Asus UL30VT FAQ / Official Owners Lounge redux

What are you using to overclock?

 

The registered SetFSB (thanks). I tried with each stick of ram individually and they both error-ed after a minute of Prime95 blend.

My memory is Hyundai Electronics with Hynix Eco chips and markings.

 

A lot of 1201n owners were using 677 instead of the 800 ram to achieve stable +2 Ghz OC. Its looking like 800 and 1066 ram is to tight?

Hynix HMT125S6BFR8C-G7-DDR3-1066 (533 MHz) looks like our typical stock brand.

 

This is the ram mine came with. It uses the 533mhz table for timings, so 2.0ghz = 308 FSB or 616mhz ram.

 

(No problem). Well, you're using the same RAM I am, the only difference if the fact that I've had mine up to 667Mhz (1335Mhz effective) before I run into any errors. I did mount heatsinks to the RAM, but I sincerely doubt that's the reason for the disparity. I trust that you are using a 64 bit version of Prime 95 right?

 

Man, I missed out on a great deal. The UL30VT-A1 was $690 on Amazon, but as luck would have it, the price went up as soon as I started considering buying the HP dm4t, which I eventually panned because of that sickly pinkish-silver tone

Do you think Amazon/J&R will be dropping the price again anytime soon?

 

My UL30VT shipped today!

Chanda_Bear, I missed out on that price just barely too, because they were out of stock of it when I looked for it... I punched in my email address for notification of stock, but when it came back in stock it was $40 more.

Can the G210M handle Borderlands at all? I'm not too worried about the gaming capabilities (I figure it's nice to have) but I am curious. Isn't the G210M a rebadged 9500M GS? My last laptop had a 9500M.

 

The UL30VT can handle most new games actually, including Borderlands. Here is a video of the UL30VT running the game:

YouTube - Asus UL30VT-A1 running Borderlands

Also, if you are interested in more games I suggest you browse through the 'khtgadgets' channel on Youtube and see if they have a gameplay demo up to get an idea if the UL30VT can play it.

(I am not affiliated with khtgadgets, i have just found their videos useful in the past)

 

Does the laptop allow resolution other than 1920x1080 and 1280x720 through the hdmi port? In other words, does the laptop have the ability to use an hdmi adapter to dvi adapter.

IE. is it possible to connect any lcd monitor with dvi port to this laptop.

 

Why, yes, I play Borderlands regularly

Not sure on the rebage part search here; Notebookcheck: Mobile Graphics Cards - Benchmark List

 

Not sure using the DVI adapter. I can select many lower resolutions other than max 1920X1080 when using straight HDMI. Everything including max resolution and HDCP is set via handshaking.

So, you should be able to select the resolution needed when using the adapter, our GT210 are supposed to support them;

HDMI - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia See: Compatibility with DVI

Newer control panels allow custom resolutions, I have not found it on my version but may be on the newer hacked version some users have installed.

 

Yes. You can use an HDMI to DVI adapter. Also, regardless of what resolutions you use, you will also be able to use nvidia scaling options to micro-manage image output.

 

No, the 210M is not a re-badged 9500M. You may be thinking of nvidia's first iteration of ION, in which the IGP was simply a 9400M. In fact, the 210M is a member of the GT218 core family, which is the foundation for the 210M, 310M, and ION2. It has higher reference clocks, and faster memory than the 9500M. In addition, it supports DX 10.1 and SM 4.1, whereas the 9500M hardware support only extends to DX 10 and SM 4.0.

However, you will probably notice little difference between the two if any at all. In a head-to-head comparison, any advantages that the core 218 has with it's newer architecture would be mostly negated by the 9500M's higher number of shaders and wider memory bus.

 

I haven't seen anything offered with regards to handling the ridiculous, non-Kensington compliant security slot offered on the ASUS UL30s, so here's my take (and would love to hear alternative suggestions)...

