Asus M51Ta Owners' Lounge

actually you raise a very good question, what is a reasonable size for the widows partition to be, im going to ask my friend to fix this for me, and was wondering what amount of space i should set aside for the os.

but i am very happy with this computer, it handles everything i throw at it, and i do feel happy knowing we have a great warranty with asus.

 

apart from the card reader every driver package on the disc asus provided with the notebook contains a x64 driver too

 

This is stupid that ASUS has not tackled or even directly addressed that these issues exist. Just as an update to where I'm at from before...

I haven't installed the 206 BIOS yet because I'm afraid of just making things worse. It seems like the general consensus is that it's not helping anyone, anyways.

I installed the 8.12 catalyst drivers and my screen still blanks out if I shut it and try to reopen it. However, I didn't do a full uninstall before I upgraded from 8.11. Something I noticed though, is that it only seems to have trouble when bringing the screen back up from the High-Performance GPU. If you shut the screen when running on the Power-Saving GPU, I don't recall ever having issues. You can manually switch it through the ATI icon in the task bar.

Has everyone contacted ASUS and yelled at them about this? I really wish I could recommend this laptop to people, but I just can't bring myself to do it.

 

I just recently rebuilt it and changed the partitions. Because I have a vista disk already I wiped out the recovery partition to get my 9 gigs back, but if you don't have a regular vista disk i strongly advise against doing this. As for the size of the OS partition I have it at 30 gigs. I have the OS, antivirus, and productivity software there and nothing else. All my games, music, pictures and stuff are on the other partition which uses the rest of the drive. That way if need be I can nuke the OS partition and still maintain my data.

The only disc that came with my laptop is a recovery disc. Are the 64 bit drivers on there? If the 64bit drivers are on the disc, why the heck aren't they on the website? That's just lazy.

 

I complained several times. not exactly about this issue (it does not occur as far as I am concerned) but I asked generally if a bios update would be available to fix all the known acpi issues.
I was told that my question would be passed to the apporpiate department. Still missing an answer!

 

i think if asus was bombarded with enough complaints they would listen, after all I've heard that asus has one of the best support groups around especially in America.

perhaps we need to get everyone we know with this laptop to send in complaints to asus, after all its a great laptop with loads of features, we just need everyone who has one to be experiencing it at its full capacity.

 

actually you should have received these 3 discs with your notebook.. the one in the middle is the m51ta driver disc from asus

 

actually since we are talking about drivers my hd3650 gpu is currently using:
Driver Packaging Version 8.561-081201a1-072275C-ATI
Catalyst® Version 08.12
2D Driver Version 7.01.01.849
Direct3D Version 7.14.10.0630
do you guys know if there are any better drivers released later than the version i have, i went to ati mobility webpage and hd3650 isnt even listed there .
thanks alot.:yes:

 

no there aren´t any newer drivers than 8.12 up to now.. catalyst 8.12 is from december 08 so it is still quite new

ati/amd leave it to the hardware manufacturers to provide fitting mobile catalyst packages to their customers since quite a while now but the problem there is that they generally only update those packages every few months or so

the mobility catalyst package you found on the amd/ati homepage seems to be a leftover from the time where they directly released mobility packages by themselves

i´ll update the catalyst driver packages i posted in the asus forums as soon as ati/amd release catalyst 9 which they should sometime in january

 

thanks alot for the information, ill keep a look out for when you kindly update them for us.
cheers and takecare.

 

Little more info/frustration here. It really seems that the issues that plague this laptop are related to the Dual GPU config. I am finding that when i am choosing run the HD3200 on ac power or running it on battery and go into standby or hibernation, i almost always have FAN issues. I just ran into another completely rediculous flaw as well. I tried to get a video of it to post here for you guys but couldn't get to a camera quick enough.

I was running the laptop on the HD3200 and the battery ran low. Vista decided to put the laptop into hibernation and it went fine. When i plugged the laptop back into AC power and powered it on, i had the 100% fan issue. I then tried to cold boot it (pressed and held the power button for 4 secs.) and it would not turn off. Yes folks, that's right, i could not even turn it off by holding the power button down. In my 15+ years of computing and work in the IT field, i have never seen a pc do this. I then unplugged the laptop from its ac cord and tried again to power down......nothing. Fan pounding away and I could not turn the laptop off. So, the only way to get it to go off was to do a battery pull. That obviously cut the power to it and it turned off. After putting the battery back on and plugging the AC cord back in, the laptop powered on and resumed my windows session from hibernation. Pretty absurd huh?

