M50Sv: Review & Owners' Lounge

ok, I have tried to search for this, and found another reason DRM sucks. There is a program on my desktop that says ASUS CopyProtect. What is it? I don't want to double click on it and then regret it, and my searches come up with why music has copy protection on it.

 

DRM has nothing to with Asus CopyProtect, if that's what you're worried about. It's a utility for protecting your data and what not. I think.

 

I was saying DRM sucked because it trashed my search results. On a side note I just got in about 4 straight hours of WoW with incredible results, and no issues. Next time I will play from a desk instead of my hot chair. So JBell not sure what your problem was, but I would have to say it was related to your machine. What is cool, was that I could not only run WoW, but multiple things in the background with no real issue.

 

Wow isn't a CPU nor GPU intensive game, so I wouldn't be too surprised that the M50Sv would run it quite smoothly
But yea, this machine can handle heavy multi-task without any problems. I'm currently watching a DVD, while photoshopping, using excel and have 25+ tabs on firefox and haven't noticed any lagging

 

I love the multitasking power

I've been playing Guild Wars, at high graphics and max res too , while listening to itunes, chatting with people, and having a few tabs in fiefox open at the same time.


such a huge step up from a P4 desktop

 

yeah i have the 9500m gs equivalent, the hd3650 in my asus m50, and im running age of conan, a very intensive game, at 1280x800 at medium settings with 30-50 frames, very nice laptop..only thing i did was overclock the cpu to 3ghz and the ram to 800mhz

 

Just exchanged my notebook today for a new one becuase of the buzzing noise I kept talking about, and I must say this one is much quieter. Can't find a single thing to complain about now.

 

I'm glad that took care of the problem. I have no complaints with mine.

 

How did you overclock the CPU?

 

i overclocked it by following this guide, its very simple and temps are still very good, it overclocks your cpu, and of course your ram
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=249470

 

Thanks. I could only get mine stable at 2.8. It would overclock to 3.0, but once I would put a full load on the CPU it would crash.

 

does anyone know if asus is going to come out with 64-bit driver for this?

 

Why would you want to go to 64 bit? In many cases 64 bit OS's are slower than 32 bit OS's.

 

Have mine running @ 3.0ghz right now. Pretty stable after running a couple of benchmarks. Froze up immediately @ 3.2. Might play with 3.1.

First I couldn't get the Auto FSB to work, but then I saw that you MUST have the program installed on C:\ (no alternatives allowed).

 

yea your cpu hasnt reached its limit, its the ram, when you overclock the cpu it also overclocks the ram, at 3ghz your at 800mhz ram, and anything higher becomes unstable, if ram wasnt limiting us, or if we flash our ram bios to loosen up the timings, we could do 3.2ghz+ easy

we got past x9000 cpu performance without spending 800 bucks!

 

Yeah that's cool (the saving money part since I already got this laptop for around 700). So it's stable @ 3 ghz. Ran Hot CPU Tester for 15 min (both cores at 100% for the entire duration). Maxed out at 60/62 degrees.

I need to take the new SATs and apply for U of M. Was attending the University of Texas at Austin before I joined the Army.

 

your applying where i am? what school here? engineering?

 

why doesn't any review of this cover the fact that the 1.3mpixel camera is swivel mounted so it can point in AND out? got to look at one of these in person and noted that, which seems a great bonus over setups like the xps 1x30 models, etc.

on another note can anyone tell me any details on the shock mounting for the hdd, about the 1280x800 display(would that automaticaly be ccfl(cold cathode flourescent/ the "white light stick" as someone referred to it earlier) backlit or wled like the other res displays?).

i noted the performance drop for application use with the robson module(1gb flash turbomemory) linked earlier as well but still would like to know if there is in fact a dedicated port and space for one in this model notebook(i live by hibernate, and the 2.0 rev flash modules are faster for read speed)?

does the camera mount have a positional sensor to indicate if it is pointing in/out (so it can automatically invert the image or not as appropriate)?

how are the bios options?

and can i get battery life figures with wireless and bluetooth off(i like wires )?

anyone crack open the case? how much free space is there available(internally installed mods like usb minihub with drives- mmm) just airflow channels(?) or possibly more given the removal of the tv tuner module from the design?

for those who have been running under load with no issues- is this on desk level with standard spacers, or angled up/ on risers to give extended clearance between desktop and notebook underside? ambient temperatures were what?

last and silliest question for the moment- it is a 2.5" sata hdd setup and not 1.8" right?

