G73 and Cat 10.5 GSOD Debug Thread

does anyone else notice how temperature ranges a lot with 10.5? My max temps at stock temps have jumped 4-5 degrees sometimes and other times it's exactly the same as it was with 10.4.

 

OK, I'm back with some testing done with Xeven's TARD vBIOS v2:

1) Comes up as 012.017.000.009.000000 for the BIOS version. Where it comes from is still unknown, since Xeven hasn't goteen back to me yet.

2) Yes, HDMI Out works.

3) Yes, PowerPlay is working, and supports a 200/500 powersaving setting.

4) Cat 10.5 thus far has been stable at stock speeds for me. (ZOMGNOWAIBBQ!!!11)

5) ATI Overdrive is enabled. (SWEET)

I also picked up at the BestBuy store a Targus Lap Chill Mat. It fits 17" lappys, and is functional with the somewhat larger G73. I like the fact you can place it on a bed and the fans still get plenty of air. An hour of Dragon Age @ 700/1000 has a max temps of:

TSS0: 72.5 C
TSS1: 84.0 C
TSS2: 77.5 C

Needless to say, I am VERY HAPPY with this vBIOS, and no surprise, +1 rep to Xeven.

Note: Your HDMI will be redetected and drivers need reinstalling.

 

Ok now that's a bit too much for me but it looks like vbios update will help some people. I'm not willing to try that though.
Cheers,

 

Chastity, you are still welcome.

 

This sounds great . Any hiccups yet? I would definitely be willing to flash if it fixes the GSOD.

 

Update: Xeven confirmed it's a modified stock Asus vBIOS, thus why everything works.

ATI Overdrive is quite generous in what it considers to work. 850/1200 is what it came up with, but wasn't stable with real apps. (Heaven 2.1 b0rked real fast) However 800/1100 was quite stable. My only hiccup was during benching, some apps would hang when they quit, and PowerPlay adjusted the gpu speed from 800 to 700. Disabling it while benching fixed that.

Scored a P8991 on 3DMark Vantage. (First time it didn't blow up on me)

Passes Heaven 2.1 Bench too.

Also, the 200/500 timing works nicely too when in power saving modes.

 

This is very good news indeed!....just one question....when the HDMI port is re-detected, will Windows automatically install the appropriate drivers? If not, where can I find them?

Btw, thanks for Testing mate! Cant give rep yet, gotta spread some around first.

 

Thx to Tim for a shoutout, the VGA port seems to be disabled. HDMI is working, but not the VGA. However, I also disabled the TV Tuner in my BIOS so maybe there is a connection?

 

Hey, Chastity.Are you still going to RMA it or something else??

 

TBH, I'm in no rush to RMA it. So far it seems to be working fine, other than the VGA port, which is no concern to me. All monitors in my house have DVI or HDMI ports, as do the TV / AV Receivers.

 

I guess I'm one of the unlucky ones who the V2 TARD vBIOS did not work for. Flashed it and it worked fine for a little bit and then BOOM! GSOD's every 10-15 minutes. Time to RMA it! Sad this unit was only bought three days ago -_-

 

Maybe this won't help, but if it was me I would put back the original vBIOS and install the stock 9.12 display drivers. Perhaps do a fresh install. If it continued to get a GSOD with everything stock then I would RMA it. Then again, if you want to RMA so you can run a beta vBIOS and the ATI display drivers, then go for it.

 

beta vBios? Maybe I am missing something. Kalim, could you please give the link for beta vBios? Is it from Asus?

 

Sorry, I meant unofficial 3rd party experimental hacked vBIOS. Beta, just seem simpler and maybe, well, a little wishful thinking.

 

Thanks for the post Chastity. One question- was your VGA port not working previously? Your post was a little unclear on the matter.

 

I keep getting the GSOD, like 30 seconds into any game of MW2. It starts to flicker, than screen goes grey while sound is still playing.

I've uninstalled creative, installed Realtek 248 and Catalyst 10.5

Thinking of returning it back to the store, this laptop has been nothing but trouble.

 

Revert back to stock ASUS ATI drivers or overclock the VRAM on the Ati card as discussed in this thread.

Cheers,

 

is it worth to even try to go for 10.5, if now am running on 10.4 without any problem...?