 

Yes, I can confirm that the fan issues has got something to do with the dual gpu config.
As long as my laptop is on AC power and hd3650 is used the fan issue never occurs. If I manually choose to use the 3200 on AC power the fan issue does occur too.

I'm going to try to use 3650 on battery power the next times.


by the way: since some days the LAN adapter suddenly disappeared...

 

The lan adapter doesn't even show in device manager or "network conections" in control panel?

 

does the onboard lan not even show up when there´s a lan cable plugged in? because it´s normal that the adapter disappears as soon as there´s no active connection since it has some kind of sleep mode

 

interesting point, within the first week of me getting this laptop, i disabled the hd3200 and run it always at performance settings, and i havent had one issue with the laptop.
im thinking if i enable the hd3200 if i would get the same issue as you guys are experiencing?!
food for thought anyway.

 

yes you will propably get them, but as soon as you enable performance settings again these issues should be gone.

@rainy_day: once I can confirm that a lan cable was plugged in and no connection could be made.

 

The only disk that was in the sealed unopened box was the one on the right. Should I try to contact asus for the other 2?

As for problems, I still haven't had any. But i really can't think of a time when I haven't used it plugged in. when i'm on the couch there is an outlet so close there isn't a point in me running off the battery, and when i take it to school i'm using it in the library, again with an outlet.

 

Alright guys, I tried a whole ton of stuff since I last wrote on here. Let me catch you guys up to speed.

• Tried Performance Settings on my existing Vista install (Factory, but changed)
• Wiped my initial Windows Vista, installed Windows 7 Beta
• Wiped Windows 7 and went back to Factory Install off restore partition

Through ALL of these different setups the same issues remained. The biggest hurdle now is that I can't even get the ATI drivers to pick up my hardware. I fully uninstalled all ATI software. However when I reinstalled the latest catalyst (8.12) and even the Windows 7 beta drivers they only find the 3200. This effectively locks it into the power-saving GPU, and all of the fan speed / lock up / crash issues that come with that. No matter what I do, any trip to standby mode will make the laptop do a hard reboot with no windows blue screen (something is seriously wrong).

The catalyst control center (CCC) somehow knows you still have a dual GPU setup though, and offers you the ability to switch to the 3650. Taking a look at the device manager shows that no 3650 actually exists. However, when you attempt to switch to it via the CCC, a "Standard VGA Adapter" will show up for a minute. Upon investigating it, you'll find that it's errored out saying that the device cannot start because "The driver is already loaded in memory". I assume this is because the 3200 and the 3650 effectively use the same unified Catalyst driver?

I worked a hack in where I could get the 3650 to install. I had to disable the 3200 via device manager, and then reboot. When I rebooted, it installed the 3650 driver, which effectively locked me into high-performance mode. This keep the fan from going nuts after a standby, but the system is still doomed to crash in the next few minutes as things spiral out of control.

Additionally, I noticed that after these changes, I was no longer offered the option to even go into Standby mode. I have no idea why these are even related, but something is seriously messed up with the graphics and the ACPI on this laptop.

At this point, I give up. I am going to contact (again, as they never even responded to my last request for tech support) ASUS soon and see if they will take my laptop back for repairs. This has been so awful that I don't think I can ever recommend an ASUS laptop or ATI hardware to anyone ever again.

 

Houndeye. Couple things...

Your are having a driver issue. Thats all. When standby is greyed out, windows doesnt have the correct drivers loaded to know how to bring a GPU in and out of standby. I am using catalyst 8.12 and it and Vista X64 sees both GPUS just fine. I have however, replicated the issue that you having when it does not see both gpus. My advise....

Do a complete uninstall of ALL things Catalyst

download these drivers Notice its a different page that has integrated amd/ati stuff. The M51-ta runs an AMD north and southbridge

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=vista64/integrated-vista64

Ive been installing the southbridge drivers at the bottom of the link i sent, then rebooting, then installing the catalyst. This has always allowed vista to see both gpus and allow me to switch between then properly.

Also, make sure you install these from a cold boot while the A/C cold is plugged in. The bios by default uses the 3650 when you power the laptop up only with the power cord in.


You are not experiencing anything unusual that any of us with the M51-TA are. Dont panic. I realize its a MAJOR pain. I'm furious about it on a daily basis and ive had this laptop for 6 months.


To all of you who in the past that "claim" to not have any of the issues that plague most of us, please try this to see if you can get you fan to run @ 100% without slowing.

