Asus UX32vd owners lounge.

While we have a big thread of the UX31A-UX32vd ivy bridge Ultrabooks I feel the UX32vd needs its own thread. Its a different beast from the UX31A. Here is a place for UX32vd ONLY owners to discuss their system.

Handy info:

• Official Asus UX32vd drivers page
• Guide to installing Windows on the built in iSSD drive
  
• Repasting the UX32vd CPU and GPU with a better thermal compound

Windows 8:

Windows 8 works very well on the UX32vd. No real issues. Its recommended that you update your bios to 211 which officially supports windows 8.

In Windows 8 the ambient light sensor will adjust the screen brightness up or down two notches from your setting according to your ambient light source.

After the bios 211 update there is something in the device manger that is Unkown, no drivers can be found and I think it maybe the light sensor. However it seems to be working? I'm sure when Windows 8 is officially released Asus will have drivers.



Sections:

Upgrades and Mods

Benchmarks

 

Stock 3D Mark 2011 score and temps: (4GB RAM)



Overclocked 3D mark 2011 score on stock 4GB RAM:



Its clear that Nvidia have under clocked the 620m heavily to reduce its heat output. With my repaste job I now have some headroom to overclock. Using MSI afterburner I was able to overclock.

The GPU hit 81 degrees, this is on IC Diamond 7, i don't recommend overclocking on the stock compound or your GPU might get too hot.

3Dmark 2011 score: P1413

NVIDIA GeForce GT 620M video card benchmark result - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3517U CPU @ 1.90GHz,ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. UX32VD score: P1413 3DMarks

This gives me about 6-7 fps increase in gaming....

Heaven benchmark.

Stock and then overlocked GPU

 

Reserved Asus UX32vd Upgrades:

RAM:

The Asus UX32vd has a removable base unlike the ux31A, allowing the user to upgrade the RAM. 1 removable 2GB stick is installed, and can be replaced with a 4GB or 8GB module. 8GB 1600Mhz CL 11 or better is recommended.

There are some tradeoffs in running 10GB single channel Vs true dual channel in the stock 4GB config. However its very little, if your video editing or using photoshop, Multi tabbing and multi browsing having more than 4GB will help.

HDD

The hard drive included with the UX32vd is a 500GB 5400 spindle drive, its slow and really this machine is asking for a true SSD not just an iSSD.

If you do plan to upgrade, the max height is 7mm, most SSD's are 9mm (OCZ vertex etc) Samsung 830 series is a recommend drive that is only 7mm thin. And with fix without being modded.

Other good 7mm drive is a Crucial M4, but make sure its the 7mm one.

If your planning to use a 9mm drive you will need to open it up and void your warrenty, if you happen to do this then you will need to remove the top plate of the SSD housing. And then using double sided tape, stick the back plate to the drive.

(Photos and details coming soon of my OCZ Vertex 4 128GB swap)

Mod / Improvement for experienced re-pasters.

Redo the thermal paste on the Asus UX32vd CPU and GPU

 

Interested in becoming an owner.

Where did you guys purchase yours? and How much?

 

Hi, brought mine from ExcaliburPC.com for $1299.

Repasting the CPU and GPU heat sinks with IC Diamond 7.

Doing this will VOID your warranty, and the effects are minimal on the CPUs heat, however if your like me. Then this is something I do to all my notebooks as I don't trust the job the do in the factory. This did lower my Nvidia's GPU temp by 6 degrees on both idle and load high benchmark temps. I've repasted over 5 notebooks now without issues. Only do this if your experienced and know what your doing!

I used IC diamond 7 for this repaste, Artic silver 5 would also be good or any other top thermal compound.

First open up the back case using a torx screw driver. Remove all the torx screws, and the case just lifts off.

Locate the heat pipe and unscrew all 6 screws. then lift it up and off. Clean the old grease off with alcohol wipes. I used Arctic Clean which works well. Don't forget to clean the copper heat sinks!



