Asus M50VM Montevina, NV 9600M GS Review

I wish I could. Everyone that I know/relatives know all live in California.

Even some of the other relatives. So that's not really an option, quite frankly.

Also, most companies prefer to only let you ship the computer to the address that is on the credit card.

I'm going to call/contact some of the resellers just out of curiosity to see if they would charge it on the order or not.

 

wow the battery actually looks good in this model

 

More bandwidth, but the GTX 280 isn't even bottlenecked by PCI-E 16x so it doesn't change anything.

 

Ken: do you have the battery test for the 6 cell as well?

 

Wow, the 9 cell gained almost an hour more on battery compared to the Sv? I hope the 6 cell has similar results!

 

what is the average fps for CoD4 in the test?

 

I couldn't compare the COD4 videos directly because there seems to be some differences in the settings so the m50VM runs with a higher fps than the m50sv-a1

m50sv
*Number of Dynamic Lights - normal
*Ragdoll- yes
*Bullet impacts -yes
*Number of Corpses - medium

m50vm
*Number of Dynamic Lights - off
*Ragdoll- no
*bullet impacts -no
*Number of Corpses -small

 

What should the battery life increase be like for getting the P8400 model?

 

I'd assume it'd be quite decent considering the P processors use 25w max instead of 35w.

 

Yeah, I figure it would be a decent jump. How much power do laptops as a whole consume and how much would 10w really save in the grand scheme of things? The A1 could be a compelling choice for me if the battery life improvement is good enough. Being cheaper than the B1 helps, too.

 

I am testing the 6 cell battery right now.

it could be, I'll test the A1 model tomorrow.

 

Battery life with 6 cell: 2 Hours 38 Minutes

 

Wow. The new battery life is pretty impressive, especially when comparing it to the SV model. It makes me glad that I missed the older models by a matter of minutes, because they went out of stock while I was in the process of finalizing an order last week.

I look forward to seeing how long the batteries last while utilizing Express Gate.

 

Express Gate does not improve battery life much, in fact little bit less battery life than in Vista so I am going to redo the battery life test again tomorrow on Express Gate.

 

WOWsers! Thanks for the review and everything Ken! Appreciate the time and effort you have sacrificed for us.

 

Would you also run xPrime in both XP and Vista mode?
Thanks.

Dick

 

Ken i can't imagine Asus forum without you

THANKS

 

How good is the display? Contrast, viewing angles, graininess etc.?

This laptop is sweet.

What's the tax for buying a laptop in NY State?

 

Just ordered the M50Vm-B1 yesterday.....hopefully it'll be with me by next week. i plan to use windows XP and vista 64bit on it, so i hope ken you can get all the drivers for both the os...

 

GenTechPC is in California, so other than California, no other state has to pay tax

NICE! that's about 40 min more battery life than the M50SV-A1.
Thanks Ken!

 

How will you accomplish runnning both OS's on the same machine? My understanding is that it is an either/or situation. M50Vm or M50S come with Vista already installed. It was represented to me that it is possible to install XP (my preference at this point) but that Vista will remain on a hidden partition in the event that one wants to 'go back' to Vista. But, if one goes back to Vista, XP gets wiped.

Am I missing something here?

Dick

 

There are ways to dual boot 2 os's installed on a laptop. You can only use one at a time, but all you need to do is restart and choose the other when booting to use the other.

 

ya....i'll probably....put each os on different partitions....and make a selection on startup.....but provided i can get the drivers.....

 

somebody want to give me some money so i can buy this right now?

 

man I wish I knew about this coming out, I bought the m50sv (and I'm lovin it) and got it a little over a week and a half ago ... I wish I would have waited, the battery life alone would have been worth it

 

Really wish I would have waited. I hope that overclock options aren't going to come out so I can have somewhat of an edge on this Beautiful baby. Battery Life is awesome.

 

ken if i buy this notebook from the distributor would i get the 8gb ssd in the box with the notebook? because im going to ASI to pick one up

 

Do they give you Vista 32-bit? If they do, why? Aren't you only going to be accessing ~3.3GB of the RAM that way?

 

I think it might be less than that since it is has a 1gb video card, so I believe it will be 3gb tops. I can't remember if swap space counts towards the 4gb of addressed memory, but if it does then it will dip below that 3gb mark. I really don't understand why they wouldn't ship it with x64, but I'm pretty sure it is shipped with 32 bit.

 

With the new Chipset the montevina platform comes with, It recognizes the 4gb of ram and 800mhz speed, Ken wrote about it in here somewhere.

 

Although the chipset can recognize 4gb, you also need the BIOS and OS to recognize it too.

 

So are you saying there's no need for 64-bit Vista at all with the M50Vm?

 

Well, just because it recognizes the 4GB ram (part of a Vista hotfix or SP! update, as I recall), you're still subject to the limitations outlined by emporiumboutique above.