 

Yeah I'm applying to U of M Ann Arbor when I can get out of the Army. Still have another year on my contract and might get stopped lost because of a pending deployment. Just got back from one in late March! My wife and I have a house in Addison (close to Adrian and Jackson).

Mine always runs at 1440x900.

Webcam does auto invert.

The figures I gave for 3.0 ghz were with the laptop sitting flat on my stainless steel desk. Ambient temp around 72-74 farenheit.

I cracked open the case once to see that the video card has it's own slot. Didn't poke around too much. I have the M50SV-A1. There isn't a tuner card.

No wireless or bluetooth I think it's still going to get around 2 hrs on battery saving mode. Performance in that mode isn't bad for surfing or doing most things in general.

Doesn't anyone have pictures of it opened up? Maybe I'll take one for you.

It's flourescent lighting I'm sure. Says on the back that the lamp in the display contains mercury.

HDD is 2.5.

 

sounds great, goodluck! im interning for general dynamics right now, i think your familiar with them being in the army, i work on the stryker and abrams, i would check them out if your in MI looking for an intern

 

Hey guys, I've had my M50SV-A1 for a week now, I had to return my first one due to a stuck pixel right in the center of the screen... the retailer had no problems exchanging it. This machine is awesome (and you guys have answered a lot of questions for me in this forum THANKS!), but I have one issue:

Has anyone figured out the solution to this speaker hum when you plug in a USB mouse? Sorry if this has been answered already, but everytime I see this topic being discussed, it just gets lost in other discussions.

So anyway, I plug in my logitech speakers to the (middle) headphone jack, crank up the volume, and hear a hi-pitched ringing/hum.... the volume of the hum does not increase by increasing the system volume. This only happens with my mouse (not with printer, flash, mp3-player).... should I just exchange the comp?
Thanks guys.

 

In response to my own post,
This noise seems to happen only when using the packaged Logitech-ASUS mouse that the computer came with. I tried my old Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical mouse and the noise is gone.... Hope this helps others with the same problem.
Thanks again guys, I enjoy reading your posts... keep it up! thanks again

 

yea the hum is from interference with the laser mouse asus gives you, all are different

 

does anyone know the utility for the fingerprint thingy??
i just recovered and all the utility is gone..

 

The file is called FingerPrints_VT.zip. I think you can find it on Asus' site under "OTHER" downloads for the M50 series.

If you're lost I'll find a direct link or send it to you.

 

Yeah I've used some of their products while on deployment. By the time their **** makes it out to us it's all outdated though. To put it in a nutshell the original Xbox is more powerful.

Not their fault though. Takes so long to push things through the red tape. They have a rapid fielding program now which helps prevent that kind of situation.

 

It's in your drivers CD:\ASPM\SETUPIAM.EXE

works for all OS.

 

well finally went and bought an m50sv-x3 /m50sv-1bap which is mainly different in having a 1280x800 display and t8100 processor(non-bluray/hd-dvd) for 1149$ with a 100 rebate coming .

feels pretty good, looks great, and compared to my old presario it could be four times as loud or more and still not reach the hair dryer level of noise my old system made.

the thing is, it keeps bsod/stop erroring like crazy. vista first use setup >bsod while it was doing its thing setting up the system after the initial prompts. restart and all seems ok so i move forward. take a look at the lifeframe app to see how the camera quality is >bsod. try setting up the facial recognition login feature, click the snapshot icon >bsod. the error on the last was some odd error_usb_ something error. bleh. no keyboard input issues, and neither my axim, wired mouse, usb hub, or old soundblaster usb generated any hum issues(this HAS to be caused by poor rf shielding in that spot imho).

i was kind of wondering what the experience you guys have had with the factory software has been, or if you have any ideas. planning on trying to replace all the drivers/software with latest update versions but it seems the latest releases listed match current installs .