1)Open CCC and find power play.
2)Force CCC to switch to your HD3200 GPU (Power Saving Mode) If it changes successfully, your screen should flicker and CCC will tell you which GPU you are using.
3)Verify that its in power saving mode
4)If it is put your laptop in standby. If you cant change GPUS, you have a Driver issue.
5)Power up from standby and VOILA, your fan should now be blaring. The onl way to get it to stop, is to power off and on again.

Please not that if you use your notebook on battery. Which you will at some point BEACAUSE ITS A NOTEBOOK, CCC will switch the GPU from the 3650 to the 3200. Then when your battery runs low, Windows puts your laptop in standby (while running the HD3200). Then, when you come out of standby your fan runs at 100% relentlessly. Its a vicious cycle folks.

People, please report back with your findings. If we can all conclude on this error, then perhaps we can get Asus to fix it.

 

Couldnt agree with this more. WHat an f-ing waste of time this laptop has been for me. I cant walk away from flaws like this either. I need to know that someone cares and is fixing them (.....COUGH...ASUS...COUGH) Realistically, i should have just returned it to Newegg when I got it and found the bugs but I really thought that asus would have fixed this by now.

About ATI, I am really thinking that using 2 GPUS on a laptop was a truely terrible decision. Using one GPU and finding a way to clock and volt it up and down as needed would have been a wiser choice. Specifically for writing ACPI code and also drivers. Clearly, they made this platform more complicated than it should have been.

When i was originally looking for a laptop i was impressed by the dual gpu feature that the M51-Ta had and this so-called "AMD Puma" platform. To say the least, I have been dissapointed. The battery life is much better when using the HD3200 then the HD3650 but by no means is it a mindblowing earthshattering difference. To be honest, my GF gets better battery life on her Dell Latitude D610 (Centrino Single core 1.86Ghz w/ X300) The price was right on the M51ta but not worth the hassle IMHO...

 

Thanks for the link, bacon. I am going to try this as soon as I get some homework knocked out.

For everyone else, I know this comes preloaded with Vista 32-bit, which is what I reverted back to. Here's the link to that one instead of the 64-bit:

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=vista32/integrated-vista32

 

I did RMA mine last month, they changed the motherboard but the issues remain. Now they say that it is a software issue. Is it not funny that they can build an advanced computer but have no clue how to fix a fan not working properly. They said that I should check the power4gear settings as though I haven't done that, this is ridiculous.

 

the only way to get some information from the asus support is to act convincingly and knowingly, otherwise you will recieve such standard mails. if you do put some pressure on them by confronting them with their lack of support and knowledge they might forward your email to next support level.

just be exertive, annoying but serious. I do write an email almost every month asking when these issues will be fixed. At least they told me that my concerns will be taken into account.

 

What concerns did you address with asus and have they done anything about them?

 

I complained about the fan issue and asked if someone is about to fix this. At least my mail got forwarded to the next support level. however I got no answer so far. I think I have to write a new mail these days.

by the way: the problem with linux booting with acpi enabled seems to be a linux issue. the acpi code might be a mess, however the new freebsd works with acpi. so maybe there's hope

 

Paulmeister, I just stated the facts for them in plain english. I don't know how to me more serious and convincing than that. The thing is that this is not the first time I hear about Power4Gear settings from Asus support. The first time I phoned them and talked with a guy there I got no answer about the issue, but the next day he phoned me back and said he had talked with an another technician at work who recommended to use Office mode in Power4Gear setting to remedy the problem. Of course that did not help and I had no choice but RMA it. I have not written to them after I got the second RMA request rejected but I will do that some day when I have time. I agree with you wholly that we must put pressure on them to get this issue solved.

 

id be willing to write them every day to help out with the situation, im not experiancing any issues yet, but want you all to enjoy this pc as much as i am.

what exactly do you want me to write them about.......ive got a month free so i can really persist with this during that time, and when i go back to uni i will want to activate the integrated gpu and as this could be one of the reasons problems seem to arise, would be keen to see the problems solved before then.

anyway let me know if i can help out at all.
takecare

 

Thank you Mtness, I'm glad that you don't have these issues because it's very frustrating specially for those with the LCD issue. I myself have no problem with the LCD. Writing to them everyday will just make our case worse but wrting to them every now and them should get their attention. My problem is mainly with the fan going on 100% every time coming back after sleep mode. I have also the same problem when starting the computer with AC power but that is a minor issue to me. I think the LCD issue is more serious, I would never accept that as little I do the fan problem.

