ASUS G73JH-A1 with ATi Mobility Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 - Part 2

sooo.... do you guys think I should buy this laptop when money is an issue and when I dont plan on buying a new laptop in about 5-6 years?

 

sorry if this is answered in the other thread but I didn't see it. What is the actual height of this thing at the back end? It obviously slopes, so I'm confused about the dimensions that are given in various statistics pages.

 

Mine's coming on the Feb 17th shipment. This is my only concern, removing the unwanted bloatware. I've never done a clean install before - but it sounds like simply removing the unwanted bloatware is faster/easier. Is this just done via the add/remove programs or is there a better way to do this?

Or if it's easy enough, should I just do the clean reinstall?

Thanks for any info.

 

No laptop or desktop will be able to play bleeding edge games without sacrafice. Dragon Age is probably the last game my old x800 desktop card was able to play..and it had really terrible frames even at lowest setting, not to mention it looked ugly. That card is about 6 years old?

If you have nothing new, I recommend getting this now..its the best bang for the buck for laptop. Like I said before in old of the older posts, if you keep waiting for new stuff, you'll never be able to buy anything.

 

5-6 is taking crazy, more like 3-4 years and you should buy this labtop no matter if $ is an issue or not.

Why do you think the Porsche Carrera 911 is so popular? Because its the best high end bang for your buck for 100k whereas Ferrari and Lamborghini cars start at 150k+.

So the Asus G73 starts at 1.6k and even gives Alienware and HP Voodoo priced at 2k+ a run for their money.

 

IMHO, if your purpose is to buy a high end laptop and have it last five years, you'd get better steady performance out of buying something like the G60VX from Bestbuy for $899 now, sell it in 2 years for like $400, upgrade to the next machine, etc. Overall you'd spend less in 6 years and enjoy more high performance gaming than buying a high end system and watching the performance go from high end (this year) to performance (next year) to mid range (2 years from now) and so on finally having to deal with a low end notebook that weighs as much as a bag of bricks by the fourth - sixth years. These high end systems are more suited to people that have the interest/resources to upgrade frequently.

 

Direct question to resellers:
There has been ongoing speculation and assumption that the delay in the shipment of the intitial batch of A1's (due now around Feb 17th) would result in a larger shipment due to the fact that the original second shipment estimate was due at that same time.
Is this in line with your expectations?

 

My understanding was.

The first shipment for A2 was supposed to be February 10th, but we got lucky.

The first shipment for A1 is said to be February 17th.

The second shipment for both A1 and A2 is March 2nd.

 

come on they are camera's 720p, i want actual footage Real Fraps or something like that ( I know that won't happen, I'm just going to be a mad in 2 weeks ) I can feel the growing madness inside me

 

Hi everyone

As many I been following G73 threads and have been very helpful, I pre-order mine mid january.

My question on is about the S/PIF out put, I have read in other forums that some laptops doesnt output 5.1 sound with the s/pif have anyone check this on the G73?

My idea is to buy the Astro A40+ mixup or the Astro Mixup + TurtleBeach HPX so I was wondering if I need an external USB Sound card to handle this setup.

Thank you

 

Well i helped move someone up. i cancelled my order on the g73.

 

1st post here. Got interested in this laptop because I travel on business 2x a month and have a large blu-ray collection + like to game. Thanks to all the posts here I made my pre-order to Gentech Friday and just confirmed it (man are they busy)!

I'm super psyched as this is my first gaming laptop. Just wanted to say hi and thanks to all the really helpful members on this forum that I've been lurking on the last few days.

 

How does the Hdmi-Ouput work? Do you have to reduce tzhe resolution if you don't have a Full-HD TV?

 

can we get a confirmation or denial by resellers?

originally the first shipment of A1 was due Feb 11th, it was moved due to being held by US customs (as sometimes happens) the expected date was moved to Feb17th. This was also the original date of shipment # 2.

The push back in late Jan/ early Feb lead many to predict and assume that this new "first shipment" would arrive concurrently with the originally scheduled second shipment effectively doubling the number of computers that arrived in the first shipment.

 

^ The numbers unfortunately did not double for the shipment on the 17th.

 

You get 3 discs with the G73JH-A2 (presumabley the A1)..

1. Power2Go 6.0 (All media burning disc
2. Drivers and Utilities
3. Windows 7 Recovery Media disc (one disc) so all bloatware is on the one disc. Whether or not you can pick and choose what bloatware goes back on your system is unknown to me.

 

thank you Justin.

i know that some here were hanging their hopes of having this computer before march on that peg.

 

So is there enough interest to start a benchmarking thread or would I be the only one posting?

 

Please do. I will be in there as soon as I get mine. There are already some good pre-lim numbers from Justin (Xotic) (799/1200 O/C). I imagine Vicious, Quad, and others will be contributors as well.

Thanks!

 

Had some time, so I decided to answer your question, as it may also be prudent to put the pics and info on the awesome WiKi by m0.

First up, here it the bag loaded at about 90% I would guestimate. Dirt 2 case as a size reference here.


Here we have a shot of what the lappy looks like in the sleeve. I don't know if an 18 inch screen could fit in the slot.


Bag is loaded at the 90% I referenced earlier. Here is a shot into the front compartment.


All the stuff from the previous pics, is visable here.


View from the top


Expanded view. PAY NO MIND to the 360 controller/windows kit! JS does not game with that ever


You should have no problem loading 3 textbooks in with your laptop.