64bit OS gives not much in terms of advantages over 32b in practice (although others can dispute that), other than to utilize the extra 800mb of RAM and the 64bit cpu, since nearly no software exists that's written to take advantage of 64bit extensions..... It doesn't work better than 32b OS, and in fact can have more problems with hardware/peripheral drivers.

 

ken if i buy this notebook from the distributor would i get the 8gb ssd in the box with the notebook? because im going to ASI to pick one up

 

I see. So although the chipset wil recognize the 4GB RAM, the OS (Vista 32-bit) that comes with the laptop, will not. If I were to install Vista 64-bit, it would recognize the RAM, but how do I know if the BIOS will?

I'm kind of noob

I'm going to get the Asus M50Vm-A1 very soon. I just want to know if I should bother formatting and then installing 64-bit Vista on it.

 

Most bios' nowadays will recognize 4gb. It's very unlikely that the M50VM can't recognize 4gb of ram with a 64bit OS.
Keep in mind that even with ~3.2gb of ram, you are mostly likely to never use all that memory with daily office tasks. Even with heavy multi-tasking, you'll probably use no more than 2.5-3gb at most.

 

If the BIOS recognize all 4GB then you don't need to worry about.

 

so if i were to put on rainbow six vegas 2 it would look superb on this laptop? on call of duty 4 recommended specs says 2.4ghz duo core so since this is a newer processor wouldnt this be the same or better?

 

I believe so since the recommended GPU requirement for that vegas 2 is NVIDIA GeForce 6600+ / ATI Radeon x1300+. The 9600M GS should play it with flying colors
I had COD4 and it played flawlessly on my M50SV-A1 with medium-high settings. I have no doubt that the the M50VM will perform better.

 

So does the BIOS recognize it for this laptop? Can you please tell us emporiumboutique?

 

XP Drivers:





For easy installtion press F2 at asus logo screen to enter BIOS, go to Advanced tab and IDE Controller, setup SATA mode from Enhance to Compatible, press F10 and exit.


Below is the drivers you can install from drivers DVD:

D:\DRIVER\ATK0100\VISTA32\2KSETUP.EXE
D:\DRIVER\KB_FILTER\XP32\2KSETUP.EXE

D:\SOFTWARE\ATKHOTKEY\VISTA32_64\SETUP.EXE
D:\SOFTWARE\ATKMEDIA\SETUP.EXE
D:\SOFTWARE\ATKOSD2\SETUP.EXE

D:\SOFTWARE\CARDREADER\RICOH_R5C833\VISTA32_64\SETUP.EXE
D:\Software\BLUETOOTH\AZUREWAVE_BT-253\VISTA32_64\WIN32\BRCM\DPINST.EXE
D:\SOFTWARE\MODEM\VISTA32\Setup.exe
D:\SOFTWARE\EXPRESSGATE\VISTA32_64\ST_ASUSIF00_HD_V0.7.6.0_20080624.EXE
D:\SOFTWARE\FINGERPRINTS\VISTA32_64\SETUPAIM.EXE
D:\SOFTWARE\TOUCHPAD\VISTA32\Setup.exe
D:\SOFTWARE\WCONSOLE2\SETUP.EXE


Drivers you need to download:

Intel Chipset:
http://downloadmirror.intel.com/12769/a08/infinst_autol.zip

nVidia GeForce Driver:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18823
1: Download driver from the driver link
2: Extract driver into a folder
3: download Modded INF
4: Copy and paste INF file into the extracted driver folder before run setup.exe
5: Run Setup.exe



Atheros AR928X Wireless lan (use update driver from Device Manger to install):
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14858

Realtek Audio Driver:
ftp://66.104.77.130/pc/audio/WDM_R198.zip

Realtek Lan Driver (use update driver from Device Manger to install):
ftp://61.56.86.122/cn/nic/Driver_5694_XP_0619.zip

Power4Gear:
http://downloadmirror.intel.com/10891/eng/P4G_V1.16_Generic.zip


IR Driver still not work in XP.

There is a question mark on "Audio Device on High Definition Audio BUs" but the sound card works.

 

Ken, you're awesome! This is great stuff

 

Well, I don't have the M50VM, so I can't really tell you
AFAIK, if you go to your system's properties, windows will say it's 3.2 or 3.3gb. Whether or not windows will actually use the rest of the 700-800mb, my best guess is no, but i could be wrong
Maybe Ken can shed some light on this...

 

In one of the review pictures windows shows the whole 4.0 GB under the Experience Index.

 

That's because the Windows Vista comes with SP1 already so it'll read from BIOS saying it has physical RAM of 4GB, but still it's only gonna use 3GB.

 

Can you post the battery life for the A1 model? I'm curious to see the difference between the P and T processors.

 

thanks a lot KEN...!!

 

I am testing it right now, it's been 2 hours and still have 38% left.

 

So it should be 3 hours 13 minutes (if I did my math correctly.)

 

I am not sure because I don't really trust the battery meter.