the only other really weird thing so far might have been an unnatural timing fluke. i set up my old system and this new one on a wired network accross a cheap trendnet 5 port switch i've used for some time to copy over some stuff to the new machine, and midway through the m50 seems to have just spontaneously restarted(i left the room to grab coffee). attempt to restart the transfer and start getting read errors on the ole presario, restart and bam- the registry hive can't be found(system/config/system32 blah blah..), and apparently the hdd in it died(can't format, or reinstall xp). now if i hadn't checked the smart statistics the night before last and had it reported healthy across the board for that drive(i planned to hand it down to a family member so i was prepping it) i might not find it so odd that it dies when it comes in contact with a new machine that's already bsod'ed a few times. maybe its just chance but...

so am i just being superstitious and its just some software misconfig on the asus? or does all of this give you guys the feeling something more might be wrong meriting an exchange?

 

Looking at the M50Sa. It has the 1280 x 800 screen and the Radeon 3650. Would this be better than the 9500G with a 1440 x 900 display?

Please explain the difference between the 2 graphic cards and the screen resolution. I don't understand what the difference in the screenn resolution will mean to me. Will the type fonts and pictures appear larger or smaller?

Thanks

 

bought the asus M50SV last month and do not know which driver fot the 9500 GPU is the best, can anyone give advice? i want to play the games with the best fps, but i am lazy to do all the benchmarks with different drivers to discover which is the best. I am using the latest driver from asus support V7.15.11.6762 of 2008/02/28 and having Vista 32bit, is there any driver from LaptopVideo2Go that does better results? Is it better to use the 17x.xx or 16x.xx series? What driver do you receommend? thank you

 

chrisngrod & GenTechPC : thx for the info, now it has worked.. ^^

 

if you do cad/modeling a great deal higher resolution= greater detail accuracy.
additionally it is possible to replace the geforce drivers with quadro series drivers for most nvidia cards for vastly improved performance in cad/etc apps and revert back for better game performance as the chips are identical except the hardware id and price(quadro series is vastly more expensive then even top end geforces.

the other side of the coin is higher resolution means more workload for the gpu for each frame, and since that resolution listed is the native resolution if you wish to display with a smaller resolution you only have 3 options- 1) external monitor with smaller native resolution 2) smaller resolution without scaling, so the image is smaller then the size of the display with black screen space around it and 3) smaller resolution with scaling(it blows up each fram to the full screen native resolution, but makes it look blurry or fuzzy if the difference is even moderately large like taking a 1280x800 native and using a 1024x768 and scaling it is just very very blurry the larger the difference the worse it gets) but scaling in this way also means additional work for the gpu, although admittedly nowhere near as much as displaying the full higher resolution(usually- if it's 1/4 native being scaled it could actually be equivalent).

ati usually performs slower(slightly) when you get the equivelent series nvidia/ati chips side by side, but tends to have better stability for some apps(depending on driver version/catalyst) and usually with some odd caveat in others. i was able to take the first generation of mobile radeon chip by ati and run doom3 on it, albeit at absolute minimum quality and get ~10-15fps, and that thing was ancient(512 ram, 64 shared as vram, athlonxp ~2100mhz radeon igp, not 320 or 200m or 340m, just listed as radeon igp). nvidia is usually more popular for independent developers, has better linux support, and cad/engineering support(as i noted) and at least recently- has not been bought by a company thats hemorrhaging money and falling behind in the performance wars. there are chip benchamarks for most of the gpus somewhere around this website, and also at http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Grafic-Cards.130.0.html
which has stats and benchmarks for most of them.

the only iffy bit beyond that i can think of, is i think the radeon 36x0 is the only card series out that is certified for directx's direct3d 10.1feature superset, at least so far. but because that is a superset of features it is designed to fallback on direct3d 10 capabilities automatically if the system and or game does not support 10.1, at least for now.

there's also the hd video acceleration features, but i haven't put any time into looking at those recently.
hope that helped.

meanwhile, anyone have any feedback for me yet ? in reproducing the stop error it is actually occurring as BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER
stop 0x000000FE . this occurs with or without any usb ports being utilized, and again only seems to happen when i try to use any of the biometric equipment(camera/fingerprint too now). the tech articles for vista relate to sleep/hibernate modes causing this or heavy use of usb hdd's . noone else has this problem?

