Asus G51Jx-A1 w/ GTS 360m (GDDR5), now available for pre-sales!

too bad this is still ugly... I like the design of the 17" but don't like the size =)

 

I was an owner of an ASUS G51VX up until last week when my house was broken into and my notebook stolen . I'm currently re evaluating my options, especially when I've yet to finished paying for my previous notebook.

That said, I've noticed the ASUS G51 series is cheaper to buy in the US compared to Malaysia, so I'm willing to go a bit above my budget to get the notebook. However, now that this update has come out, I'm unsure if I should get the previous generation with the Core i7 and GTX260M, the current generation with the Core i7 and GTS360M which is less powerful, or wait and see if ASUS has an update to the GTX260M.

I'm without a notebook for the next 3-4 weeks, so if I'm going to get a notebook, it will be after that time period. I'm willing to wait as I rather not make an impulse buy and regret my decision later.

I would appreciate your views and comment.

Thanks.

Scirwode

 

Do you think a BIOS upgrade would activate USB 3.0?

 

No, absolutely not. USB 3.0 isn't on any chipsets yet. It's a hardware feature.

 

I'm probably going to put my G51JH up for sale when my G73 comes in. Just got it in early January and it does not have the BSOD problem. It's a better machine in my opinion than the JX (as long as you have one that doesn't BSOD).

 

And even better yet: It seems the BSOD might have finally been fixed.

 

Whoa, i must have missed that! I have been so focused on the G73 thread that I hadn't heard of a fix yet.

 

Yeah, it JUST showed up-Gentech posted a I guess prerelease BIOS Asus thinks may fix it, and people have reported success so far...but given that some of this would be stable for a week or two, I think we need to wait that long to know for sure.

Still, very cool!

 

Cool; I'll wait for you guys to beta test it for me before I flash!

 

Wait until March, to see what Nvidia's new GTX 300M chips look like.

 

Dude change your sig, there's no such thing as the G51J H

 

But is it worth it? Considering I have to live without a notebook for 2 months, maybe even 3, so I don't know if I can wait that long.

Scirwode

 

Join my in my boat, Scirwode.

 

Me thrice. I have a work laptop that sux balls.

Anywho? Are there any listed benchmarks for the GTS 360m? It looks like newegg is shipping qosmios with that chip under the hood?

Is there any information on this laptop outside of what is on the resellers sheet. this was my original plan for purchase, however then i found the g73. the delays there may force me back to my original, but i would like to see some more information.

Anyone have any?

 

The GTS 360M performs like the 9800M GT.

 

I wish I wasn't, to be honest .

Scirwode

 

The wait is long, but we'll get through it. Mid February is only a month away.

 

row row row your boat..gently down the stream..

 

Well now that it appears the Blue Screen has been fixed with a new Bios, it looks like a good time to try and find a G51j-a1 since it will probably end up a better laptop than the JX.

 

To see how we gonna be frustrated all over again due to power throttling issue?

 

G51J has throttling?

 

Same here, trying to sell mine on eBay now before prices start to go down.

 

Apparently it does. Back then when I tried it I didn't notice anything but right now it does seem apparent.

the CPU throttles down then both CPU and GPU are used at 100%.

 

In what tests? If the CPU is throttling then def. give the latest throttlestop a try.

 

furmark+prime shows it, along with a certain part during 3dmark06 in the SM2.0 test I think.

I will try throttlestop, thanks. Additionally I got the 150w PSU in case power is an issue

 

any chance they redesigned the look of this model? Not sure if anyone has seen pics or not.

 

Unfortunately ASUS has not re-designed the G51JX. It is expected to look just like the G51J.

 

That's a shame. If there's one thing I don't like about the G51's its their ugly lid design.

 

I like the white one that I have seen a few times. I forget the model.

 

Yeah that one was really nice. Unfortunately they've decided to go with the strange "slash" design for the current G51J. I don't know who's bright idea that was.

 

I don't like the slash either. The price of the g51jx is insane though: 1799 euros (2592 dollars), not worth it in my opinion.
The asus g60jx on the other hand comes with the 2.53 ghz i5-430M instead of the 1.6 core i 7 for only 1099. Eventhough it has 4 ram instead of the 8 which the g51jx has, I doubt it will matter to gaming.
The higher clocked corei5 even seems better than that i7, but i'm sure i'm mistaken because why would the i7 cost more then?

For the ones interested where I looked up these prices: http://www.laptopshop.be/keuzehulp/?page=2&pricerange=&option[0]=5905&option[1]=4315&sort=price&dir=a

I'm really surprised about the 1800€, because this store is usualy the cheapest around. I myself will probably order my new laptop from a local professional pc store, which will probably add another 100€ to the price But I guess thats what you get when you value service over a bargain.

 

Wow the G51Jx is freaking expensive over there. It's only about $1500 for the base configuration here in the U.S. I'd definitely have to go cheaper if I were you too, that's just too much for what you get.

 

I believe these ASUS G51 series (VX, J, Jx, and probably older models) also have higher price in SE Asia compared to North America's (about US$400~500 higher here in Indonesia). I'm not sure what makes them reasonably more expensive... import tax? that's a bit too much, IMO.

