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

It is in your best interest to get your pre order in as soon as you can due to the popularity of this model. Most of us sellers do not require payment for pre order so you can get your spot in line right now and not be out anything. Once the item comes in we will request payment at that time and can work out a date that works best for you.

 

Nice choice of receivers.

I'm pretty sure I saw that this was going to have S/PDIF output via the headphone jack, so that seems like the way to go to hook it to your Denon. If that turns out not to be the case, then it obviously becomes a bit trickier.

I just looked at the specs on a couple of the reseller sites, and they both said S/PDIF, so hopefully that's the case, then.

 

Thanks
Implemetation on it would be key, but yes, having a S/PDIF out could ease up my sound desires even though it would still add another connection, but at least not a sprawling 8ch analog connections. Thanks for the heads up on expected S/PDIF, I recall seeing it, but never followed through as I'm on a 1 cable track mind . I feel confident the HDMI will work through the 3808 and into any HDMI input monitor/HDTV, but I am salivating at the idea of an Eyefinity setup after the 3808, I can always hope.

 

No esata on a high end modern gaming notebook like this? So I thought "ok, I can just use my express slot dual esata card". What? no express slot either? Wow. That's most likely a deal breaker for me at this price level. I have a few express slot devices from my old notebook that I would like the option of using, and I use esata on external harddrive(s), other than flash drives. I will probably go with some other notebook or wait longer. It seems like it will be a nice machine otherwise though , hope everyone is happy with theirs when they get it.

I've been waiting until I see multiple sites post lots of real world benchmarks of the new mobile gpus before I decide on a DTR this year.

 

Well all... I have been reading this forum for about 2 weeks now and doing a whole lot of reading about this system!! This is my first post here, and I am posting to say I am a soon to be owner of 2 of these bad boys!!

Products
2x ASUS G73JH-A1 - PRE ORDER
- Xotic Gear: No Xotic PC Gear
- Warranty: 2 Year ASUS GLOBAL Warranty, 24/7
- Software Bundle (Not Installed): No Software Bundle
- Microsoft Office Software (Media: No Office Software
- Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit -
- Notebook Cooler: No Notebook Cooler
- Mouse / Keyboard Accessories: Asus G Series Razor Gaming Mouse
- Fingerprint Reader: No Fingerprint Reader
- Port Replicator / Dock / Adapter: No Dock/Hub/Adapter
- Spare AC Adapter: None Standard*
- Car Adapter: No Car Adapter
- Battery: Smart Li-ion Battery (8-Cell)
- Case: Asus G Series Matching Backpack
- Sound Card: Sound Blaster Compatible 3D Audio
- TV Tuner: No TV Tuner
- Camera: Built in 2.0 Megapixel Camera
- Wireless Network Accessories: No Network Accessory
- Wireless Network: Built-in 802.11 Wireless A/B/G/N
- Bluetooth: Internal Bluetooth + EDR
- Memory Card Reader: Internal 8-in-1 Card Reader: MM
- Floppy Drive: No Floppy Drive
- External Hard Drive (Back Up): No Back Up Hard Drive
- Raid: HDD Raid Settings - OFF
- Second Hard Drive: - 500GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache Buffer
- Primary Hard Drive: - 500GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache Buffer
- Optical Drive: - 4X Blu-Ray Reader / 8X DVDRW/C
- Exterior Finish: Standard Finish
- Ram: 8,192MB (8GB) DDR3 1066MHz Dual
- External Monitor Video Adapter: No Video Adapter
- Graphics Video Card: ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD5870 1024
- Thermal Compound: Stock OEM Thermal Compound
- Processor: - Intel® Core™ i7-720QM, 1.60-2.
- Dead Pixel Policy: ASUS Zero Bright Dot (ZBD) 30 Days
- Display: 17.3" FHD 16:9 "Glare Type" Supe
- Current Promotion: !! FREE !! UPS GROUND SHIPPING

Now... When do I get to play with it!!! =D I CAN'T WAIT!!!

 

Hm, is RAID-0 not recommended for those going the 2xSATA route? I've noticed most people opt out of it.

If such a scale is possible, from 1 to 10 what's the difficulty of taking out the primary SATA and replacing it with an SSD later on? If it's not so tricky I'll go find out the specifics on how to do it, etc.

Thanks

 

It is easy to switch a HDD in a laptop, provided they make the drive bay easy to get to. Once you switch the drive, then comes the REALLY time consuming part of reinstalling your OS, updates and software.

