G74Sx-BBK7 briefly freeze at random

*** SOLVED ***

Fresh install made it all so better. Other small problems I didn't mention here are also gone.


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Hi. I'm long time lurker in this forum who finally bought G74 on Fourth of July. I got it from BB that everyone seems to hate but 18 month interest free financing and $100 gift card was hard to ignore after all.

So far I'm happy with its performance but I'm having strange problem.

After waking up from sleep, laptop would randomly freeze. It usually freezes for 5 seconds or longer. While this freezing is occuring, Turbo Boost Monitor displays that CPU clock at 2.7-2.9 indicating something is causing it, yet task manager doesn't really display any process that's using CPU.

What could be causing it...? I haven't uninstalled much Asus bloats yet by the way.

 

more than likely the Intel RST driver waking their stuff up.

 

Hmm. if it's merely waking stuff up, shouldn't the symptom go away after awhile? But problem persists for pretty long (10-20 minutes) after I get frustrated enough and force shutdown.

How do I find out which version of RST driver is installed? Forgive me for noob question but I'm coming from centrino laptops lol...

 

You can find the version number looking at the device in Device Manager, or by listing your installed apps and finding the RST entry.

 

I just checked list of installed apps and wasn't able to find RST, neither in device manager.

Should I just reinstall fresh w7? I'd like to avoid that course since installing windows isn't exactly fun activity...

 

that is the first thing i would have done. that way i know what is on the system and if something is wrong i know what to do.

i do installs all of the time. put on a movie or your favorite show and just let it run. honestly these laptops are so fast that installing is not that time consuming (especially if you install everything from a flash drive). it will take me around two hours to get mine back up to spec with everything installed and tweaks applied. and that includes installing adobe cs5 and office 2010 and a game or two.

 

that is what i did i bought the best buy version and after 2 days of buggy and all , i reinstalled a copy of my windows 7 and installed all the drivers and bam all is well and running great i recommened making a backup of the drivers there is a folder named edriver or somthing like that and it has ALL the drivers and software that shipped back that up OR you can get them online so far i have not had any more issues

 

Thank you for picture. I figured it would say Rapid Storage Transfer.... :/ I just bit the bullet and did fresh installation.

I do appreciate the help, though.

For now I'm having trouble locating wimax driver.. :/ I have no use for it so I guess I could bypass it but I wonder why driver from Asus is not working.

 

Hi OP, if you've played some games can you put up some frame rates numbers or a review for this laptop? I'm trying to decide on this one or a sager np8130. I know this one has 128bit GPU whereas the sager has 192bit. but since the screen is only 900p on this and 1080p on sager, I'd expect gaming experience be slightly better in terms of fps.

or as an alternative if you can run 3Dmark06/vantage at default and post the score, it'll also be helpful.

thanks!

 

I will try to run those benchmarks tomorrow since my internet is abysmally slow right now.

However, if screen quality is important to you, I can't really recommend this one. :/ LCD's color is way off. It has awful amount of blue tint on it that I can't really take off easily. I thought of returning it initially, then I remembered that it looked about the same when I first saw it on the another BB than where I purchased it. (The BB where I made purchase didn't have one on display, probably that's why they had it in stock...)

According to hwinfo32, this one has Samsung LTN173KT01000 panel. And little # of reviews I could find on Google are not written so kindly. :/

-- if FFXIV benchmark means anything to you, it scored 3384 on LOW.

 

You can balance out the blue tint by changing your color to 32bit then going through control panel to color management and lowering the blue a couple notches.

Was installing the drivers from the copied eDriver folder straight forward?

 

I had to lower blue down almost to 50% to get what I consider natural gray in calibration... so that's lotta blue.

I tried to get most recent driver if possible.. and I didn't know about existence of such folder either lol.

It was pretty much straight forward except driver for WiMax device and GPU driver. I was having trouble with WiMax one because I thought one driver file was supposed to cover both WiFi and WiMax. I later found out there's separate driver for WiMax, doh. And latest driver from Nvidia was NOT able to detect the 560m yet, so I had to use one from Asus, which worked fine.

So far so good... Coming from 6-7 years old laptop & 3 years old desktop, this thing is like dead silent compared to those ancient legacies.

 

oh for some reason the latest non-beta Nvidia driver doesn't recognize the hardware but if you get the beta one (ends with .50 I believe off the top of my head) it'll work. As to how big a performance upgrade you can expect, I can't rightly say.

 

I can run games like black ops..but it starts out at 5fps and increases slowly...then its up and down during play....could this be the same issue? It has never locked up....game looks great! but i cant sustain fps rate! idle temps are 40c and sometimes less...i havent tried another game yet

 

maybe its related to a windows update.... now that i think about it. I ran COD black ops with no problems...then did a windows update...that F'd it up for me

 

it is always a clean install ftw! i don't EVER keep a factory install. way too many bugs.