On the GPU (to you right and the small die) Use a small pea size amount of paste.
On the CPU die (To your right and larger) use a rice sized amount of paste in the middle of the CPU.


Stock temps after 3D mark 2011 run and Temps with 3D mark 2011 using IC diamond 7. Room temp was 26 degrees both tests.

Improvements:

CPU 1 degree less idle and full load temp.
GPU 6 degrees less on both idle and max load !! Big improvement there... Your millage may vary. I can't say if you will see improved temps or not. Its the risk you take.

 

Hi,

I've had my UX32-VD for some weeks now, and I'm pretty satisfied.

However, today I discovered that my unit might have some problems with it's integred Sandisk i100 SSD. I can't find it in Windows Disk Management, or SIW, CPU-Z or HWiNFO32 as I can see.

Here is a Print Screen showing 3 different programs indicating the iSSD is either defect or just don't mounted:
View attachment 81160

Do anyone have any suggenstions for how I can solve this on my own, without having to send in the unit? Because I really don't want all the efford with reinstalling everything on a new unit....

 

Hi Indisium, does it show up in the bios and before you did the clean install was it there?

 

No, it don't show in the BIOS. I have never done a clean install, the system is like it was when i got the computer. I can't find the drive when booting in PartedMagic either...

 

If no software is making it show up it sounds like you do have an issue. Send the system back....

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...87-asus-ux32vd-owners-lounge.html#post8754503 heaven benchmark results added, stock and then overclocked 620m. You can see even at 1080p it makes a big difference overclocking it

 

Hey guys, I got my UX32VD about a month ago, and I replaced the hard drive with a 7mm Corsair Force 3 240GB drive (it was the notebook version, so no mod was needed for it to fit), and the RAM with a Corsair 8GB Vengeance stick.

Just yesterday I got a BSOD while watching streams, and now nothing works. Whenever I try to do anything I get a BSOD and it crashes and restarts. This happens when trying to boot into Safe Mode, or even external media (my Windows 7 Installation USB Stick).

Can someone point me to where I can get some technical support, if not here? I'd like some help ruling out problems... Also, the warranty is void because I replaced the drive correct?

Anyway I hope nobody else gets this problem and I hope my laptop is not a $1300 paperweight now haha.

Anything helps, thanks in advance!

 

Several people have mentioned they heard replacing the HHD or memory does not void the warranty. I returned mine for not turning on anymore to where I bought it and am waiting on word that they will send me another. I called Asus first and they said since it broke DURING the process of upgrading, I broke it and voided the warranty. They were wishy washy about whether or not just upgrading voids it. I think not, but I don't think anybody knows for sure yet. There really isn't any way they can tell though and it sounds like you have a hardware issue. Put the factory HHD back in it and send it back

 

there is no sticker on the back cover saying that removing the cover will void the warranty. however, one of the screws holding the heat sink has a sticker saying that damaging removing the sticker will void the warranty. but changing ram and hdd should not in any way tamper with that sticker anyways

and i have no idea why one would say up front to asus that they were attempting to upgrade in the first place...just slap back the orignal hdd and ram and pretend it was like it when u got it....

 

Yes you only void the warranty if you do the cpu and gpu repaste.

 

I like my UX32VD, but am not satisfied with the battery life yet. Battery life is very important to me.

What I am doing at the moment:
1. set the Windows 7 profile to Gear4Powe Battery Saving (this sets processor to 60% max)
2. set the display's refresh rate to 40Hz from 60Hz
3. disable keyboard backlight
4. reduce screen brightness as much as possible

Unfortunately this only gives me about 4.5 to 5 hours with normal usage (browsing the web). Yet others have reported up to 7 hours of battery life.

Is there anything else I can do? How can I verify that the Nvidia Geforce is not active when watching YouTube etc.? I don't want it to use any power.

Finally, has anyone noticed a battery life improvement after switching to a SSD?

