Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 Owner's Lounge

New G14 owner here, ordered it on the 24th of November and finally arrived this past Tuesday (the 15th) taking a whopping 3 weeks to get here. I even ordered early to make sure to beat the Black Friday influx of parcels but alas was too late, I can tell you these were 3 of the longest weeks of waiting.

I ended up grabbing the 4800HS & 1660Ti Max-Q w/ 120Hz display on sale for $400CAD off the $1700CAD MSRP. I'm loving how well it performs plugged in and how long it lasts on battery. While the CPU is absolutely phenomenal for my music production but I've found the GPU somewhat lacking. (If only the 4800HS/2060 Max-Q variation was readily available in Canada, as well as only the 1660Ti variation had the $400CAD sale) Catching up in this forum has peaked my interest in trying to to squeeze a few extra frames out of of the 1660Ti.

While I feel I am fully capable of doing a shunt mod to increase the TDP of 60W to the TDP of the Max-P variant's 80W I was wondering if anyone had simply thought of flashing the vBios of the Max-P variant to the Max-Q version? While I consider myself tech savvy, bios' have always scared me because of the possibility of bricking the system entirely. A bios mod would also make viability of this mod much more available to the average user. I see no reason that if the 1660Ti would work the 2060 would work and vice versa. Thoughts?

 

Well that's the thing, vbios flashing a Max-q with a Max-p bios just locks the gpu into safe mode 1350/1380mhz which ends up being even slower than stock.

 

If 6123 is without applying any kind of OC, the shut mod is working. Now you need to start overclocking to get the most out of it.

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Damn, if only it had been that easy. I did more research last night and came to the same conclusion. Oh well, ordered myself some 0.010, 0.012, and 0.015 Ohm resistors to do a shunt mod. I'm sure I'll be back to post some before and after scores as I haven't seen any 1660Ti scores with the shunt mod.

 

I get 6049 on my graphics score on timespy with 0 overclocking and my 0.015mohm shunt mod... I'll be moving up to 0.010 or 0.009mohm here soon...

 

that's after an overclock, what do i use to over clock or mess with voltages i have no idea, i really feel like it can do better it stays around 65c anyway im starting to think it can handle more power but im not sure im still just using the 15mohm does anyone else have more time spy scores for me to compare too? also ive been using msi after burnner i dont know if i can unlock voltages with that, but yeah should i push from more power? i have one more 15mohm shunt resistor should i put that one on the other one next to it?

 

What are your OC settings? It seems to me that your shunt mod isn't working if you are getting that score.

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Has anyone else overclocked their screen??? I didn't realize this but apparently some people over at reddit have easily been getting the coveted 144hz range... I'm testing it out using CRU.... I'm at 130Hz right now...first try... Gaming does seem a bit different from 60hz...maybe it's by old 30 year old eyes but it doesn't seem like it is all worth it going up from 60hz...
It definitely heats up using 130hz for gaming....

I still think I'm going to drop in a new shunt after the holidays... probably 7-8 mohm would be my guess... with the wire that I used I believe I'm getting additional resistance which brings up my final number on my current 15mohm shunt to more like 20mohm...so dropping it to 7-8mohm would level it off around 12mohm total...

 

Not sure about the panels used in the G14 but my old zephyrus G with a 120hz panda panel can go up to 167hz. The panel response times are still gobshite tho.

Edit: Just checked, the G14 also uses a panda panel, CEC PA LM140LF-1F01 to be exact.

