Asus N550JV - user review and owners lounge

Please keep us posted. It'd be really nice to see if CPU/GPU throttle more than expected. If you could record CPU/GPU frequencies and temperatures while playing then it'd be amazing!

Do you happen to own Crysis 3? It's known for high CPU usage.

 

Sadly not. I'm not much of a gamer anymore

 

I opted for the Momentus 750gb 7200k drive. I wish there were more bench comparisons as I am not sure if the 1tb 5400k Momentus would be capable of matching the 750gb 7200k. I didn't want to gamble on that so I went with the 7200k.

 

True something could come out in the future, but honestly that ship has already sailed for MS once they just had to drop the price of all their unsold Surface tablets that have become a colossal failure for the company. The sales of Win 8 are also quite terrible. The only reason it isn't a complete failure is that Windows 8 is pushed on to consumers with new hardware such as this Asus laptop we are discussing. There is no way in hell I would have ordered this with Win 8 if there was an option for 7. I would have even paid up to $50 to have Win 7 included instead of 8. I would be really surprised if they continue on this path of forcing people into a touch screen tablet sort of thinking regardless if you are using a touch screen or not.

 

Luckily enough, there are free little softwares like "classic shell" that can make W8 look like W7, start menu and all. Thank God. I wouldn't mess with W8 without it. Touchscreen laptops are an aberration imo (except for convertible laps). It's just absurd when you think about it more than 2 secs.

 

Quick question: all these people reporting their battery life of about 4-5 hours, is that on the non-touchscreen or touchscreen version? Does anyone know how the battery life is on the touchscreen version?

To those of you who may own the touchscreen model, is there a way to disable the touchscreen for better battery life?

 

Yeah I installed Start8 pretty quickly after playing around with the new start menu and tiles. I read so many people saying to give it time and this is the way of the future, but I realized that is just stupid when you think about how much bull it adds to any task you do. Count up all the clicks it takes to do different tasks in Win 7 and Win 8 and you see that it is a terrible design requiring more work to do the exact same thing. I also completely dislike have everything part of the cloud and all the programs that take over the entire screen and cannot be tabbed out of.

First, I don't want a little tile worth of info, if I want info, I want more than just two sentences worth and will go to specific program or website. And I certainly do not need all the info cluttered in with all the programs that I very infrequently use.

Second, only phones lock you into a single program that cannot be easily tabbed in and out of, oh wait.. No, phones stopped that about 3-4 years ago as well.

Sorry for the rant, but the UI and UX for Windows 8 is an unequivocal failure no matter how you dice it.

 

Can someone please record something with laptop built-in mic? Or at least test it and let us know whether quality is ok or not.

I had Asus n56vz and recording quality was just awful. I wonder if ASUS fixed this issue now.

 

Amen Steezus. I knew W7 was the perfect OS we were waiting for after using it for less than 2 hours when it was released

Mic sound is actually pretty good. Just tried it with Youcam. It records the voice loud and clear (I tried some guitare and yuck lol, it is really meant for voice which is quite logical) in stereo but there can be some little compression artifacts like on some poor mp3s but it's pretty discret and not prohibitive. There are three holes near the webcam, guess it all for mic. The best thing about integrated mic records is that there's absolutely no background noise, i mean none at all. Compared to my Lenovo, it's pretty amazing how they cut mic noise.

 

What software do you use to record/log cpu frequencies during a gaming session ?

There is no throttling with cpu tubo off while gaming (BBC2) as temps don't go up to 80°C but there is definetely cpu throttling with cpu turbo on cause it reached 84°C, but i don't know by how much, doesn't seem to be hard throttling since i didn't experience brutal fps drops. The gpu on the other hand always stays at max boost 1167 mhz according to gpu-z log file. I didn't undervolt during those tests.

 

HWiFO64 should give you a graph.

Run sensors and right click on a core to get it's graph. You can get it for a lot of things.

It also has a log button at the bottom.

 

ok thanks i'll give a try

 

I can confirm some CPU throttling involved as it approaches 80C. Like Kallogan, I don't have a graph proving it, but playing World of Tanks yields some FPS drops occasionally down to 30 when normally I can get 60-100FPS. When running Dolphin Emulator, a similar occurrence happens when upping GPU settings to 4x IR and throttling the CPU every so often resulting in a drop from 60FPS to 20 (and the GPU stays at 1163mhz the whole time indicating the CPU is being thottled hard). So Asus's control is literally trying to keep the CPU from going over 80C. <-- Did not undervolt at this point, so might make some difference, but I'll just have to try again once I get everything stable.