 

swapping the drive is easy, if you have raid it won't work.

 

2.

I'm doing RAID 0. Some people are worried that they're going to lose their data but I've seen many people that used RAID 0 for years. It's how you take care of it honestly.

 

Oh, say what? There's no way to "disable" raid before swapping hard drives or something?

 

btw, any notable news in the last 50 pages or so, i took a break from checking in on this thread because the anticipation was killing me. can someone save the the waste of time reading through 50 pages of should i get the 5300, it only has two wires, is an SSD better than raid? why do they charge full price for the upgraded processor, i should get the 720 in return, does changing the components void my warranty? What about the stickers? Use a blowdryer...so on and so forth.

So, anything notable?

 

I forget the exact term, but it spreads your data across both HDDs, so if you have a 1 picture file (JPG), there is a chance that part of it sits on HDD1, and the other part sits on HDD2. Therefore if one HDD dies, or is swapped out, you lose that picture file.

EDIT: The term is striped.

I was considering a RAID 0 option, but from what I have researched it is only a marginal performance gain, and doubles your chance of data loss (still a small chance). My plan is to opt for a standard config, and the swap the primary for an SSD when they are more affordable.

 

Oh well I mean, I could just back up all important data to an external, then problem solved, ready/able to switch HDDs from SATA to SSD?

 

That would work, I thought your plan was to keep the data in tact on the raided drives, and only swap out one. What you are basically asking is...Can I scrap all of the data on two drive and put two new drives in. I think the answer is yes. On the other hand, and I am not up to speed on technology..can you raid SDDs? I assume you can, however I have not kept up on computer technology...and my education on this topic is newly discovered in Decmeber, when I decided to scrap my 3 year old budget gaming PC and my scrap a$$ business laptop for a new super laptop and what i thought was going to be a netbook, but ended up with a 3gen 64gb ipod touch.

So, please technical pros...chime in.

 

Hehe, something in between. I'm asking if I can scrap all data on both raid-0 drives, and put in *one* SSD drive. I know it's not possible to have raid between SSD and SATA, but when I take out the primary SATA, is there some disabling-of-raid-thing that happens, that will allow me to put in one SSD?

 

Nm...........

 

mackloon = not a pro

mackloon recommends consulting a computer geek

 

I don't imagine any reseller will have a problem if a preorder or two drops out as the line should be long enough. You might make a few friends dropping out and letting the board know

TMK:
1) still undetermined
2) over spinners, yes (SSD stripe, likely a different story, prob couldn't utilize the I/O's anyway without a hardware RAID card)
3) IMHO Labor, a reseller has to do the work, they should get paid. If you want to do the work, buy an 820 for that cost, swap it out and now you have a 720 for sale.
4) an authorized reseller changing the components will never void the warranty
5) still at your own risk

You will have to change your BIOS out of RAID and reinstall a fresh windows onto the SSD, you will likely be better off getting a Windows DVD than trying to deal with the Premium x64 version that comes at no extra cost as an image on the primary HDD.

 

if you disable RAID 0 you will lose all ur data.
it's better off not enabling RAID for you since you're going to get SSD drive soon.

 

Thanks, I was really just joking...since there is probably 300 pages in this thread talking about what i was mentioning.

...thanks for the reply though.

 

To anyone who is interested... I don't know if this has been posted in the other 4419 posts or not... But I just found the G73jh user manual on Asus's site.. here is the link:

ftp://ftp.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/G73Jh/G73Jh_1229-b.pdf

Have fun!!

 

I just looked all the way through it... it looks like a pretty basic manual.. but still it's something... =D

 

iirc thats been posted.....9 times now. thanks tho.

 

sorry then

 

Yes you can RAID 2 or more SSDs together. If the SATA controller can handle the additional R/W bandwidth then this would show a decent speed increase, but it would pale in comparison of the initial boost from using an SSD over HD. If I could afford it I would get two 160GB x25-m SSDs and put them in RAID0 since I think the SSDs are much less likely to fail causing data loss compared to two HDs in RAID0.

You could also in theory RAID0 an SSD and HD together but the overall speed would be much lower than a single SSD (at most slightly faster than the slowest HD used).

I do a lot of RAID in the course of my work. However in that case I am usually using RAID1, RAID5, and RAID6 which is more for redundancy rather than speed.