 

i dunno, i rarely use up all my battery but i do have a battery monitor to monitor the drainage if im not connected to my charger

heres what i did (still running on HDD):
- removed gear4power, use windows balanced power setting
- turn off auto brightness and manually set screen to minimum brightness, keyboard backlight set to only one step above off
- manually set maximum cpu usage on battery to 20%

and i just did web browsing with IE and some chat programs and outlook running, wifi on and bluetooth radio on. get a drainage that fluctuates between 6-8Wh, probably more towards the lower end if i change to SSD later on. given the 45Wh battery that gives me approx 6-7 hrs of battery under this situation

so anyways, just switched to UX32VD a few days ago from my sony VPC-Z1 and overall its pretty good though i prefer black over the brownish colors, but i guess they will get sued by apple

my only complaints on this unit, besides price:
- heavier than my VPC-Z1 (under 2.8lbs)
- the enclosed usb ethernet thingy is not gigabit or usb3.0, instead i got this: ASIX AX88772B - Low-Power USB 2.0 to 10/100M Fast Ethernet Controller why would i use this when my wireless speeds is much faster thn 100mbps
- the upgradeable parts that asus came with - ram and HDD - suck and very slow, and definitely need an upgrade to better ram and a ssd

 

how did u do it ?

 

Hey guys, I'm planning to pick up the Asus UX32VD tomorrow!
What are some things that I should do right away after getting the laptop? Should I grab an external DVD burner and make a recovery DVD?
I plan on upgrading the SSD and RAM a bit later after the prices have come down more, the 4GB RAM and HDD is sufficient for my current usage.
What are some bloatware that I can uninstall? Any tweaks I can apply? Or anything else, please, let me know!
Thanks! Super excited!

 

1. Click on the battery icon in the taskbar and click more power options
2. Find the Power4Gear Battery Saving plan and click change plan settings.
3. Click Change Advanced power settings.
4. scroll down to Processor Power Management -> Maximum Processor State
5. Change to 20%. Hit Apply, OK.

 

Interesting, can you still play full hd YouTube videos like this? And how much did it improve your battery life?

 

referring to my post earlier:

that said, if you try to play movies, it will eat more power and will drain more battery (more than 10Wh). you can still play full HD youtube videos fine under the lowered cpu state; i just tried viewing transformers 3 trailer but battery drainage went up to 12Wh. dont expect a 6Wh drainage while watching movies man, thats more possible with light surfing and nothing else

setting the max cpu state to 20% simply prevents the system from overshooting the cpu load from time to time. to be honest i dont think intel designed their cpu to run at only 20% even on battery, maybe closer to 40%. so setting it to 20% might not necessarily limit to 20% but it will prevent 100% load per default settings

here's what i personally use for battery drainage monitoring, a pretty handy desktop gadget, look for "battery meter":

Most Wanted Windows Desktop Gadgets - Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8

 

I have the UX31A-DB51 and love it. I want to get the UX32VD but can't find it anywhere! Where did you guys get yours?

 

I'm currently waiting on my ux32vd which I have customized with 480gb intel 520 SSD, 10GB DDR3, IC Diamond thermal paste and hopefully a fix for the display bleed through xoticpc. Since it's gonna be all nice and repasted, I've been looking into overclocking the gt620m. It seems that the gt 620m can use gt 630m drivers according to this forum http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...m-driver-asus-notebooks-bonus-oc-results.html, so hopefully I can ramp this up to at least gt 640LE territory, possibly higher. I know you have been experimenting with max CPU levels for battery life conservation, but has anyone tried lowering the min and max clock speed of the hd 4000 graphics? It seems that underclocking the integrated graphics would yield no appreciable change in performance, but would give better better life when doing any slightly intensive task.
All in all, I'm looking forward to get this ultrabook for university!

 

Excaliburpc.com is where i got mine.

I've repasted myself and have lowered the GPU temp by about 6 degrees. I did not find a driver that I could get to work with my UX32vd from the link you posted. I'm running the latest beta driver 304 i think it is.