I'm testing Prime95 without the GPU running and no hard throttling to 800mhz. Only the standard 47W throttle which leaves it at around 2.6 or 2.8Ghz (depending on if you undervolt or not) at 75C.

Later on, tried some undervolting, -99.6mV got a crash without a BSOD, so I left it at -50mV for now (while I continue testing stability at -75mV). Also increased the turbo speeds to 3.4Ghz (4 cores)/3.6Ghz (1 core).

 

Wow, I just tested it thoroughly last night and today and this machine n55jv-db71 is throttling but not because of heat but I think what the Asus Engineers set it up at.

I mean the i7-4700hq is capable upto 100c and it throttles down to 800mhz as soon as it hits 81-84c. My fps in game while monitoring it with Crysis is a steady 50fps then as soon as the cpu temps hit 80ish celcius, the 4 cpu clocks via hwinfo dropped from 3.2ghz to 800mhz and simultaneously my frames per sec in crisis drop from 50fps to 35fps and then stays that way for 20-30 seconds since the cpu are now at 800mhz then my frames per sec comes right back to 50fps with cpu clocks back up to 3.2ghz simultaneously since the throttle made the cpu temps from 80ish celcius down to 70c then rinse repeat within 1 min, the cpu throttled again.

GPU via Nvidia Inspector and MSI Afterburner shows no throttle for straight 20 minutes with continues 99% gpu usage, 1,163mhz core clock with all straight graph with average temp reaching 78c on gpu.


Why did ASUS set a cpu threshold throttle of early 80ish celcius when the damn i7-4700hq is capable of upto 100c limit before it shuts down? Damn I had a Clevo W230ST that reached 95 celcius and around 80c on gtx 765m and it never throttled and I was getting max performance.


There has got to be a way to disable this threshold on the cpu temps that Asus put in if they really did it. This is very disappointing!!!





I had my doubts when I read the professional review of notebookcheck of N550JV and here was the quote that scared me but I figured I take a chance

" The Asus achieves 42.6 dB(A) under medium load (3D Mark 06), but only 38 dB(A) under full load as the CPU throttles and does not need to be cooled that much"


What in the hell do they mean it does not need to be cooled that much, is Asus telling us that since they do not want to increase the fan rpm speed and noise, they would rather throttle the cpu at early 80ish celcius to get gimp performance when the cpu threshold is 100c? WOW JUST WOW!!!

 

Yeah the 80¨°C throttling point is a bit weird, plus the fans who are running at very low speeds. I mean ok it's friggin quiet when gaming but just a little more fan speed and a throttling point at 90°C wouldn't hurt and would make the lap running perfectly at max speed. Oh well, maybe a bios update. I'm not worried, i always find a way, rising the lap with adhesive pads, repasting, 60 fps framelimiter etc...That said, playing with turbo off is no problem. Or lock the cores at say maybe 2,8 ghz with -100mv, should work also. Silence comes at a price.

 

That's what i'm currently testing right now Kallogan. Turning the turbo boost off, but since the bios on this does not have the option to turn off the intel turbo boost, i'm using this old trick of turning the min and max of the cpu at only 99 instead of 100 and it turns off the turbo boost perfectly fine and all 4 cores stead at 2.4ghz. So far my cpu temps only reached 79c after 30 minutes of crysis and there was no throttling.

The only problem with this is that I don't know if running 2.4ghz only will affect other games when it comes to frames per sec performance since Crysis is more of a gpu hungry bound game. I figured 4 cores running at 2.4ghz is going to be around 9hz and that is plenty fast for any game even cpu intensive ones don't you think?

Without turbo boost @ 2.4ghz x4 = 9.6ghz vs 3.2ghz when all 4 cores are running at max speeds with turbo on 3.2ghz x4 = 12.8ghz

 

Colpolite,
it doesn't exactly work like that. Clock speeds do not add up with more cores to equal a single core higher clocked CPU. (2.4Ghz x4 is rather just 2.4ghz on each individual core and each core is hyperthreaded to allow more threads running a time) A quad core CPU can simply handle more tasks at the same time, but a single threaded task will not run any faster than a 'supposed 2.4ghz i7' that had only one core.
Some newer games have more threads for different parts of the game, but older generation games may only be single threaded and only utilize one core at a time (task manager can be sometimes deceiving as the workload bounces between the cores). Often a dual core i5 can actually beat a quad core i7 when the application is single or dual core usage only simply because the i5 has a higher clock rate.