 

i put 220 on the core and 1000mhz on the mem, and that's it but i just took it off and trying to see if they are the same, although im not sure how i could have screwed up the soldering it's not hard, but i dont know if it's the piece i used or what, or my wires, or how thick they need to be or something, i kinda went into this blind only because the soldering part isnt hard for me,but yeah i dont know if i got the wrong shunt it's a thick film 1watt 1% tolerence 15mohm resistor 1206 type, i tried pulling the soldering joints and they seem to be on there so i donno, i un installed asus armory to try and just use msi afterburner for over clocking but now im still stuck on why it's not giving me better results, as one guy said in this chat, 15mohm is about 88 watts so do i push further? i donno but it stayes around 65c currently, update, yeah i dont think my shunt is working i just got 5548 on the graphics score and thats without oc so i dont know what im doing wrong, does the shunt need to be a paticular way when i put it in? im not sure im just gonna test things while i wait from a reply from you kind people

 

+220 seems way high on the GPU... I can only manage about +185 on mine... that's a pretty golden chip if you ask me.. I can go upto about +1100 on the memory but once I get to the 1150 mark I start getting artifacts so I leave plenty of margin and don't go over 1000... last thing I want to do is cook my VRAM and toast my GPU...
Definitely isn't working...something is reducing the power on your GPU. I get around 5850 on the Time Spy Graphics score with my GPU at stock without the shunt mod....

I'm upto 140Hz on my panel... It does feel different when gaming but not sure a 140hz screen is worth it on a 14" laptop... I feel like I already have to squint compared to my 28" 4k monitor...lol
I'm kinda liking 80Hz right now...little more than 80Hz and doesn't cause my CPU to go nuts and try and keep up with the GPU...

 

i hope its as good lol it doesnt crash at 220 it starts at like 240, and i cant push mem passed 1050 but thats okay, i have the laptop open right now and im trying different things to get it to work, but yeah it is a low score and i dont understand why, maybe some nvidia settings? i donno yet but today i wanna figure it out, i closed stuff in the back ground and stuff and i used Oosu10 to shut down any windows things that might be running in the back ground okay i just flipped the resistor and ran it again and i re soldered my joints, and i still got 5556 stock im gonna try the other shunt

 

Update okay i just took off the shunt and now im getting 5533 on the graphis, so something is wrong but i dont know what i dont think it's the shunts, i think it might be some settings in the computer, im willing to do a factory reset if i have too but would anyone care to give me a hand? i dont really have an idea of what it could be, i have it on the asus plan in power settings and it's plugged in, and i have the battery setting set to 80 percent charge, i dont know if that has anything to do with that, and in the power profile i dont have anything than can hinder performance

 

Please post a picture of the job

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New shunts ordered! Should have them by next week hopefully. Went with 7, 8, 9mohm... I'll start out with the 9mohm and see what that gets me. I hover around 1610MHz average on Time Spy so I'm excited to see if I can get into the 1700MHz range with the additional power. The nice thing is I can easily back off the power when gaming based on an overclock/underclock profile in MSI Afterburner so I'm not worried too much power will change games too much...just benchmarking for bragging rights. lol

 

here you go tell me how i did

 

i also cleaned in between the contacts just to make sure they wern't going to short
but what doesnt add up is the fact that it had no impact on testing it no changes on anything i did happened

 

Have you used lead free sodder and flux?

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no i haven't but the one i used has silver in it, here i used this one
https://www.amazon.com/Cardas-Solde...46775&sprefix=cardas+audio+qua,aps,207&sr=8-2

it has flux in it, but it still looks ugly cause it's not enough, but it's on there pretty good so i donno

 

Glad I'm not the only one that went that route with the wires... I had an awful time soldering so wires were the best route for me...just snipped some off a spare 12v fan I had lying around and walla....Looks similar to yours except I've got like 500+ more thermal pads than you..hehe

I think 3d mark is having some issues but scored a new high ( 6908): https://www.3dmark.com/spy/16627886
I went back to the drawing board for overclocking and now it looks like I'm stable at +200 on the Core, +1000 Memory. Once I have the new shunt next week hopefully I'll be pushing 7k+

 

Normal solder and solving iron don't work. You need lead free solder and a soldering iron that can go 250°C

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Normal solder works just fine. I myself use it for my shunt mods and so do many others I've helped with shunt modding.