 

If it's working I'd leave it alone.

Cheers,

 

Are you guys kidding me? So you're telling me that overclocking the video card on this laptop makes it more stable?

I need to try this myself...

 

I've installed the Catalyst 10.5 yesterday, everyting seemed fine, played hours of Splinter Cell Conviction and World of Warcraft+watched movies for hours, but today when I tried to play Left 4 Dead 2, after 2 mins (or even less) the campaign loaded, bamm, GSOD.
Seems something in the AMD released drivers conflicts with the custom built Asus MXM 5870/vBIOS...back to waiting for ASUS to release new working driver

 

There are lots of folks who run the ATI reference drivers with no issues, so I don't think it is fair to say that it is necessarily solely a vBIOS issue, although it seems whatever the root cause is can be addressed with a vBIOS update.

 

Or maybe most of those folks were just lucky and nothing triggered GSOD yet

 

OK, just to summarize:

1) The v2 vBIOS is a modded stock Asus vBIOS with adjusted settings for PowerPlay on battery (200/500) and Overdrive enabled.

2) If you are unstable on 700/1000, then overclocking seems to work to stabilize. (My opinion is that overclocking turns off any and all power saving features) 705/1100 and 800/1100 seem to get favorable results. You can use Overdrive to permakeep the setting.

3) I never used the VGA port before as I had no need before flashing. And no, I don't feel like flashing the vBIOS twice just to find out.

 

Ok every1 stay away from Catalyst 10.5...while uninstalling my laptop frooze with black screen+now the default driver GSOD too, just stay with the default driver. I try fixing it with Win reinstall, hopefully I wont have to RMA...damm, why did I install this damm driver

 

Been using it fine without issues. I don't think a blanket "stay away" statement is necessary for it at this point.

 

10.5 works great for me.

 

All you needed to do is boot to Safe mode and run Driver Sweeper on it. You didn't need to do a full reinstall. Also, the point of this thread was to get 10.5 WORKING on problematic G73's.

 

Initially with stock drivers I've had no issue with my laptop. I upgraded to bios 209 and had no issue. I decided to install the 10.5 drivers and wham it would just lock up with a black screen on anything. I couldnt get 1 sucessful run of 3dmark to see if the score even improved...nothing. Again, no GSOD just a black screen which would lock my system. Uninstalled, driver sweeper, installed again and same issue so I've returned to stock drivers from the Asus site and everything is back to normal....I hope. I did not try to change my gpu clock/mem with these drivers. Some say they are more stable at 800/1100. I may reinstall them and try that out later. I also still have the creative software installed although I dont touch it and it hasnt been an issue with me to this point....I run usb audio anyway. Sounds like its just different system to system.

 

Maybe I overreacted a little, here is what happened:
default driver: played Splinter Cell Conviction for a hour->experienced stuttering
Cat 10.5: Splinter Cell runned great, no more stuttering but GSOD in L4D2 (Black screen, gray lines)

back to default drivers: Played Splinter Cell again but 2x more than last time with stock driver->stuttering again, but after 1,5-2 hours the laptop freezes with black screen (NO gray lines) and have to shut it down with the power button...do you think this is because the game needs newer patch/driver or because VGA issue? Had 2 black screen freezes in SC so far:
1) when I reached checkpoint and the game should have saved
2) when I died and the game should have loaded last save

 

So do you have to load the modded vBios and THEN overclock a little, or would just overclocking have the possibility of fixing GSODs with newer drivers?

Can't clock speeds be edited in a bios and then flashed so that you don't have to run OC utilities all the time?

 

Actually you can do it. You can edit vBios with RBE and flash your Video card.

 

Reason it wasn't was to guarantee compatibility, and also many people do not need to overclock for stability. Plus with Overdrive, it's easy to OC it if neccessary, and you only need to adjust it once.

 

OK, so I messed around a bit. I uninstalled 9.12 and installed 10.5. Then I did a baseline run of FurMark. Normally my laptop will lock up within a minute if it's going to lock up on Furmark. Sure enough, about 30 seconds in...GSOD. (Well, actually, the lines were reddish brown, but hey.)

I'm so over getting pissed off about that. I was expecting it anyway.