 

Just ordered with these specs:
17.3" Full HD (1920x1080) LED backlit Widescreen LCD (Shipping begins in late February)
ASUS 30 Day Zero Bright Dot Guarantee
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5870 w/1GB GDDR5
i7-720QM (1.6~2.8GHz, 45W) w/6M L3 Cache - 10Gb/s DMI I/O BUS
IC Diamond Thermal Compound - CPU + GPU
8GB (4 SODIMMS) DDR3/1066 Memory
500GB SATA II 3GB/s 7,200RPM Hard Drive (16MB Cache Buffer)
500GB SATA II 3GB/s 7,200 RPM Hard Drive (16MB Cache Buffer)
RAID Disabled
Blu-Ray Reader/8x Super Multi Combo Drive
Internal 8-in-1 Card Reader: MMC/SD/Mini-SD/XD/Memory Stick/MS Pro/MS Duo/MS Pro Duo
Built-in Intel® PRO/Wireless 5300 802.11a/g/n
Built-in Bluetooth Wireless 2.0+EDR
Smart Li-ion Battery 8-Cell
Windows 7 Premium - 64-Bit
Full Range Auto Switching AC Adapter
ASUS Gaming Mouse by Razer
ASUS Gaming Backpack
Global Two Year Warranty + 1 Year ADP + 24/7 ASUS Support
NO Spare Battery
NO "Medialess" Microsoft Office Software
NO Spare AC Adapter

 

Does anyone know if the G73 will be coming with Windows 7 install media of any sort and if not how we can go about getting it?

 

it says on the page, at all resellers I believe, that it comes with Win7 home premium and restore media, restore media being windows 7

 

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Thanks. I didn't see a reference to restore media on xoticpc where I ordered.

Still don't see it. Sorry if I missed it and asked such an obvious question.

 

uh....what's that supposed to show?

 

that looks like a star trek facepalm

 

I believe its supose to express frustration over the ups and downs through this thread of information reqarding this laptop, Though it was uneeded, I Think it expressed the feelings of alot of us here.

 

I love this thing, incredible bang for the buck. I just with I could order it with i5(switchable graphics, didn't I read that this has the hm55 chipset?)

 

yes it has the HM55 chipset

 

Lmao, it's Captain Picard.

 

3 questions

1. What is the difference between the A1 and A2
2. Did anyone receive theirs yet
3. Can you do eyefinity with the ATI 5k series in the G73?

 

1. i dont know
2. no
3. no, you need a certain port that the g73jh-a1 does not have. although somepeople are looking into an adapter for the hdmi port to make it work.

hope that helps,
AKA

 

A1 = Blu Ray
A2 = DVDRW

Rest of the specs are the same. No G73's have shipped yet. Unfortunately the G73JH does not have a display port for eyefinity.

 

lack of display port is another fail on Asus cutting costs......especially with a 5k series GPU in the notebook

 

Im getting seriously annoyed by people who keep recycling the same questions over and over and over again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9q2jNjOPdk
1:10

/rant

 

Yeah I would've rather had a display port in place of one of the hard drives...OR even better an ssd instead of a hard drive it's still a really good deal tho

 

I have a few questions for you guys. I am getting the G73 with 2x500GB HDDs with no RAID option.

If I understand correctly the operating system is all installed on the primary HDD and the secondary has nothing on it but what you put there?
So when I swap the primary out for a SSD can I just put the primary into an enclosure?
Will I be able to pull any file off of it and generally use it as an external HDD?
To clarify that, will the fact that the enclosed HDD has an operating system installed on it affect it in any way?

 

i cant wait any longer. i've got ants in my pants.

 

S#it so no display port with such a powerful card its like it has 8 fingers instead of all 10... I'm sure about a month after the release there will be a solution to this.

And 2 hard drivers with no Raid controller ????????????????????????

They have had raid controllers with their previous versions. Can they be added?

 

Well, considering you have to spend 1000 dollars more to get an Alienware with displayport I don't consider it a "fail". You AlienWare guys who have no intention of buying this thing need to quit sniping in this thread. It's getting ridiculous.

 

I am not sniping at all. Just pointing out my opinion

If I had not learned about the OCZ whitebook when I did, I would have bought and loved an Asus W90 and been in the Asus thread the whole time instead of the Alienware one

 

Its not cutting costs at all. The value and what you are getting in this thing for the price is unbelievable. At its current price tag there is no way you should expect it to have every bell and whistle. To say that Asus is cutting costs on this laptop you are either trolling or uninformed.

 

The contradictions in this one are strong.