 

Excuse my noob ignorance I have a question is the intel wireless card that much better than the stock model and can you upgrade it yourself later without voiding the warranty? Also I notice a lot of the resellers in Canada do not give you the option to customize. Is this only allowed by only a few resellers including the few that post here frequently?

 

so is the 360m better or wose than the hd5870??? any educated guesses??

 

Worse for sure since the GTS 360m is worse than the GTX 260m

 

I don't think we really know for sure. It'll depend on clocks and what not. I'm guessing it'll be more powerful, though to me that's irrelevant since ATi doesn't support it.

 

If ATi isn't crazy it'll be better than GTS 360m.
I'm guessing 5870 is around 25% better than the GTX 260m.

 

Yeah, that sounds like a solid guess to me too. For me though I'd take the 260/360 over that even if it were twice as fast. I'm probably almost alone on that, but driver support is a must-have for me.

 

Driver support in windows is fine. Linux is a completely different story...

 

ATi doesn't support their mobile GPUs AT ALL. I realize you can hack drivers, etc., but that's not something I'm doing when there's a company that's been officially supporting mobile for about two years, and unofficially before that.

(Plus actually I want PhysX acceleration anyway)

 

I realize there is no convincing you otherwise but just a word of warning that you probably won't be using a relatively slow nvidia card for PhysX too much.
In the rare chance a games supports PhysX hardware acceleration, chances are current nvidia mobile cards are going to need all the performance they can give for graphics, not physics. This is especially true as games get more and more shader processing heavy.

I have nvidia on my desktop and I've used PhysX a total of 3 times. Ghost Recon, which took a fairly large performance hit when enabling PhysX, Mirror's Edge, and Arkham Asylum.
There are only 15 or so games that support PhysX acceleration, half of which I've never heard of.

Now that there standardized api's for GPU compute I see PhysX falling to the wayside.
Personally I'd rather have DX11 and modded desktop drivers than PhysX.

 

I imagine eventually we will use like OpenCL or something for a physics engine, but it's not going to be for at least a little while. The two big engines are PhysX and Havoc, and neither one is likely to be ported to OpenCL or Direct X anytime soon as both are owned by hardware companies.

And right now it's a LOT more than two games using PhysX. It's pretty huge, and actually seems to have been slowly supplanting Havoc over the last few years, most likely because it's free, and so long as it's CPU support is decent, I'd think most developers are going to go with it for both the price and hardware support for a lot of their PC customers.

To compete...hmm...actually right now the best thing I can come up with would be AMD coming out with free and competent physics middleware that uses OpenCL. That might slowly get developers to migrate to it, but without the backing of another big company, it's going to be tough for anyone to build a business model around a physics engine when you're competing with two established players, one of whom is giving their product away.

 

Check nvidia's site for a list of PhysX games that support hardware acceleration. It really is about 15 games total. I agree there are plenty of games that use the PhysX sdk but very few support GPU acceleration.

 

Well, how about DirectX 11? Will they have more games given the same period of time as from when PhysX was introduced up to now ?

 

I feel a bit like a broken record saying this again, but relying on nVIDIA's mobile driver "support" may very well lead to disappointment. nVIDIA's mobile drivers are nothing like their desktop drivers. Rather than being a unified driver architecture that supports all nVIDIA mobile cards, the drivers seem to be more of a "try it and see" fix - they work with some manufacturers' systems, and they simply report "no compatible hardware" with others, despite the fact that they're all using nVIDIA hardware.

The best solution for mobile nVIDIA cards is still to hack nVIDIA's desktop drivers, just like hacking ATi's catalyst drivers is the best solution for Mobility Radeon owners (and fortunately, it's simplicity itself to hack either manufacturer's drivers thanks to Laptopvideo2go.com and Mobility Modder), but either way, holding up nVIDIA's commitment to mobile support as a shining example of why they beat ATi doesn't hold water. All of us resellers were very excited when nVIDIA first announced this, but we've had too many customers complaining about not being able to install nVIDIA's drivers to put any stock at all in that "support" any more.

 

It's *NOT* try it and see. The drivers download page explicitly tells you which systems are included. Mostly it's just Sony that won't allow Nvidia to support their hardware. That's Sony's (bizarre) issue, not Nvidia's. Nvidia had to fight to get to the position where they're now supporting their mobile GPUs. We knew about that at least a year before they officially started.

I would think that it would be a lot easier for AMD to follow in their footsteps and go "yeah...let us do what they're doing"...but nothing so far. They've never been as series about driver support, even to this day on the desktop.

 

I would have to get our support team to forward a mountain of emails for me to dig through for specific examples, but we don't sell Sony, and we have had customers with issues trying to install official nVIDIA drivers on Compal, MSI, and Clevo systems (Possibly the ASUS S96S, too, but I'd really have to go digging for a specific example to confirm that). We haven't had recent reports because our support team has simply switched back to sending customers straight to LaptopVido2Go.com now, since it's better to send someone a driver that you know will work than to send them one that is supposed to work but may not actually work.

 

That's too bad. Maybe those have issues? Asus doesn't for sure, and I know even a few years before the official rollout it was easy to install their desktop drivers on a Mac without any hacks (and seemingly without even disabling any mobile features...it seemed to be supported in every way except "officially").

 

Resellers,
Any change to arrival date of this machine? There's only a little more than a week left in January.