 

i have a lot more thermal padding lol it's just not in the picture lol, hey where do you guys get the shunts?? are mine any good? i listed the specs on it already but i dont know it it might be the shunts fault why i cant get higher then the scores i got on stock

 

yeah i didn't feel the need to get lead free on the board, i dont know the temp of my soldering iron anyway, it's a weller on though and it's 40watts i mean it gets the job done on litterally anything i throw at it so i think it's okay, also yeah i dont know what shunts i need, i just got ones that were thick film 1% and 1watt and 15mohm

 

i forgot to say too i went with the wire solution because i had intended to swap out the resistors if necessary, i dont have the ability to solder that small anyways lol and it's much easier to deal with and i got my wires from some 5 volt charger from a phone

 

I know of 2 places you can get them from. Digikey and Mouser... I've ordered from both and both are good...I prefer digikey...
I should have my shunts on Monday to install. Can't wait for more POWER!!!!

 

i got mine from mouser BUT i didn't see any changes from the shunt i swapped 2 of them making me think i put it in the wrong place, so im just not sure at all

 

Merry Christmas everyone. I'm having issues cloning my main drive to my new SK Hynix 1TB drive... I tried to use macrium reflect 7 and it said my drive is incompatible...apparently the sector size is 512 on my NVME WD SSD drive that came with the laptop and my external SSD enclosure to the new SSD is 4096... I'm trying to use the SK Hynix specific program to clone the drive and its hanging on the recovery partition...every time... any guesses?

 

Shunts arrived early! Going to take a look at them and see with the larger size how difficult it will be to solder on the new one. I also could not get the new NVME SSD to work...the drive I believe is corrupt or the external enclosure is faulty or something is not allowing me to access the drive properly...I ended up doing an Amazon replacement with a new external enclosure so we will give that a try...worst comes to worst...I'll have to clean install Windows 10 on my new drive and then restore from a backup.

 

2nd shunt mod is complete, I went middle of the road with the 0.008mohm shunt... I'm a tad worried because the wire seems to be a tad brittle from the heat and bending but it is still in place. The shunt wasn't too terribly difficult to solder. Can't wait for my new screws...they're badly needed.

Time Spy is 30MHz higher but doesn't seem to effect the scores that much on average... Firestrike is where I see the gains: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/24483787
That's 17,111 on the graphics score, +190Core, +1000Memory which lands me close to the 2070 max-q speed and definitely faster than a stock 2060 non-max-q. I'm happy! I probably won't try any less mohm shunt... I'd rather not keep soldering the heck out of the shunt area and mess something up...last mod will be new screws and a new SSD once I have my replacement... after that this machine should be a total beast!

I might have some difficulty trying to calculate the TDP for HWINFO to capture...with my scores it'd seem I'm clocking higher than the 2060 but I'd need to know the exact core and memory clock to compare my scores and even then it might be difficult to tell... I'm sure I'm in the ~95W range based on my calculations...sad I can't break into the ~7k score range in TS.

 

Hi just brought a zephyrus g14
this was my old pc
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Pentium-D-830-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-4900HS/1127vs3694

and from a geforce 7300LE to this rtx 2060 maxq
its soo smooth and fast that is not funny how i managed to survive with my old pc.
welp i'll be in monhun world now. Thanks for all the info and tips here

 

Alot going on with the new year right now but few updates:

I received the new SSK external NVME enclosure along with the new SK Hynix Gold P31 drive. Low and behold my laptop recognized it right away and I had 0 issues cloning the drive...swapped them out and I'm all set to go!
This drive is BLAZING fast:


I also tested out the newest shunt and it appears to be working slightly better. My previous score, completely stock, was 6049 in TS graphics and now its 6113. Not a huge jump but enough to know the shunt is working properly. Stock clocks went from average of 1513MHz to 1560MHz. I'm tempted to go with the smaller shunt I have but a 0.001 difference from 0.008 to 0.007 probably will not get me a huge jump in performance at all...so basically I'm ending my shunt mods there... Based on some people's scores in Time Spy it would seem I'm still only pulling ~90w from the GPU instead of the 97W I was hoping...