 

I'll be benching as soon as I get mine. Might be able to snatch one from a Canadian reseller when they ship tomorrow as the store I usually pick stuff up has 2 extra or something that haven't been preordered (at least thats what I recall when i went yesterday). I'll do the ICD myself if needs be since thats my only upgrade from buying from a US reseller.

Also benching desktop alongside with it. Going to be a fun-filled week!

Edit: +Rep for 0100 for the pics!

 

Thank you so much 0100! I was wondering how much we could squeeze in there with such a big laptop. Looks like it has room to spare!

+rep

 

That's pretty hard to answer except by the software developers themselves.

It's unlikely any software shop that wants to make money is going to write code that only works on 4 or more cores at this point in time since the market wold be limited.

 

thanks 0100, that really does look small for a 17". people have said so, but its nice to have the visual reference.

 

Nice job getting all that in there. Do you think it would fit under the seat on a commercial airline, like Southwest for example?

+rep

 

Yess !! I am +1, who refreshs page every minute for see some news about G73JH but sadly most of the stuff is not the thing i want to see, questions questions... You should make a new thread, so it won't have soo much off-topic questions IMO

 

Who is your canadian reseller and is it the A1 or A2 you can pick up? I ordered the A1 from NCIX and they say the ETA is the 11th. I havnt seen the A2 offered there.

 

You are the man!

 

if the asus recovery disc is not a strange image disc but a unattended scripted disc here is a way to get rid of bloatware:

get yourself a 4GB usb flash and follow this guide to make a win7 usb installation flash drive, you can boot from this and reinstall win7 much faster.

http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1665.entry

after following above step just copy the full cd over to the flash and set your boot order to boot from the flash drive.

but before that, you should search for autounattended.xml or unattend.xml or any other xml file on the flash and edit them to remove any unattended install of bloatware.

good luck, i don't have a asus disc to play with it, but it is what i do with dell disc, and i can remove all bloat and get a very clean oem install from it.

 

What I want to see is an email from my reseller informing me my machine is out the door!

 

Wheres this benchmarking thread then Mandrake! eh?

I look forward to following it,

Viscious, i didn't know much about them thermal temp sensors until you filled me in, are you happy with the G73 running the furmark temp? realistically the two extra zones (Memory and....forgot the other ones) do tend to run very hot on most graphics cards.

 

the G73JH-X3 gives me hope that we'll see i5 or arrendale i7's as an option. Switchable graphics on this thing would be godly, it'd be perfect.

 

It would be so much easier if I had the system.

I get something preliminary started.

 

Heh, just what I was thinking as well, only Midwest for me!

 

11th is for resellers in BC, 9th is for resellers in Ontario. Reseller is Infonec (spelling? Whatever, its a walk-in store but they get their stuff in when on the date of release..well at least for anything I bought)

 

I hate to tell you guys but it appears IC Diamond (or any Thermal Compound) along with CPU Upgrades will not be done by most if not all resellers. To access the CPU/GPU you have to remove the C Surface (Touchpad and Keyboard area) undo 2 ribbons and a speaker connection. Once this is done the motherboard has be taken completely out of the shell and flipped over just to access all screws on the heatsinks. Take a look at the attached video showing with the C Panel Removed. (It is still being processed by YouTube). Sorry some our sound effects didn't get deleted from the beginning.

You will also see accessibility to the fans is very difficult. So cleaning fans will be very, very hard to do.


width='640' height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gg0OIwK3-vc&hl=en_US&fs=1&hd=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/gg0OIwK3-vc&hl=en_US&fs=1&hd=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width='640' height="385"></embed></object>

 

Thanks for the update Justin!

Guess that means I'll be cancelling my US preorder unless I can't get one tomorrow from a Canadian reseller =x

 

Justin can you let us know if it's MXM or proprietary?

 

Agreed haha, its always best if you can use something to actually benchmark lol,

I suppose one thing to do is see how effective the whole GDDR5/128 bit bus scenario is,

What you could do is a standard vantage run on 1 gpu with your 17xR2, and another in 1080p, then do the same with the G73, and see if there is a performance ratio change between resolution upscaling.

Also i dont suppose anyone knows the power rating of both the 4870 and 5870?

Justin, that looked like a nightmare to get into :S

 

I had a feeling this might happen because of the amount of work its going to take just to get at these components.... Its no 20 minute job thats for sure...

 

Isn't that the same as saying you can only get a i7-720QM with the system or do they come to you guys with different procs?

 

That's how it was to upgrade the proc on the XPS M1730.

 

Exactly, ASUS only provides the A1 and A2 with the 720QM.

 

Yeah its no fun when the entire machine has to come apart down to the last screw just to add paste....

When i first saw the service manual i thought how can the resellers only charge X amount to do all that work ?...

With all the pre orders and the amount of time each machine would take its just unrealistic to handle it all in any amount of reasonable time....

I know these guys would love to be able to do this for there customers but people will just have to understand all that it would entail ...

 

Maybe the design is to discourage people from doing it themselves.

 

Bingo!!! lol....

 

You are lucky man, i've still 2 more weeks

 

Sounds like a headache to start reworking all the pre-orders. I was thinking about taking the easy route and just adding a 920 to my order....guess not.

 

So I guess this means anybody that upgraded the paste or cpu is out of luck?

 

Yeah it sounds like it unless certain Resellers are going to do it regardless of the amount of work its going to take.....