Since heat generation is pretty much exponential to the voltage (that comes with higher clock rate), running at the standard 2.4ghz will produce far less heat ingame. If the game isn't being limited (frame rate drop due to CPU), then 2.4ghz is plenty. If the game is highly CPU intensive, tough luck and either hope the clockrate is good enough or possibly decrease GPU settings for less heat generation. Hopefully the Haswell supported version of Throttlestop will help.

 

Good info F35. Anyway you think Asus has something to do with this stupid early 80ish celcius throttle? I mean why would they do that when other laptops like razer 14, msi ge40/ge60, clevo w230st are running high in the late 80s and early 90s celcius and they are not throttling are still within the safe limits as long as it doesn't go above 95c or close to thermal limit shutoff of 100c.

So far the only games I tested with the intel turbo boost on/off is Crysis and WoW and both did not suffer in reduction of frames per sec regardless if turbo was on or not so this is good news. I also tested 3dmark06/3dmark11 with turbo on and off and the difference is minimal.



3DMARK11

Intel Turbo On
- 2,715 Score
- 2,522 GPU
- 7,288 CPU
- Max CPU temp 84c

Intel Turbo Off
- 2,650 Score
- 2,487 GPU
- 5,917 CPU
- Max CPU temp 72c



3DMARK06

Intel Turbo On
- 14,051 Score
- 5,454 SM3.0
- 6,705 CPU
- Max CPU temp 86c

Intel Turbo Off
- 13,438 Score
- 5,303 SM3.0
- 5,165 CPU
- Max CPU temp 74c


I guess 2.4ghz quadcore is still plenty fast. You think battery life will also be improved even further with disabling intel turbo?

 

Most definitely an artificial throttle set by Asus. When the CPU runs alone without the GPU, the CPU stays below 80C, so it will run smoothly without being throttled. When the GPU is on, the CPU's temps go higher and throttle occasionally when the game gets intensive.

In my Asus N53SV model, I had no problems accidentally running the CPU up to 100C...which I promptly repasted when I found out the stock paste was badly done. They didn't have any artificial throttling on that model, so I've run it upwards to 85C-88C normally during games. So there's likely no harm in running the CPU in the 80s to 90s range (though 90s I would caution doing since it puts thermal wear on the overall components including the motherboard).

I'm seriously hoping on Throttlestop's next release in hope that it will counter the artificial throttle. (Throttlestop worked with Sandybridge Asus G series models that throttled to 800mhz)


As for battery life... if you want more battery life, don't play intensive games unless you're on AC. You'll get like 1-2 hours max running on standard clock rate due to the GPU also being used (it's only a 59Whr battery, so GPU + CPU will likely use around 40-75W depending on settings used ... which means around 1 hour battery life).
High battery life comes from down clocking to 800mhz whist in battery saving mode and running more simple applications like web browsing & lowering brightness. (NOTE: Turbo speeds also aren't supposed to run on Battery Mode, so the max speed will be 2.4Ghz anyway)

 

Can the people who undervolted post their results? I'm looking for a good starting point for when I get mine in a few days.

Is there a tangible benefit to replacing the wifi card? I noticed several people were talking about having dropped in an Intel 2230.

Is there a cheaper reseller for the ODD caddy than XoticPC?

Thanks

 

I was wondering if anyone who has this laptop can comment on whether it has a bluray drive or not? In all the press shots it shows the bluray symbol on the disc drive.

 

Yeah throttlestop might get rid of the throttling issue. For now, i'm fine playing with turbo off as i only play BBC2 and 2,4ghz will be enough most of the time for the medium class 750M, i didn't buy that lap for heavy gaming, just occasionnal and for video editing mostly. I was aware of the 80°C throttling before buying it anyway so i can't say i'm disappointed.

Craz> The highest priced models have bluray on board yes.

 

I don't know about others here but i had a friggin' issue aka high idle power consumption with Atheros wifi card (17-19W never below). I ditched it for a spare intel 2230N i already had because i'd like to try Widi someday by curiosity. And guess what, idle power consumption fell to 13-14W (i'm talking wifi on and max screen brightness here) and responsiveness seem better while web surfing...So i'd say in my case it was all benefit in every way.