 

how can you replace the geforce drivers with quadro series drivers?
is it compatible? i mean is there a quadro series driver that compatible with this notebook's gpu - the 9500m gs?

 

it takes a bit of hunting, but afaik the 9500 is ~= 8600gt with smaller package and different stock clockings so finding one should be doable.
one article on it although a little bit dated is http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539&pgno=0
.
once i get the other issues i'm having ironed out and i can look up all the info again to find which ones work on this model(in theory) and then test it out i'll post it here if you like, but i wouldn't expect to get that far at this rate for a week at least. i had all that research done but it was on the poor presario i mentioned, and wasn't in the portion of data that did make it across the network before it died/was murdered >< .

 

ooh. i see. all i can do is saying "good luck dude".. hahhas.
i'm stupid at these things..

for the time being, what's the most updated driver for the graphic card?
my rivatuner seems to say that it isn't compatible or something.
everytime i change my core clock, it always switches back when i clicked OK.

 

update on the bugcode_usb_stop bsod when using the builtin camera. removing the camera driver, the camera software, the fingerprint reader driver, then moving to sp1 disabling uac and turning wireless/bt off before reinstalling cam driver, then fingerprint driver, then cam software again seems to make it work. only took seven rollbacks and trying something a little different. ><

and my reward for getting rid of the bsod? now it just locks up the whole system randomly when trying to register my face. sigh. checked the display model at the store i got this from for comparison. no bsod no apparent lockup.
...

 

I had BSOD's all the time with vista so ended up formatting and installing xp & haven't seen one since....

 

I will have to try this on my Vista partition.

 

What drivers are the stablest and have the best performance for the video card?


The one I have right now cause my screen to start flashing after play guild wars for about 45 minutes, and the card is maxing out at 66 degrees, so I'm pretty sure its not overheating...

 

My god, that worked! I upgraded the 9500 to a FX1700 - a $600 video card. I can now play Battlefield 2142 with the settings maxed out with out missing a beat. Call of Duty 4 plays with all the settings maxed out at 1440x900 2xaa. This should be turned into a sticky. The weird part is that the Vista index's went down. That just shows you how flawed Vista's benchmarks are. Thank-you steelblueskies.

 

175.80 are the best drivers now...

 

Wait a min... did you replace the stock GPU with a quadro fx1700 GPU on your M50? or did you just change the drivers to the quardo drivers?

 

I just changed the drivers using the above mentioned tutorial. The driver works really nicely. I couldn't play Battlefield 2142 at full settings (1440x900) at more than 5 fps, now it's fully fluid. Call of duty 4 with the settings maxed out still takes a frame rate hit, but it doesn't really pause and jerk like with the 9500 drivers.

 

Hey Guys/Gals,

I am selling my M50SV-A1 I bought it a month ago from Gentech. As my office will be giving me a new laptop that is the reason I am selling it. It has all the accessories that came with it along with the XP and Vista Cds and has a notebook sleeve designed by waterfield design that I purchased seperately and also comes with the Zalman 2000B cooler (Black).

Here is the website for the sleeve www.sfbags.com

If anyone is intrested please email me at [email protected]

Thanks

Ed

 

This needs to be listed in the For Sale part of the NBR forum - it shouldn't be placed here.

 

So I'm trying to get the multimedia touchpad working under XP. I just received this laptop last week and so far am loving it. I ordered it with XP pre-installed and the touchpad works great but I can't seem to turn on the multimedia features via the "mode" button.

I've tried adjusting the synaptics settings in the mouse config but can't make it happen.

I did find a IR driver so I have no yellow warnings in device manager. Now I just need some software to try it out with? Any one have any ideas on what is good to use? All the install programs on Asus website seem to kick me out for not having Vista.

I've read all 90+ pages in the forum and haven't found any suggestions that work for me on these 2 problems. Thanks so much!

Kevin

 

You need to reinstall the touch pad drivers (use drivers from the CD).

 

I tried using the drivers located on page 1 for the touchpad when I installed XP Pro and found they did not work, so I used the ones from the CD and it worked fine (They should probably edit that so no one else asks about it)

 

I just ordered the A1 and I'm so psyched!!! I want it to come already!!!

 

Congrats on your purchase!