The unorthodox 2mm right-angled triangular eyehole on our ASUS notebooks that replaces the traditional Kensington rectangular slot really is currently problematic for those of us trying to find some cable-lock solution. It drove me crazy for a while, and I was even directed by ASUS support to contact Kensington for a possible custom solution. Kensington told me they have NO cable lock products compatible with the 2mm hole. And after investing hours of googling for potential lock sets, I couldn't find one that was a perfect fit.

So what I'm looking into getting is a type of padlock+cable solution used for locking up bikes and bags. The luggage locks that work by securing zippers together appear to be compatible with the 2mm hole, providing the lock is 2mm and can hook into the hole. Fortunately our notebook's security hole is accessible from both sides, so this should be doable. Then you'll need a cable looped on both ends such that, on one end you can loop the cable to a table leg/securing object and on the other end, attach it to the padlock . The critical thing is of course getting a small and strong enough padlock that can insert into the notebook's hole.

An all-in-one solution might be this one:
Master Lock Pit Stop 24x2mm cable & combo lock | Xtreme Bike & Sport

It has a 2mm diameter cable, though I'm not sure if the metallic locking tip is also 2mm compliant (since you'll need to of course insert the cable starting with that metal piece).

Someone even mentioned using a snowboard cable lock. In any case, you won't really be able to leave your laptop secured like that for too long, since any 2mm cable can be cut with a strong pair of wirecutters. But at least it'll serve as a visual deterrent if not also a limited physical deterrent too, and hey, that's better than nothing. Besides, anyone who leaves their laptop alone and chained up for more than 20 minutes is begging to have his/her laptop stolen...

A final option would be the stop-lock solution, which involves PERMANENTLY adhering a metal plate to your laptop's top lid and locking a cable to that plate. It has the added feature(s) of database tracking based on serial number and it's a very obvious visual deterrent too. But it really detracts from the slim, sleek beauty of our UL30s. Sigh.

 

I missed the part where you used the adapter? No Issues?

 

I'm not interested in pushing past the easy 1900ghz but very interested in doing the undervolting part.

I'm downloading CPUgenie. Anything I'm missing or tips that I or anyone else may need?

Tia

 

Ok i know I may have missed it in one of the forums but can anyone tell me what a good 13in sleeve and a good backpack are for this laptop?

I must say i love the size of this laptop. Now my G50vt is just a media computer now. I love being able to use it to watch a movie and just site back and use the UL30vt for everything else now.

Just another question. How is the 210m compared to the 9800gs in the g50vt? Looks all the game will pay just fine on it though.


Thanks in advance.

 

Just let its do its thing with the voltage optimization wizard. It'll start at the stock voltages and incrementally decrease it in small steps while checking for stability. I did the short 3m tests at first, which took a little over an hour, and it correctly found .9v to be stable at all speeds. The long test (8 hours) overnight repeated that rest. But to be sure, I later verified stability with a few hours of LinX (gui for intel's linpack64). That program heats up cpus around 10c higher than typical 100% load situations, its brutal and an absolute worst case scenario program like Furmark.

Once you know what lower voltage you're cpu is stable at, you set that load voltage with ThrottleStop for free. Check set multiplier and then simply set the voltage. Checking power saver and SLFM will let the cpu clock down at idle, but it doesn't really affect the power usage because the cpu will already be in a deep sleep state using practically no power.



I did some more DC watt battery usage as measured by the Performance Tools power counter. My sample sizes are only a few minutes and the results fluctuated by at least a watt so some results look a bit off. They do show a decent benefit from undervolting the cpu, even at the stock 1.3ghz clock. Also undervolting the cpu with Turbo33 on appeared to shave off half the power increase over Turbo33 disabled. However, 100% load on both cores is atypical, but every bit of power savings helps.

