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

I'm not lucky....as far as I know, I still have a couple weeks as well!

 

All I changed on mine is the paste, should probably call Ken and make sure he doesnt spend the better part of this year applying it LOL!

 

It's usually MUCH more difficult....to give money back.

 

Well, I am not sure how much room is under the seat. I would like to reference it to my Pelican 1510. It is the maximum carry on size the FAA will allow. the 1510's exterior dimensions are:
22.00" x 13.81" x 9.00"
(55.9 x 35.1 x 22.9 cm)

The backpack is about (depending on how full you stuff it):
19.00" x 14.00" x 8.5"

This makes me at least comfortable telling you it WILL fit in the overhead compartment, since my Peli 1510 will. I stuffed my backpack with 3 of my coats, it doesn not have all that gear in it anyl onger. Here are the pics sir....
Backpack is 3 inches shorter than the 1510.


Its only deeper because I packed it with coats.

 

Do you know if the GPU is upgradable?

 

Haha yeah it usually is but in this case id say it wont be ...


Have you seen the service manual ?... Ugg .... I know the 1730 was a pain and im glad i skipped that generation of XPS Had Gen1 Gen2 1710 but no 1730 ... Guess it was a good thing ...

 

So how will we clean this notebook after 6 months usage?? It seems like a very bad news for me Maybe I should reconsider for G51Jx... God!! Why these companies can't make a very good product... Everytime something has minuses
I hope it will worth to wait 2 more weeks... looking gaming videos every 2 hours Y_Y So confused with the fans!!...

 

Get some compressed air and every couple weeks or once a month just use it...

If you take off the panel on the bottom that covers the RAM and the HDs most of the dust should shoot out there so i would not worry to much about it honestly.... Its a bummer it is so tough to access but not a reason to change machines ....

 

I haven't yet, I only saw the regular user manual.

 

Minuses always happens due to cost cutting and other financially related problems. Nothing is perfect.

 

I know that this laptop comes with the ATI 5870 that has the Eye Infinity drivers built in. I am just wondering if anyone plans to connect 2 or more external LCD monitors in their setup.

It the answer is 'Yes', than how can this be achieved? Will I need any other hardware adapters? I am hoping to setup each external LCD monitor to the left and right of the Laptop, with the Laptop Display in the Center. This way, I can spread my work or gaming into 3 screens .

Each screen will have a resolution of 1900 x 1080.

Thanks for any available advice or comments.

 

Thanks for taking the time to measure it up.... Here's what I got from Southwest Airlines website: http://www.southwest.com/travel_center/animals.html

The under-seat dimensions are as follows:
Window Seat: 19"L x 14"W x 8.25"H
Middle Seat: 19"L x 19"W x 8.25"H
Aisle Seat: 19"L x 14"W x 8.25"H
However, please keep in mind that some seats might be slightly smaller in width.


A tight fit but MAYBE do-able without the coats.. Thanks again!!

+rep

 

It can't be done on this laptop, as it doesn't have any eyefinity ports.

 

To be honest we have not went as far as to take the motherboard completely out to see.

 

For the people that upgraded paste/cpu's how are you going about handling that?

 

Ohh okay, thanks for the advise You satisfied me!!

 

Is this the only ASUS that is so difficult to access?

 

We will likely offer a refund on it.

 

Hehe, see this is why i like the MSI machines, the backdoor is there to everything.

But i do approve of ASUS making it more difficult to get in their, last chance of human error and breaking something lmao,

Any noticable warrenty seals etc when inside?

 

I could have sworn the 5870 HD mobility came with it.... here: "As the desktop HD 5000 series, the Mobility HD 5870 also supports Eyefinity to connect up to 6 monitors to the graphics chip" -http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-5870.23073.0.html

 

Its the first of any Asus models i have seen like this but im sure there are others...

Years ago most notebooks were put together in layers and taking them apart was a breeze but putting them back together was a different story ....

 

It supports it, but there are no ports for it. If there aren't any ports, all the support in the world is not going to help. I.e. MB supports USB 3.0, but if there are no 3.0 ports to the laptop, 3.0 = less than useful, to say the least.

Hmm, would this analogy make sense?

 

Oh...thats a disappointment!

I was also wonder why their engineers decided not to include an eSata port too.....I could live without the Cardslot, but the eSata port would have been very useful for copying data to external harddrives for transfer to other computers.

Guess we can't expect everything from a laptop that already seems like a very good value for money.