I've managed to clock to +162 Mhz on the core and +365 Mhz on the ram. This has given me a boost off over

I'm not sure who we can lower the intel GPU's clocks is there a program for that if so give me the link and i will try it. But with my overclocking I've managed to get a good frame rat increase. Diablo 3 has gone from 29 fps to around 42 with in 1080p default settings.

Use trottlestop to stop throttling.


And battery life im getting around 6.0 hours with about 6.7 discharge rate. I find this acceptable



This the is lowest power consumption I can get, power4gear uninstalled. Max cpu to 20% and backlite off and wifi is on. 1 tab in google chrome.

 

how long have u been using the UX32VD and have u been constantly on battery mode? i only got mine since last wednesday and my battery's capacity is 1Wh higher than yours, 45.766 to be exact.....your battery is losing charge already?

 

Overclocking Intel’s HD 4000 | SemiAccurate This article talks about overclocking the HD 4000 with an Intel utility, however it does not seem that it can underclock using the utility, which I maintain is the best thing when there is a discrete card, unless it's used in conjunction with the card. Also, you put a considerable overclock on the card. Did that change in heat translate to it feeling hotter when using the keyboard? And you listed only your gpu and memory overclock, did you leave shader speed at stock?

 

Hi guys I just got the UX32VD today and so far it seems great! However, my issue is that the internet speed appears to be painfully slow on this laptop. With speedtest.net I get 15mbps with my iphone on the same wifi network, whereas I get 0.34 mbps when I test it on my zenbook!? This is when the power is plugged in and profile on high performance! Does anyone know how I can adjust this? Thanks!

 

According to this page http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/678302-asus-ux32vd-wifi-problem.html it seems like the problem is related to the router, and by using a g signal or WPA 2.

 

Thank you so much!!!!
Finally fixed it by changing my router settings!
You are a life-saver!

 

No problem, I've been obsessively researching problems with this machine to be sure that when I get mine it will be perfect!

 

I spoke too soon
After a while, the speed dipped down to the low 2 mbps and under range again.
I didn't change anything, not sure what happened ugh.

 

It seems to go up and down. Its 44.905 Wh now. I've used the battery about 5 times now.

I overclocked the shader too. And the keyboard is fine, but it does get hot above the keyboard.

Thing is the overclock lasts only 20 minutes or so. Anyone figured out how to stop the GPU throttling ? Its becoming a real pain. I can clock high, but the GPU never seems to hold it for long now. CPU throttling can be fixed with throttlestop. But GPU I'm not sure how to stop.

 

I'm getting a discharge rate of -9 mW with:

> battery mode on
> Graphics on Max battery saving
> CPU on max 20%
> Backlight off
> Brightness on 30%
> screen refresh rate to 40Hz
> Chrome with 6 tabs of which one plays music

Anyone has suggestions on how to further improve the current max of 5 hours of battery life?

 

Set the refresh rate of the display to 40Mhz, this will give about 30 minutes more battery life.

 

Actually I already did that, but forgot to mention it..

But now it's permanently set to 40Hz. Is it possible to make it go to 60Hz when the charger is connected?

Also, is there software that tells me 1) which devices use power and how much (e.g. screen, wifi, HDD) and 2) which software is putting the most stress on the CPU?

Finally, can I disable some hardware completely (in the BIOS such that it does not load and use power), such as the bluetooth device?

 

well if u can crank down that 30% screen brightness.......

 

I just got the UX32VD today and have a question. My idle cpu temps are at around 46-47 degrees c and when doing a bit of browsing it sits around 53-54. If the fan isn't constantly running at 3-4500rpm it is cycling on and off a lot. Is this normal?

Cheers, Jonny

 

My UX32VD does not do this. Temperatures are the same on my machine.

 

Just for reference, I asked Asus all these these questions with out telling them who I was and when they finally asked for my name I said "Gotta go, bye." When I returned it to the company I bought it from I did exactly what you described. I was just curious what Asus would say.