1.3ghz, 33% brightness, intel gpu, wifi/bt/camera off
7.3w idle
16.6w load 1.038v
14.3w load .9v

Turbo33 on, 33% brightness, intel gpu, wifi/bt/camera off

1.73ghz
7.2w idle
25.8w load 1.038v
21.3w load .9v

1.91ghz
27.5w load 1.038v
21.8w load .9v

1.32ghz (this will be higher than turbo33 = disabled because of the overclocked FSB & ram)
17.6w load .9v

882mhz
14.2w load .9v

588mhz
12.4w load .9v

294mhz
9.8w load .9v

147mhz (so slow!)
8.4w load .9v

I set it back to 1.73ghz and then recorded 6.6w idle, underscoring the fluctuations.

 

UV30's are rather light and fragile notebooks. I saw the remains of a e1705 with magnesium chassis destroyed by a failed theft. I would suggest a large dog or best bet would be to lock em up? Place in metal box that can be secured by cable?

 

Thanks for your time!!

 

I'm also confirming this works. HDMI cable to a monoprice DVI adapter. However, it won't handle resolutions above 1920x1200, unless the G210M supports HDMI 1.3 and you have a dual link DVI adapter.

 

Your 9800 or my 8800GTS will push higher FPS at higher resolutions. Also these guys do games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat that I would not attempt on the 210m. They are also much better at GPU accelerated applications as well.

The 210m, however, can take a battery and smash the latter.

 

Now I'm quite confused. I'm currently on P4G Power Saving at 23% battery remaining and I'm only estimated to have 1.5 hours left. BT is off, Turbo is off, and brightness is almost at the lowest setting.

On regular Power Saver mode, I'm getting nearly 2 hours. Either modes estimate that I won't even have 8 hours if I was on a full charge. I have been on battery saving modes for the past few hours. Is this really natural? Will my readings have been different if I was not on discrete graphics half the time?

 

Does asus ul30vt support triple monitor? The laptop monitor, one through vga and the other one from hdmi/dvi.

 

If I understand your question, you will get best battery life on the Intel. The Intel on the lowest battery saving position with screen turned down and all radios off give you the longest battery life. This is also with no USB devices attached and with hard drive spun down in power mode saving mode, via P4G.

This pretty much leaves you doing nothing but word processing, reading reports or viewing pictures, note that after each picture, the drive will have to spin up to load next if not in memory. I never use this mode but this is for best battery life..not performance. What you actually get varies from machine to machine to health of your particular battery, nothing is written in stone.

On long plane flights I may watch movies or surf and listen to music so I'm using PG4 in cut down entrainment mode, good for 4-6 hours or more if I don't fall asleep.

You can customize any of the 4 pre-sets to your liking. I normally use Full Power only on AC. On battery I use either entertainment or quiet office depending what I'm doing.

So what you choose is the lowest setting you can stand to reach your destination. If this is not happening then you need to review your settings.

 

LOL, Photoshop? Maybe Vigilante has?

 

I tried with the nvidia gpu and could only have two displays active at once.

 

I'm running the V. Optimization as I type. So far .875V on two out of three, step 16 of 26. Max temp has been 72C. I've already hit 73C, in previous OC, so looks good so far.

So if I understand you, I won't need CPU Genie after best voltage found?

So Throttle Stop will let me do all future undervolting and back if problems arise?

Odd that the test start at original voltages other than one step down. I guess the point is to see if your good before you go..

TIA.

 

Yep, throttle stop will let you lock in a load voltage you select and only apply it while its running. It only allows voltages from your min to max vid, so thee selections are safe.

As you might have seen by now, it records the original voltage max temperature for reference purposes at the end of the tests.

I wish I had that lower idle vid.

 

Romir, would you mind doing few other DC watt battery usage tests.

I was always wondering how big of a change screen brightness, Wi-Fi and nVidia GPU make.
It would be great if you could measure reference and then alternatingly turn one of the other features on for a test.

I must say that power savings from undervolting seem huge. I also didn't know that Turbo draws that much more energy. I guess one could even add few hours to laptop's battery life with this knowledge.
Thx!