So I rebooted, tried AMD GPU Clock Tool, and set it to 700/1050. This time, Furmark lasted about 2 minutes...about a minute and a half in, the screen started flickering a bit. I've learned that that's a sure sign of an upcoming GSOD. Sure enough, another GSOD.

This time, I rebooted, and tried 704 (I had meant to try 705) core and 1100 memory. I let Furmark run for over 3 minutes...no flickering, no GSOD.

I'm going to go try the WEI benchmark. That always seemed to crash on newer drivers too. But I'm leaning towards believing my system is stable right now.

 

The WEI benchmark worked!

Now I just need to figure out how to edit a video bios and save the settings more permanently!

 

Daggah you can try this method posted by the great Kalim some pages before:

 

On another thread there was a post talking about tweakforce drivers for 10.5. Has anybody heard of it or tried it? If you have, where it is? I googled the tweakforce website but i don't see anything new.

 

I'm one of those guys that had gsod with stock drivers on my g73. Then i installed 10.4 and i didn't have crashes anymore but would still pause every now and then with random coloured screens. Yesterday I saw this thread and i overclocked to 800/1100 and now it crashed twice as much as before. Clearly overclocking aggravates the problem for my g73. just to test this theory in overclocked to 900/1200, it crashed in seconds. i couldn't even start the game. i had to hard shutdown. finally i underclocked to 650/950 and no more freezes with random colours or gsod's. so yay.

only downside is that after an hour into the game some buildings and roads don't load in advance.

btw i'm playing the saboteur currently

 

Yeah Ziddy brought it up awhile back, and I have checked their website but no update. I would say it's not available yet. Dunno if it ever will be or if he abandoned the project.

 

That worked for me. I had the one crash (because I upgraded to 10.5 just to test it's functionality; didn't need it as all my games worked fine with stock drivers) and implemented the overclock (700,1100) and it has been stable ever since. 10.6 is fine as well. Using the Kalim method works like a charm!

Cheers,

 

I'm curious to hear how people who haven't made any bios / vbios mods are doing on 10.6

 

Are you saying you'd like to test a system with the original system bios/vbios and no prophylactic over-clocking of the GPU or vram?

Cheers,

 

I'm still scared to update BIOS from 205!

I may go for it,but I'll sure feel stupid if I lose the keyboard lights again...

I'm going to try 10.6 on BIOS 205 though (need to do an Acronis image first)....I'll report any issues. 10.4 was fine for me except for Blu-Ray playback.

 

I thought I was the only one with extra drive lying about for this purpose.

Now if there was a way to image the bios before we update it!

Cheers,

 

And a hardware image!

I image (with Acronis) from SSD to secondary G73 HDD....then up to Desktop and/or NAS device, then to one of several USB drives. Redundancy rocks!

Anyway, I'm up on 10.6 now - still on 205 BIOS....we'll see...

 

Correctimundo!

 

Now that's impressive. I've never used Acronis. Is it better (more reliable) than Ghost? Obviously looks like it can do images as files in addition to full clones like Ghost. I'll have to look it up.

I don't see you losing any game saves or characters buffed over years of play!

Cheers,

 

It's what I recommend in the guide and use myself. If Ghost does what you need it to do that's fine. I run Symantec free systems. Symantec couldn't pay me to use any of their products.

 

I was running 10.6 on my bio 206 for a little while. I haven't gotten to change the gpu clock since 705/1000 worked for me on 10.5. I could change it back to 700 but i don't see any point in changing it. So overall, everything has been going fine. I updated the bios to 209 though to fix the keyboard issues. Still have my KB lights

 

I'm a developer, so the backups are more for years of source code work and a development system that takes 2 days of boring work to restore where with Acronis I can restore a full system drive image in 20 minutes.

I've never used Ghost, but Acronis has worked great for drive images so far.

Been playing a while now with Catalyst 10.6 on stock everything (205 BIOS)...no issues so far. Temps unchanged from stock - never over 89C for any sensor. I also enjoyed the fast Bad Company 2 load times that I got a taste of with 10.4!

Going to watch a Blu-Ray disk now and see how that goes...

p.s. Also Symantec-free here

*edit* No-go on the Blu-Ray playback...crashes in 5 - ? minutes... Bummer.