As for undervolting -100mv seems to be the sweet spot for many Haswell users. It makes a huge difference in temps and power consumption (shave 10W+ at the wall). I crashed at -110mv and -120mv at some points but -100mv is rock stable for now. It's a dynamic undervolting so it apply directly at all P-states from idling to max load.

 

There is a tiny flaw in the cooling system as the GPU pipe had no reason going above the CPU with it's own heat. I find that kinda strange. This is why on my unit Prime95 runs all day without any problems, but as soon as I start Furmark, CPU AND GPU will clock down. The CPU gets extra heat, the GPU cannot be cooled fast enough since there will be some extra heat on the way as well. I might be missing something here, why this cooling design.

The 80°C limit makes sense since they tried to keep this fairly low noise. Things could have been better with a Turbo button for fans (I had them with Clevo and MSI if I recall this right, well Clevo had some button that kept fans at low rpm, but still the same idea). So far this is the only 4700HQ that has such a low limit and it still does not clock down that much. Others have like +90 limit and they run at 800Mhz rather fast. I guess Asus cooling is good, but could have been much better.

Anyway, I see no problems in games, I always play on Balanced (maybe has something to do with it, have no idea) and medium settings. Laptops also stays cool enough, it only gets hot in the top middle part, where I never reach. Other laptops will burn your gaming fingers.

I had this laptop very fast, as it just entered the market. I am extremly happy with it. For me seems like the most complete and well balanced. It's not a beast, but can handle games well. It not heavy. It's not big. A wider gamut panel would have made it laptop of the year for sure.

 

i'd say that just by putting a 90°C throttling point and say 10-20% more fan speed under heavy load, it would be perfect for gaming with turbo on. I mean it's a strong dual fan cooling system and it feels like it's only at 10% of its real cooling capacity lol.

And it's summer, hot ambiant temps

 

Honestly that's not a necessarily a bad cooling system solution. The reason why they probably did that is because it WILL improve the CPU cooling when the GPU is not running at all. In my Asus N53SV, even though it only has one fan as cooling, the two heat pipes were separated and thus the GPU would be much lower in temperature than the CPU. Right now, I'm getting GPU temperatures that are around 5C lower than the CPU that during 'normal' loads. It's basically a compromise to give the CPU better cooling and raising the GPU temperature. Without the throttling point, it would have functioned very well.

 

I'm liking the touch, used it starting from the Windows install screen.
Things felt easier, not just in the new interfaces like the Bing travel app but when scrolling around webpages as well, especially when scrolling horizontally.
It comes with a towel for screen cleaning too but I haven't used it; I never eat around the pc and keep my hands relatively clean. Not enough smudges yet to break out the towel after a few days.

 

Tested the beta Throttlestop. SUCCESS, after disabling BD PROCHOT, no throttling
Attached a graph of the throttling & after disabling.

 

here we go, problem solved

 

Is the green graph on top the success one and the red graph at the bottom the throttling one? What is the BD PROCHOT and is that all we need to do is uncheck or disable that one and cpu and gpu running together no longer throttles the cpu? Can you test how high your cpu temps go up now that is no longer throttling and did the fan noise increase as well?

 

You have on the left what colors mean.

 

Yes the indicators are on the left.
It's all on one graph, the orange showing the clock rate changing and throttling for the first half of the graph before I used throttlestop and thus the clockrate becomes stable at 3.4ghz rather than crashing to 800mhz every couple of seconds. The temps still don't really go much higher than 80C at all...

BD PROCHOT is a feature on throttlestop that supposedly enables/disables the temperature threshold that the processor is set to throttle at (which is supposed to be 100C, but certain models like this one have set it lower.)
You can read the throttlestop guide in this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...arket-upgrades/531329-throttlestop-guide.html

 

Very nice, so what temperature did Asus set it to throttle at?

Also if we disable BD PROCHOT, do we have to do it everytime we restart by starting up throttlestop or once we disable it, it is good to go??

 

Likely the temperature is definitely around 80C and usually only throttles when the GPU is also running since I haven't had it hard throttle with prime95 on without the GPU. That's just a thought.
I'm pretty sure you need to reinitialize throttlestop every reboot (as with XTU I think), but there's also supposed to be an option to start throttlestop up for couple seconds in task scheduler on login then closing it after applying the settings.

 

ok guys i dug into throttling and throttlestop (beta for haswell) does not work for me, it doesn't change anything. As soon as I stress cpu (cpustressMT) + gpu (furmark), it throttles.