 

Heh no! Being hooked to 3 monitors kind of defeats the purpose of having a lappy for portability....I have a mini-itx gamer that does all my heavy lifting.

Also very interested in undervolting as well. Haven't gotten around to it yet, but hopefully some free time will turn up this weekend. I get about 10 hours now on a battery with 7% wear and always looking to get more. Perhaps it's possible that slower drain will lessen wear on the battery too.

 

I don't suppose anyone's figured out how to get the switchable graphics working in Linux yet since the opening post was created?

 

Oh, also, the turbo33 overclocking function...just how much of a cost is there to battery life? As I understand it, the power options will reduce the CPU to 60% on battery power...will it reduce it to 60% of 1.73 GHz, or 60% of 1.3 GHz? I think I read somewhere that you actually have to restart the laptop to turn turbo33 on and off?

 

Anandtech did some full battery drain tests on the UL80VT which are still mostly applicable to us.

ASUS UL80Vt and G51J: Going for the Gold

I didn't record the wattage but the screen was extremely efficient and might be within my margin of error. My WD Scorpio blue drive's head parking might have caused some of that. I'll use the windows port of hdparm.exe to disable that and get longer sample times of say 0/20/40/60/80/100% brightness. LED backlighting makes a much larger difference in battery savings over an ssd, and that can't be said enough.

Turbo33 does require a restart because its making the motherboard detect the cpu as a higher front side bus speed part (266mhz instead of 200mhz). This is known as a BSEL pin mod in the desktop world, and is mostly used to overclock OEM machines with lower end/bus speed CPUs that had no problem operating at higher speeds (thanks to the stock voltage headroom).

 

The final adobe flash 10.1 is out. I seemed to have perfect intel & nvidia 1080p youtube playback with the final RC from a few days ago.

Adobe Flash Player version 10.1

Edit: Direct link to the redistributable exe. For those who don't want the adobe download manager installed, or if you use multiple browsers and need to update them all.

 

Go for it, I'ts making a big difference in OC temps when I tested game today. Battery life should improve when I get all the battery only settings complete.

 

Ok,

Under Volting seems to run fine. I’m still trying to fine tune my four settings in Throttle Stop. This will range from 1900 MHz Max down to 286 MHz for battery is what I have for now.

Here is where any tips and help would be appreciated. Throttle Stop and CPU-Z don’t agree on some of the clocks. Both programs show VID @ .8750 and multiplier @ 6.5.

Not sure if I did this right following docs but P4G is set for max and I have OC set for 1900 Mhz. Using a combo of settings I get the above four pre-sets in Throttle Stop.

At Performance, pre set, I see Core 1733 MHz and 266 MHz for Bus in Throttle Stop but CPU-Z shows 1906.6 MHz with a 293.3 Bus speed. So both work out for the given core speed using the 6.5 multiplier.

I’m going to side with CPU-Z on the actual clocks but may have missed something here.

 

As far as I know, there is no support for Linux concerning hybrid graphics. As far as turbo goes, yes it does require a reboot, and yes there is a significant impact to battery life. @ 1.733Ghz on battery you could expect 4-6 hours depending on usage patterns. However, P4G allows you to set the CPU to whatever percentage you like, so you could leave turbo enabled always and then set the CPU to a lower percentage on battery. I usually run mine @ 1.06Ghz with turbo enabled (so the RAM runs at a full 533Mhz), and I get about 10 hours of light use on battery with the webcam and bluetooth disabled.

 

thx! Adobe just loves to take over your computer, like reader is going to the only and last application you ever use

 

Romir- please post a link to a youtube clip that you can view on full screen at 1080p...

Also - I'm assuming you have the nvidia card enabled to view the clips... you aren't watching them on the integrated grapics?

Reason I am asking, is that I have not been able to get anywhere near perfect playback.

 

do you guys know how to get sound working over the HDMI? i've heard it involves turnign the sound output to 'digital' or something. any thoughts? thanks.