 

As promised, I ran 3dmarks 11 and Vantage....


Vantage - P8511 3DMarks

3dmarks 11 - P1891 3DMarks

Both were complaining that I wasn't running latest driver but what could I do. lol

 

Here are some 3D Mark marks for BBK7:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...57761-asus-rog-g74-coming-68.html#post7664802

Have tried:

Crysis2: (Best looking game I have seen)
Ultra, 900p - Around 15-25 fps (when OC to 875)
Very High, 900p - 30-45 fps (Very playable)

NFS SHift 2 Unleashed:
Easily get 50fps, with high settings, 900p and AF off,
With AF on, get around 35-40 fps, (Most other settings medium to high)
Ultra all settings Maxed out: 30 fps, still playable

NFS HP (2010): (Smooth as silk)
All settings maxed: Never comes below 60fps (V sync on by default)

Portal 2:
Didn't check FPS on this one, but was very smooth on high settings.

Works very stable (63 C, Max over 45 mins of Crysis 2) at overclocks as high as 900/1450/1800.

All above numbers on latest NVIDIA beta driver.

On stock drivers i got 1950 odd, 3D Mark 11 points.

 

<strike>I wonder why my scores are so low....</strike>

Edit: I guess I'm going to try out beta driver..

 

well i just did a fresh install on my g74....COD black ops played fine again.... Then today i tried the game again ...runs ...but fps starts at 5fps goes to 60fps then drops to 15-25...levels off there..c.ant play...i only installed klite codec pack...so i unisntalled that...same issue!!!! ...and the only drive i can update it with is a beta??? BS!!! lol im about to return this thing

 

What's wrong with the 275.50 Beta? Using it, works nicely.

And why the heck do people even bother with codec packs? I find them most annoying. I just install MPC-HC and use it's internal drivers for all my vid needs. No hackery with codec packs, it just works.

 

I'd also like to see some benches too and some in game FPS. My job is allowing me to purchase a laptop up to 1400.00USD instead of me carrying my badboy(M18x) back and forth. I'm either going to go with a G74 from Bestbuy or a Toshiba Qosmio X775-Q7272.

Qosmio X775-Q7272 Laptop

 

Why not get a business class unit with the appropriate battery life and service protection, and be responsible.

 

Not my money. The Qosmio's battery gets up to 4.18 hours. I prefer the look of a gaming laptop. I'm more leaning towards the Toshiba because of reliability.

 

Re-ran those benchmarks after installing 275.50 beta driver..

vantage - P8611 3DMarks

11 - P2181 3DMarks

 

Thank you. +1 rep

 

does g74 have overclocking menu (processor and memory timings) in bios? just like alienware?

 

Just checked and I see nothing like that.

 

Thanks but wait.... What settings in bios can be played with for the processor? Still waiting for a month to get my g74 bb.. Slow delivery via shipping... lol

 

pretty much nothing.

 

Display

The 17.3 inch screen is a representative of the low cost standard typical for the market. The screen (Samsung LTN173KT01000) has a resolution of 1600x900 pixels (WXGA++; 16:9). The high resolution contributes to the overview; lower resolutions would be to coarse for a 17.3 incher.

The screen has its weakness in the very small contrast of 164:1. The glare-type screen pretties up the contrasts optically, though. Thus, a crisp color impression is visually implied. However, the screen isn't suitable for professional picture editors since the color spectrum doesn't even cover sRGB (t). Moreover, the screen isn't AR coated. We have placed the good consumer display of the Vaio beside it for comparison (picture 3).



195
cd/m² 213
cd/m² 218
cd/m²
200
cd/m² 225
cd/m² 216
cd/m²
204
cd/m² 221
cd/m² 220
cd/m²

Information
Gossen Mavo-Monitor
Maximum: 225 cd/m²
Average: 212.4 cd/m²
Brightness Distribution: 87 %
Center on Battery: 225 cd/m²
Black: 1.37 cd/m²
Contrast: 164:1
ICC File (X-Rite i1Display 2)
Distribution of brightness
The brightness assessment shows acceptable results. The luminosity has an average of 212 cd/m2. Our Gossen Mavo Monitor measures up to 225 cd/m2 selectively. The illumination is quite even with 87 percent. Is the brightness high enough to work in daylight despite the glare type screen?

The Samsung display corresponds to the majority of laptop screens (TN) in terms of viewing angles. The horizontal viewing angles are poor. We can only recognize unaffected colors up to a deviation of about 50 degrees from the front. Beyond that, an intense inverting develops. The colors already invert at 15 degrees when looking down or up onto the screen (vertically).

(If helpful, please note.)