 

Mine did the same, then it disappeared, this seems to be a problem for several people, try to unistall
intel dynamic platform and thermal framework drive

I think that might be causing problems
(you can easily install it again if nothing changes)

 

Cool thanks I'll give it a shot. Maybe it just needs a couple of days to break it in

Edit: Tried uninstalling intel dynamic platform and thermal framework. It didn't seem to help and the fans were spinning even faster after that so I reinstalled it. Everything seems to have mellowed out a bit today and I'm gonna use it a fair bit over the next few days so will update on how it goes. I'm hoping to be able to get at least 5hrs with light browsing and a bit of word processing on the battery saving mode.

 

Ok, maybe just a coincidence, I'll try to reinstall it on mine and see what happens. I also have pretty bad battery time even though the fans are more normal, the discharge rate according to battery meter is about 9-11 Wh on battery save mode, with 50% CPU max rate and keyboard backlight off and screen turned down to the lowest, expected it to be lower... This results only in between 3-4 hours. 3 hours with a usable screen setting

 

So guys I'm hoping someone can help me out. Basically I have three issues with my freshly installed UX32VD with a 256GB Samsung 830 SSD.

Battery life

My battery plan does this:
1. CPU to max 20%, min 3%
2. Brightness to 25%
3. Backlight off
4. Screen refresh to 40Hz
5. GPU to max battery saving
6. Battery to passive mode
7. Wifi to battery saving mode

Together with an SSD, this still only gives me 4 hours of battery life with wifi on and browsing (Facebook, these forums, etc.). I find this very short for a mobile device.

Is there software that tells me exactly 1) which devices (cpu, gpu, fan, ssd, ram, bluetooth, wifi, usb) are using the most electricity 2) which software running on the background is causing the most stress on the cpu? This way I may be able to further reduce energy usage.

Touchpad unresponsive every now and then

Especially after resuming from sleep, press gestures just don't work anymore for a while. I then have to use the physical mouse buttons. After a few minutes the press gestures work normally again, and sometimes they don't work for some while anymore. It seems quite random and appears to be a driver problem. I do have the latest Asus gesture software.

Anyone else has this issue?

Fan spinning wildly

Every few minutes the fans seem to spin wildly. This did not happen before I did a fresh install. This seems a software issue as well. Uninstalling the thermal framework software does not change anything.

I hope someone can help out.

 

Mine is as high as 17wh just browsing as well and rarely sits below 10wh unless I'm doing absolutely nothing. I also expected to see longer battery life. I got about 3.5 hrs on my second charge. Fans still spinning on and off frequently.

 

17wh just browsing? That seems like an awefully high amount. I'm getting a discharge rate of about 8-9 on wifi, brightness two higher then minimum, 20% processor state, keyboard backlighting one from minimum, 60hz refresh rate. Roughly 5.5 hours of this before its dead.

 

I agree, it doesn't seem right to me. I'm doing a clean install of windows on the 32gb ssd this weekend and will report back on any improvement or lack of.

 

So I have been fiddling around with touchpad drivers and found out that the Samsung Series 9 has an Elantech trackpad just like our notebooks, but it's several versions newer than the Asus driver:

Support - Notebooks NP900X3C | Samsung Laptops

I am using it right now, and it is far superior than the Asus drivers and eliminates the need for the Touchfreeze utility.

 

Tried those and upon each restart of the PC or bringing it back from sleep, I get a message saying that "ElanTPCfg has stopped working". I did a fresh install of the software, not an update.

Driver itself and control panel-Mouse-touchpad-options work and show the latest driver. Not sure if I can live with that error.

 

Concerning the fan issue:
I also had the problem that the fan would go on and off all the time. What I did was to change the BIOS back to the original 203 version (down from 206) and now the fans work a lot better (don't even turn on when surfing in battery saving mode).
Has anyone else made a similar experience?

 

Can anyone confirm 100% what size torx the screws are on the back. I need to purchase an ESD safe screwdriver and want to ensure I get the right one first time.

I know its either 4 or 5.

Thanks