 

You might want to go directly to You Tube then SEARCH for 1080p clips.

Curious, how do you watch 1080P on our 720P screens?

1080p requires a resolution of 1920× 1080. Our native rez is 1366x768 which can display 720P natively. This means you struggle to download a high bandwidth flash file then your cpu must then down sample to our native rez.

When I watch 720p clips they look like weak sauce using Flash FLV, 1080p is no improvement but I have to crank up my CPU to decode it

 

You could watch 1080p with your UL30VT only if you connect it to an external monitor that supports 1080p.

 

Hey Dave!

Yea, still looks like weak sauce compared to some of my 720p MP4 that require far less processing. 'm spoilt! Ymmv.

 

Hey all, thanks for the responses! Sorry for the late reply, i was traveling and could not log in. Anyways, I do not remember double posting on this thread, if i did i apologize. I did post this question in another thread but got no responses so i tried it here . I never saw wisse's reply earlier.

Regardless this is my situation:

I have the stock drivers from Asus's supplied DVD. I did not change any of the settings.
I am on the default rez (1366 X 768)
I do not remember using the system on the stock OS (i did a clean install of win 7 64 bit the second i got it)

I have changed the power settings like Wissie suggested. I changed it to "good power savings" from "custom settings" what does everyone have it on?
after changing it, the button that was there for me to enter power settings is no longer there. I will restart and see what happens.

after changing to "good power savings" i could not see the flickering anymore, but it has only been 20 Minutes so it could happen again, ill let you guys know if it craps out again.

on a side note, what does everyone have for values under color correction? I don't really like my current setting.

hydra, can you give me the link to the updated intel video driver? I could not find it on my own.


Thanks for all the information, ill be sure to post back if i figure out anything else.

________________________
UPDATE: changing the intel power savings to "good" seems to have solved the problem however, every time i restart the system, it reverts back to "custom" and the screen flickers again. is there a way to make it stick?

thanks again!

Best regards,
Homie_g

 

Inception - Trailer 3 1080p. This can't watch this enough.



I tested it tonight on an external 1080p monitor over Nvidia HDMI and saw 25-35% CPU utilization throughout several trailers. There were a couple spikes into the 70s. The Intel driver doesn't seem to support the HDMI output so I couldn't test that on an external display. I'll have to test it at work on my 1920x1200 lcd with a vga input. 1080p content downscaled to 1366x768 worked fine though.

Firefox flash video actually isn't working with the 10.1 final so I used Chrome. My system is a fresh Win7 x64 Pro install with the latest drivers from Asus's site. I had Turbo33 on and was running at 1.73ghz. (My setfsb overclock doesn't persist through standby and I keep forgetting to set it.)

My system by default switches to HDMI audio output when I plug in a HDMI cable. To do it manually though, right click on the volume taskbar icon and select playback devices. Then right click your HDMI device and select "Set as default device".

This is what I see with my HDMI monitor:

 

I played it using the Intel using HW acceleration, on notebook. At 1700 MHz it plays better than the last version of flash with just a slight dropped frame here and there. I saw about the same CPU utilization you saw and buffer filled before play. Flash still needs more work.

I would like Flash to play as my 1080P MKV movies with core DTS, using the Intel, at 10-12% utilization - very smooth, no dropped frames. I have to switch to the nVidia to send to Denon.

 

The resolution of an HD clip is only part of it. You can watch 1080p clips on youtube, but since they're streaming media, the actual bitrate (which probably can be said to matter more than the resolution does) is very low to permit streaming. Blu-rays run at, what, 20-50 megabits per second? But I can download a 2 minute 1080p clip on youtube and it's only 100 or so megabytes. (Remember, 8 bits = 1 byte)

 

I think think driver was found during clean install. I'm using 8.15.10.1855. Try driver update in hardware manager and see if you have any luck. I'm default using custom as you, I think this is determined by P4Gear but guessing there.