 

it´s sad that paying customers nowadays have to resort to such methods in order to get significant problems like the fan or the lcd issue which both heavily affect the proper usage of the product fixed...

it can´t be helped though.. am i assuming right that you guys write to [email protected] ? or is there another proper address to write to?

i think we´ll really have to start to regularly write our complaints to Asus Tsd in order to have a chance.. i´m going to start a thread in the Asus forum itself later on advising every M51ta owner who experiences problems to send mails to tech support..

 

yeap i agree with you mate, if we all start writing in, sooner or later they will have to do something about the problem.

its a shame and im sure this lack of support doesnt happen with there high end machines, but one of the main reasons i got this asus was the fantastic global warranty it offered.

in some countries you can contact a consumer aware group which contact the company informing them of the complaints and that if action isnt taken it will be reported on tv potentially damaging the companies reputation..........hmmmmmmm

 

anyone have problem with hinge cover? my hinge cover stucked up at 2 times, and i send notebook to asus, anyone have solutions ? where i buy hinge covers?
have other question, what is yours scores about HD3650 ? mines has 3718 has good? and yout temps about this card what is?

 

I guess you used 3dmark06?
I never benchmarked mine but according to http://www.notebookcheck.com/Mobile-Grafikkarten-Benchmarkliste.735.0.html it's quite a good result.

yes I do use this email address for my "technical inquiries"...

it seems to be the only way to get asus to do something about these problem!


by the way: linux kernel 2.6.29 rc3 was released and should fix many acpi issues, especially with notebooks. I compiled the new kernel yesterday but somehow it does not even boot with acpi disabled. but it might be my incompetence to build a new kernel, although I've already did it several times. (but never used a vanilla kernel...)
If anyone has some linux knowledge, maybe he can try it?

 

I don't quite understand the problem but hinge covers are cheap parts; you can get them from ASUS eStore (in North America). If elsewhere, see the Info Booth, there is aFAQ item about buying components.

 

thanks for reply, yes its is 3dmark06 but my temps reach at 96 degrees for exemple when play grid ....:S and i made a stress test about 2hours on 3dmark06 and temps stay on 96 degrees C, its normal ? i have a M51VA, the problems is my hinge cover jumped about 3 days buyed notebook lol, i send notebook to warranty and when we cames, the problem are the same... hinge cover jumps lol, so i live in portugal not chance to buy on north america, and i need notebook to send asus another time :S

 

I personally havent had issues with my Hinges/covers at all..... I can see how it would be a problem tho


I tried installing Catalyst 9.1 the other day and didnt have much luck getting it to switch between the 3200 and 3650 smoothly. I had to force it to detect the 3650 as well. If anyone else is brave enough to try it, please report back. Until then, I am using 8.12 again.

 

i also tried to install them as mobility modded packages on a fresh windows vista system - although both cards were recognized and the HD3650 was working fine and i was even able to switch to HD3200 the grapics with the HD3200 was corrupted...

As soon as the HD3200 became active the resolution reverted to 640x480 or something like that and couldn´t be changed afterwards.. also the colors were displayed as bad as kind of like color depth was set to 8-bit or so

but even worse was that i couldn´t even get the previously working catalyst 8.12 to work after having uninstalled catalyst 9.1 entirely with even running drivercleaner - i had to install vista again in order to fix this problem

 

What I have noticed about these driver installations is that I is best to power the laptop completely off when rebooting between driver installs.

Why? Well, if you uninstalled a driver and the laptop had the 3200 running a reboot will continue the 3200 running while a complete power cycle will reset the 3650 as the active primary driver on the next windows boot up.

You shouldnt have to reinstall vista after going back to a previous driver (altough clean installs are awesome) Next time try powering the laptop off, wait a minute, then on again so when the catalyst installs, it is seeing the 3650 as the primary adapter.

 

about temps, what temps you get on max ? and idle, guys?

 

That was the first time i had problems with uninstalling graphics drivers ever since i started using vista... i often change graphics drivers since i try every new release and often also experiment a bit myself..

I normally uninstall the drivers by simply removing every component through ati software uninstall then boot in safe mode, manually force the graphics card to use the standard vga driver and then run driver cleaner..
Although i´m not entirely sure i think that i even had my notebook switched off for a while between uninstalling catalyst 9.1 and installing 8.12

well, anyways.. 9.1 isn´t working with dual gpu...

 

Out of curiosity, why is this relevant? Are you seeing graphical distortions? Is your laptop bluescreening? Do you have issues gaming?