 

Hey all, just got this machine (GA401IV). Enjoying it so far and learning the quirks and features as I go.
A few things to report:

I run almost exclusively docked so having to keep the lid open is new, but I guess I'll get used to that, and maybe modify my setup and get use from the screen since it has to be open anyways.
I enabled the setting to disable turbo as I saw some recommended doing that.

I updated NVidia drivers to 460.89 and that seemed fine, but then when compiling a large project in Visual Studio 2017 which causes the system to become bogged down (both CPU and memory) I was experiencing frequent BSOD's. The errors were: VIDEO_MEMORY_MANAGEMENT_INTERNAL and VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE - the latter giving nviddmkm.sys as the offending module.

This was the first time I loaded up the machine heavily so I was thinking, uh oh, maybe it's bad hardware or something, (and also why would Visual Studio loading up the CPU cause a failure in the GPU). Also initially this would just reboot the machine - until I told Windows to not auto-reboot and looked on the main screen as the external monitor doesn't show the blue screen; it just freezes.

Experimenting a bit I installed the NVidia driver from Asus' site (451.67) and so far haven't blue screened again, with a fair bit of trying.

 

Morale of the story, nVIDIA's latest drivers are absolute garbage. Always stick to the latest nVIDIA Drivers are that offered from the laptop manufacturer. Same exact story with my Alienware Area-51m R2, not errors but lower performance with the latest nVIDIA Drivers vs the ones from Dell.

 

Really? I've never had such problems with nvidia drivers. Granted i use nvcleanstall but that shouldn't affect things right?

 

Doesn't matter, I benchmarked both. Unless you have literally benchmarked both in various tests, then don't just blindly use the latest. If you follow the nVIDIA Drivers update threads on the GeForce forums and here in the Gaming section you will see that they are riddled with problems, since more than 3 years not just recently.

 

I see, good to know. Is this just for laptops by the way?

 

I only own laptops since more than 10 years so I cannot comment on desktops. It's best to always test the latest ones vs the ones offered by the manufacturer to see for yourself (ie. the Graphics Card Manufacturer of the computer manufacturer such as ASUS or MSI if it was a pre-built system)

Personally, from my testing, I have never come across any game that wouldn't run on the latest ones from the manufacturer that forced me to update to the latest ones.

Unfortunately, nVIDIA's driver support has been atrocious since years, they release one bad version, wait 2 days, they release a Hotfix driver to fix the mess the released a couple of days earlier, which by itself has its own bugs, and the story continues. They call them WHQL drivers (which should mean quality), I wouldn't even mark them as BETA in my books, more like Alpha drivers.

 

I did it! Finally cracked 7k in Time Spy! https://www.3dmark.com/spy/17040768

I replaced the 0.008ohm shunt with the 0.007ohm...yea splitting hair's at this point but it gave me like 5MHz more on the core which was enough to boost past my previous scores... Temperatures on the GPU are still amazing! Just upped my manual fan curve a tad more and I'm not even over 65C on the GPU...

 

Excellent well done.

Would you mind please posting the links of the model description of the resistor you used and also post your OC settings and which software you used? Msi afterburner or Armory crate?

I want to do this mod, I am very happy with my G14 2060 but want a bit more power. What wattage to the GPU are you getting after your latest shunt?

Thanks!

 

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/rohm-semiconductor/PMR18EZPFU7L00/2094205

Without the wire your TDP would be WAYY too high.. I'd recommend starting with 0.015ohm before you drop down to that low resistance...
I have all my teardown and shunt mod photos in my flickr album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/30149337@N04/albums/72157717119290976
I also included my major eff up with the fan pinout on the GPU fan..