 

ah, I get what you mean now.. my bad!

ps. only $400 more to go until i get this baby!!!

 

It supports it, but it's up to the laptop manufacturer to actually add the port required to produce the eyefinity display. Asus did not add it.

Edit: Beat to the punch by dtwn!

I feel bad for the resellers having to go through all this hassle now to explain the situation. Big bummer, but since I feel the cooling system is sound in the G73 I don't think the stock thermal compound will be an Achilles heel in any way.

 

The card may be capable and even support it but it doesn't PHYSCIALLY have the ports that allow you to do this. (I believe it requires a DisplayPort.)

 

Anyone test to see if ATI Overdrive works with the 5870 yet?

 

That's included in the Catalyst usually right? The Catlyst panel I have does not have the ATi Overdrive. I read that DriverHeaven is working on modifying the Mobility modder to support the HD5870 and the new Cat 10.1.

 

Trying to download the games on steam while I am at home on my fast internet... every single time I start steam my computer locks up. Went back and forth with it for an hour and had to stop to make the kids lunch.

Right now transfering over files from my desktop I need for work tonight and after that will probably have to delete everything from steam and start fresh. Sucks I already had like 7 games 60% downloaded so no way will I finish downloading them all in time before work for benchmarking tonight.

I started to get an error when windows reboots "steam.exe main exception cmultifieldblob end of blah blah"

I found that your supposed to just delete that file and let it rebuild itself, I did that and after it rebuilds and is about to start steam it just locks up again and I have to start all over. So must have a corrupted download or something causing the problems, this is going to set me back quite a bit considering how busy I have been.

 

If the option is not present that means it's not supported.

I tried getting Cat 10.1 working with my 4870s also but it failed. Cat 9.12 works great with the M17x but I haven't had the same luck with the M17xR2 even though they have the same gpus.

 

Yeah 10.1 doesn't work with the mobility modder yet. 2 weeks is last I read for the ETA on that. The drivers I see here I think are a stripped down, modified one by Asus. I look forward to ditching this in a few weeks.

 

Maybe it has the same issue like the G51J. Check if you have Creative sound software installed and Sound Audigy sound drivers on the Add/Remove Programs. Uninstall them and try Steam again.

 

I just copy my main steam folder over from my desktop to my laptops everytime then run Steam.exe at which point it installs the service ... Never had to do anything more then that...

 

This model does use creative software, this is a possbility but I had it working before, and got most of my downloads done so its odd that it would be a problem now and I would hate to lose my sound driver software.

Sounds like a good idea, will give this a shot.

 

Quad did you install the creative Audigy drivers or just using Realtek's HD drivers?

 

I thought ATI 10.1 drivers were meant to install without mob modding.

 

When i did a fresh install i just used there drivers disk and clicked on the bare essential stuff .. Nothing more though... Not infront of the lappy right now though so i cant tell you for certain.....

 

The mobility drivers only go up to 9.9. I haven't tried 10.1 without mob modding them. Has someone tested this?

 

Now that you mentioned that, googled it and found this:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=454780

I may try it later.

 

I had mine working even with special sound profile for 2 months before I started getting the freezing problems haha. I don't know what triggers it though.

Hopefully it will be something far simpler to fix.

I am so jealous of you G73JH owners haha

 

Aren't you going to sell your G51J soon?

 

Dondah modded the 9.12hotfix drivers for me and they installed just fine....

I think he did also send me the INFs for the 10.1s but i never made it that far ....

The 9.12 hotfix scored the same in everything that the stock drivers did... Performance was identical....

 

The 9.12 drivers make things more "flickery"

According to that post you don't have to mod the 10.1 drivers. I'll try it when I get home.

 

Has Gentechpc or Powernotebooks declared their position on this?

 

I want to start by apologizing in advanced for the off topic question here is my situation.I have $1650.00.I cant decide on this laptop or a Alienware desktop priced at $1500.00 with a radeon 5870,825 watt power supply,500 gb hdd,and a
i7 920 (3.2GHz, 8MB Cache)..


Here's my thing I doubt I will ever leave the apt with the laptop.Then again since I'm in a 1 bedroom apt space is limited what would you guys suggest me buying?

 

omg. and i thought it was hard to get to the CPU in the M17x.

 

Desktop, hands down...

 

you should build your own desktop.

 

Desktop if you don't plan on using the laptop away from apartment.

But then it is fun to use the laptop on your desk, kitchen table, in the bed etc.

 

Its only $200.00 less if I build it myself