I still have my G73JW and it still shuts down during gaming despite what I said above a few months back.
I think maykon_helver is right about the cause being related to the motherboard and power consumption of the MXM card. Even if a modding solution was found, at this point my laptop is over a year and a half old and I don't want to open it back up or tinker with its innards. Dealing with the fragile teeny tiny cables and the keyboard's foil backing made me wish I just left it alone when re-pasting. That and I re-pasted the CPU thus voiding the remainder of the warranty.
The shutdown is definitely not heat-related. My temps are fine. It is true that overclocking the vram causes the temps to rise even higher (in my case) than overclocking the core. It's possibly they could have been overheating, they don't have sensors on them to their heat contributes to the overall video card. But since I still get shutdowns with vram at stock, I don't think that's the problem. They were loaded with thermal paste too, so I'm sure they were probably fine. Heat is not the issue because furmark can get the card in the 80s and it's fine. Gaming is where it shuts down... I've had it shut down at 71 degrees so I know it's not heat.
Re-paste lowered temps a bit but didn't solve the problem. Higher voltage power adapter did nothing, waste of money. Stock vram clock didn't solve problem. The more recent drivers cause a shutdown even faster in certain games like Skyrim (5 mins) when clock is over 800. 775 core at stock vram clock lasted an hour on Skyrim. Witcher 2 could run for a couple hours at 800 and no shutdown, but I'm also running at 720p with that particular game to get a 30fps+ average. Skyrim is at 1080p.
I ran for a while on stock clocks. Stock clocks are
mostly fine. I do get the occasionally rare shutdown at stock. Every so often (every couple months) it will happen while browsing too.
Judging from all the comments archived here and elsewhere and those who still own the G53/G73 experiencing it, I think it is pretty safe to say that it is a design flaw. It effects all models of the G53/G73 regardless of CPU or GPU (all generations of i5/i7, ATI or nvidia) and possibly even the entire G series, I'm not sure.
Customer support has been unhelpful except for the unofficial support we've received here from Asus employees (which is much appreciated). RMAs and replacements won't solve it. BIOS won't solve it. Driver updates and OS reinstalls won't solve it. OS doesn't matter (it happens in OSx86 and Linux). Re-paste doesn't solve it. New power brick doesn't solve it. And now overclock appears to be safe. It even happens at stock clock.
Basically for over a year and a half I've had a decent laptop that I've played many games on but annoyingly lost progress due to shutdown (and I've been a good boy and ran chkdsk almost each time after it happened) and to be fair mostly while overclocked but not exclusively. It would be still under warranty but I re-pasted the CPU. And in all honesty the new models out right now are too modest of an update for me. I'd be fine if the G73 was reliable even at stock for another year or so. I'm also afraid that when I sell it the buyer is going to complain about the problem and blame it on me.
So this one's on Asus. I doubt they will do anything, but I'm serious about the class action lawsuit. This problem affects all G53/G73 owners
BTW - I'm currently trying a 750 clock with stock vram clock. If it lasts 2-3 hours then it's a keeper because that's what stock lasts. It gives a modest fps boost to many games, almost 10% so it's not completely worthless.
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Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