I use MSI Afterburner AND Amoury Crate... I just don't have both open at the same time to prevent any conflicts... My machine is rock solid stable at +170MHz Core and +1000 Memory. I've benched all the way up to +200 Core and +1100 Memory. I just back it down for gaming purposes since I'd rather not experience a CTD.

Not entirely sure on the wattage... I'm guessing based on the numbers from other members that my shunt mod would place the wattage around 90-95W on the GPU.

 

I did think about the wire changing the actual resistance as opposed to soldering the resistor straight to the board. Makes sense, I have not decided which method I will use at the moment but will probably opt for the wire solution as I am experienced with soldering SMD, very small components as well with big soldering irons

So you would recommend 0.015 with wire soldered? Do we know what equivalent card we would move up to after the shunt is at 90-95w? Is there any way of actually seeing what wattage is going to the GPU? I am reading the answer is probably no.

I guess game dependant we are looking at around a 10FPS gain? I have to admit this card should have run way more wattage from factory. I'm a tad disappointed about that

Thanks,

Mike

 

Not sure really... Honestly my GPU is a tad behind an overclocked RTX2060 notebook. Based on my benchmarks I'm just slightly behind a RTX2070 Max-Q

 

Okay well when i get around to doing it I will follow, also the amount of wire is also going to adjust the omhs slightly I would have thought, maybe someone can chime in to confirm that.

I would have thought that you would be slightly above a 2070 max q tbh as even stock the 2070 is only about 10% ahead..

 

After taking a look at the wire I used..I'm guessing I'm using 28awg aluninum stranded wire. It has only 7 strands which are so incredibly small. It doesn't have any markings on it but I'm guessing for a 0.1Amp 12V DC fan..it's either 26 or 28awg wire. The length of the wire is equivalent of the width of the m.2 drive...x2 so ~40-45mm in total length. We'll shoot on the low end so 40mm. If its 26AWG = 0.0082897ohm, if 28AWG = 0.0132006ohm. I'm leaning much more toward 28awg then the soldering points will add an additional amount of resistance. I bet if I removed the shunt and just wired the two wires together I'd still have around 0.010-0.013ohm resistance which would essentially be the shunt mod... That's probably why I'm not quite seeing the ~7k graphics score in time spy...
It's good to know that I could probably remote the shunt entirely and just go with the wire. I'm sure after that I'd have some crazy high time spy scores but I might hold off for now... In Metro Exodus I'm already hitting around 75C on the CPU and 68C on the GPU...well within my limits but I'd also like to keep this laptop around for quite awhile so I'll probably hold off...UNLESS my free copy of Fry Car 6...I mean Far Cry 6 destroys the GPU then I'll solder the wires together...lol

 

I'd actually recommend going with NO shunt at all... I just ended up removing the 7mohm shunt and soldering the wires up directly... gave me a little boost. I get around 6181 with just the wire in TS graphics. +200Core +1050Memory gives me 7092: https://www.3dmark.com/spy/17145963
Same overclock on the Core went from an average of 1658MHz to 1697MHz... Plenty of additional performance for my liking without adding a TON of power...

Also getting 17,700k in Firestrike: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/24579267

 

I may have to shunt even more...
https://www.notebookcheck.net/First...mpere-desktop-class-performance.514698.0.html

Looks like the RTX3060 should be around 8800 in Time Spy graphics....

 

Yea i saw this about a week ago and wasnt best happy, but, i am not a hardcore gamer, aslong as I can play 1080p games at 60+ fps on max settings that is good enough for me, I should have waited though since I got my unit weeks ago, but the truth is, I didnt want to wait, impatient I am

Its also going to be very expensive

 

@Philaphlous glad to see your shunt mod worked out. I was just notified by my friend, the person who was second in time spy before you took his place a while back haha. Seems a few more people have shunted their g14s now though.

 

Brings a tear to my eye

Happy benchmarking!