That being said, i check my throttling without using throttlestop and despite pushing hard on cpu ang gpu, my cpu never go below 2,8 ghz. It starts at 3,2 ghz and as soon as temps reach 85°C, the cpu underclocks progressively to 2,8 ghz and stays that way no matter what. It's not what we can call a hard throttling.
I don't know if it has to do with the fact i updated to the last 205 bios. Maybe cause it's impossible for me to make it throttle below 2,8 ghz. I'll continue my testings to be sure.

 

Has anyone tried overclocking the GDDR3 on the 750M to get the bandwidth up a bit?

 

TDP 47W throttling is not supposed to be stopped. A stress test will use MORE than 47W and cause progressive underclocks so that it maintains 47W after the short time frame of boosting power to 58W. Throttlestop will not change these settings when you uncheck BD PROCHOT, only artificial throttling where it throttles all the way down to 800mhz.

It is possible that the 205 bios changed the EC control of the CPU and prevents hard throttling. (since the release doesn't state much about the change).

 

well, since i have a 768p screen, i don't think i need more bandwidth but for those with 1080p screen it might help a bit.

 

Does the GPU clock down? Here is my OP test

I have no idea what's my BIOS . I'll take a look. Not 205 for sure since it's 2013/07/31. It would have been nice to know what it does.

 

i will log cpu frequencies and gpu frequencies to see what happens when gaming.

when i launch a furmark, my gpu is locked at 900 mhz. But while gaming it's constantly at 1167 mhz

 

OK, I've updated the BIOS.

Strangely enough, Winflash does not work with Windows 7 64bit so I did it from the BIOS itself. Anyway it's better like that. Was fast and painless. System seems the same.

 

So it still throttles with the newer bios?

 

ok played BBC2 for 30 minutes or so (no undervolting)

Constant 3,2 ghz on four cores and constant 1162,7 on gpu.

i attached log files.

i also have put adhesive pads to rise my lap to improve airflow, don't know by how much but i stacked two on each side (2x3mm thick or so) so the lap is 6-7mm height.

http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00ECRThjWgglkw/Adhesive-Rubber-Pads.jpg

 

I was playing in dx9 and framerate was mostly between 80 and 120 fps.

Just played BBC2 again with turbo off and put a framerate limiter at 58 fps via Nvidia inspector, 73°C max on cpu and religious silence while gaming, fans barely kick as power consumption is only at 70W or so.

Funny thing is the 58 fps limiter is reducing tearing a lot while with the limiter at 60 fps, there was a lot of tearing. It's almost like the V-sync without the laggyness, pretty cool.

 

Room temp 30°C.



I get mixed results. But they always throttle.

The fans kick in a little late now (GPU needs to hit 80 first for example and by that time it's too hot to be cooled fast enough so it throttles).

Sometimes the CPU has a hard time going up from 800Mhz if the GPU is under full load. After some time if the GPU goes under 1000MHz I think, it will boost to 2.6-2.7GHz. If the CPU itself is first under load, it will hold 2.8-2.9GHz and the GPU will have 880-980Mhz. It will never go above.

In the example from the pic it was CPU at 2.8-2.9GHz with temps as high as 90° on current run (but they got even at 95° on some tests due to GPU heat wave) and the GPU at constant 953Mhz at 78° flat and it did so for a long time. But it will not always behave like this. On another run for example it was 927Mhz flat at 78°C with CPU at 2.8GHz at 87°C top. So mix results.

Under games things should be a lot better since there is no constant full load on any of them, not to mention both.

 

Hey guys will the new intel Centrino 7260 dual band w/ combo Bluetooth 4.0 fit and work on the n550jv?

Here is the link and is cheaper than other stores where it is $30+, this link is only half the price Amazon.com: Intel 7260HMW BN IEEE 802.11n PCI Express Bluetooth 4.0 - Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Combo Adapter: Computers & Accessories


Will that fit and work?

 

it will fit perfectly now to see if it'll work you'll have to try by yourself to be sure But there are good chances it'll work no whitelist afaik. I have put this one, no probs at all :

http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-Centrino-Wireless-N-2230-b.jpg

 

Nice Kallogan. When you installed the intel 2230, where did you download the drivers for it to work on your n550jv?

 

Testing the newer version 205 bios, but the results seem worse than the original bios I had (version 203).
Throttles even more quickly than the first. If the CPU is loaded by a stress test and I open even the lightest application that turns on the GPU (without loading it much), the CPU throttles to 800mhz. Throttlestop still works with it though.

 

Just took the drivers on intel website.