 

its not relevant but im curious, because at this time i have mine 3650 overclocked at 700-500 from 600-400 and my max temp are 95Cdegrees, and idle are 39c, and i dont know its normal

 

I would not recommend overclocking a notebook's graphiccard. notebooks are very heat sensitive systems!

 

95 degrees are quite ok seeing that you overclocked your gpu - even the more powerful desktop graphics overstep the 90° boarder when gaming.. as soon as the temperature oversteps 100° i´d be careful..

your idle temperatures however.. did you take that value shortly after you started your notebook? it seems very low to me because mine generally idles at about 50-60 degrees

edit: as paulemeister already said you should be very careful with overclocking your notebook anyway since that´s quite a bit more critical than with a normal desktop pc

 

hy, the only think i made, its put The GPU BIOS file from Asus F8VA, on mine Asus M51va, and temps drops about 13 degrees, i do not change boot clocks or 2d clocks, this F8VA bios are more stable and low temps, and now i have overclock more safely, an it allows to Downvolting GPU and temps drops more than lol

Edit: when i have a Asusm51 GPU BIOS my temps in idl aresomething like 55Cdegrres, and overclocked max temp are 109c degrees lol

look at my post http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=349349

 

I would advise to avoid getting to such large temperatures as 109 degrees Celsius... that can damage the integrated circuits, not in the short term perhaps, but it will be detrimental in the long term.

 

Wow, what the hell. How can they just say it is a software issue and not provide a solution? This is like crucial to the normal operation of this laptop. They are basically selling us all lemons, and if these were cars it would be illegal and we would have their asses in court.

I was considering sending my laptop back to them on an RMA, but after hearing this I am thinking twice about it. I may still do it just to make them look at another laptop of the same model and raise their operating costs.

I'm still under the impression that the ATI graphics cards are the source of these issues. If you run the laptop on the high performance graphics card exclusively the fan issue seems to go away. Standby operates normally... most of the time. I'm not sure about the LCD issue, but I haven't noticed anything too weird happening. If the ATI drivers get even slightly out of line, the ACPI options disable themselves.

Also, I've noticed that even though you may download the "integrated" catalyst driver, many of the newer versions do not have the North Bridge driver included! Pay attention when installing these from scratch. You'll see that it never installs them, and that is why you have to force detection to pick up both GPUs. A whole host of problems arises because of this. I found that most of the time, only the 3200 would be detected (which causes the FAN issue, standby lockups, and who knows what else).

I started with the latest ATI drivers at the time, Catalyst 8.12, and started progressively moving backwards... it was not until I installed Catalyst 8.10 that the North Bridge drivers were installed. I'm not sure if they are simply not contained in the other packages or if they are just not detected. Whatever the issue is, that is just plain incorrect and ATI needs to get their sh-t together.

The only way to preserve both GPU installations from this point is to do an UPGRADE from 8.10 to 8.12. If you decide to uninstall 8.10 and then reinstall with 8.12, your North Bridge will be missing and your GPU configuration will be messed up. I don't know why this is, but it certainly pisses me off.

One last thing I noticed is that if you try to turn the laptop on with the wireless switched off, it will lock up as soon as Windows loads.

 

north/southbridge drivers aren´t by default included in the catalyst package anymore..

go to http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx and by following the link ATI Catalyst [Version] Display Driver for [OS] - Motherboard/IGP Drivers you´ll find the download link for the southbridge driver package at the bottom of that page...

 

Yeah, I just figured out last night that the North Bridge drivers are included in the South Bridge driver package. I did a clean install with the 9.1 catalyst package, but it wasn't smart enough to find both graphics adapters. I had to disable one and reboot and force a detection.

Also I've noticed that you can update the drivers on the 3650 to "ATI 3600 Series" manually to get newer driver versions on that card.

 

I loaded 9.1 the same way having to force the 3650. What happened to me using 9.1 is that the adapters wouldn't switch back and forth properly (3200-3650 and vise versa) I am now using 8.12 again.

Here is my hack fix for avoiding the LCD from not powering on if you close the lid for a few hours (while the laptop remains on) or the fan blaring issue.

1)When in in windows on A/C power and not gaming, i use the 3200. That way I can close the lid and not have to worry about the LCD not coming back on.

2)When going into standby on A/C or battery power. I force the laptop back onto the 3650. This way when it comes out of standby, the doesnt sound like a lawnmower.

Its annoying as hell. I'm about to write ASUS again. If they could fix 1 of the two issues for me, (preferably the 100% fan when hitting standby on the 3200) I would be ecstatic.

 

Mine just arrived, so far so good. This thing screams.