier post, I had a bad experience), I'm not regretting my thoughts of venturing back to ssd.

If anyone has successfully installed an ssd into a g73 please post on what you did. Thanks.

 

Sometimes this may because the audio on your DVD was never that loud anyway. Also, if you use VLC you can ramp up your audio about 200% however I wouldn't do this for too long as it could ruin your speakers. Otherwise, you could try reinstalling the Audio Driver.

 

Haven't installed an SSD on here personally, but a few things to check here.

(1)Make sure you've verified your boot order in BIOS. The cause of many a grief.

(2) Check for any non-bootable, removable media, such as jump drives, CDs/DVDs, or external drives.

(3) Check that you have the latest BIOS firmware (not sure if ASUS has released one for our models yet).

Other than those typical troubleshooting methods, you might want to try a disk imaging/mirroring program, connect the SSD into the secondary drive bay, and mirror your original boot disk onto it.

Good luck!

 

Settings as far as what exactly?

 

@sev- yep did all that. I'm pretty familiar with bios settings- I have a couple of systems in my house that are raid 0 and 1 configs. Usually when I reinstall an OS, I change the boot priorities in BIOS rather than the temporary F8 function and then revert back after install.

BIOS is still stock (which is up to date with the JW model). I'm going to give it a go again tomorrow. I blew my Saturday for fustration, I should get some sleep, maybe I'll see things differently tomorrow.

Last resort would be the disk image but I'm not a big fan of those- I'm a fresh install type of guy.

Thanks for the input though!

 

Hey.I have had my g73jw-a1 for a few weeks now and love it . I have installed a 60gb vertex 2 without a problem. I don't get the 5 install dvds though . i have created a bootable 4 gb flashdrive with win 7 on it . a fresh reinstall on the vertex2 takes 10 min . i cant wait for BLACK OPS to come out.

 

How did you get your windows 7 off the recovery discs or disc and onto the flash drive? I would like to keep a flashdrive for just this purpose. Any tutorials or info you could point me to is appreciated.

 

Tried several DVDs so don't think this is the problem. And not really liking the audio boost idea - still think it is a driver issue. Anyone else having this issue?

Does anyone have a link to updated audio drivers or is the driver included with the unit all we have? Also still wondering about the HD audio driver that came with the nvidia beta driver - question from my earlier post...

Thanks!

 

ok, so here we go again with the vertex 2 120gb. I downloaded basically all intel, asus, and possible drivers from ocz that i could find that are correlated to ahci controller and still no luck installing windows 7 on this.

Then tried mirroring my HDD to the SSD using Acronis and Apricorn and still no luck.

I think its official, i am sending this drive back. I have done over dozens of secure erase, sanitary erase and reformats to this drive where I am the point that at my 2nd venture back into SSD led me to one conclusion: buy a laptop with an SSD already preinstalled with it.

 

yup -- can someone give advice on how to upgrade a new SSD?

also.. anyone tried a clean install of windows 7 yet? can we use the product key written underneathe the laptop to activate it?