New owner of the G73-JH laptop, impressions and questions

First of all a little background. I have been looking to get back into pc gaming for a while now and it was a toss up between the g73 and m17x from alienware. I chose the asus mainly because its a few hundred dollars less than the alienware, and I got a good deal financing the laptop through best buy. Yes, I have the bestbuy version of the g73. it has 6 gigs of ram, no blueray, and a 1600x900 screen. It has the 740 i7 processor.

My first impression of this laptop was just how huge it is in person. Definetly not something your going to take with you to work. I know personally Id get fed up lugging this thing around. Hence why they call these laptops desktop replacements right?

Anyway, mine came with a little bloatware which I removed and then I got to installing crysis and starcraft 2 and the performance of this lappy is incredible.
I am playing crysis on high settings with 2x aa and I get excellent framerates, and starcraft 2 runs like butter at high settings as well.

I wanted to know from other owners if theres anything I should do as far as drivers go or a bios update. Ive heard people having some problems with this laptop and a bios update seems to fix whatevers wrong. Does that sound right?

Ok enough rambling, Im on very little sleep, jumping back and forth between crysis and starcraft 2 here at 4:00am. I cant get enough.

 

Lol welcome to the republic of gamers

Anyways im assuming as youve just gotten the laptop that your on stock (everything) drivers right?

Well I believe ASUS started shipping them with the 211 BIOS so your good there, but if you want to update your video drivers to the latest youll likely need to update the vBIOS first to solve the GSOD issue (not that everyone gets it, I was one of those people) it can be found/read-about in a couple of the sticked threads

Other then that I think your good to go, enjoy your new machine!

 

I noticed youve overclocked your 5870, what program do you use for that? I remember back in the day I used atitool, but I think the most resent version of that is from 2006 heh.

 

My advice since you just got your lappy...(I too own the BST7 from BB) is too break her in for a few weeks and just enjoy your laptop.I would only start messing with over clocking if you really need it... .....but you shouldn't for quite a while.But if you like doing this sort of thing then go for it...

 

Go to the gym. If the G73jh is too big or heavy, you're too weak. I take my G73jh to class and work everyday. And I know I'm not the only one, I've seen two in the engineering department, everyday. And I know Vicious on forums, one of the few G73 owners that I don't think is a moron, bring his to work also. And we both have been doing this for about a year with no issues.

The whole point is to have something to replace desktop power on the go. Or else it would be just stupid, buy a desktop instead...

 

i havent done the vbios update yet, but my bios version is 211, thats the most recent right? and im going to check my catalyst drivers right now

 

Seems every new person manages to miss this, the only stickied topic in this forum.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...blems-useful-threads-read-before-posting.html
ALLurGroceries has done an amazing job keeping the thread up to date. It's a shame so many choose to ignore it.

 

Thats all good and well but Im 6'1 and no weakling, but I wouldnt lug this thing to class with me on a daily basis. If Im going to be taking the laptop back and forth from work or school I would personally get a ultraportable, something like the m11x. Just makes life easier. Plus it looks silly dragging around a 17.3 inch laptop and setting it up in class lol.

But to each his own right

lol, I was reading that thread last night but thanks for the sarcasm

i just installed the lastest catalyst drivers, and its telling me catalyst control center host application has stopped working. should I uninstall these drivers and try something else?

 

Have you done the latest Vbios update yet?...if not you might get BSOD with any but stock drivers....and make sure you uninstall your old drivers from control panel too avoid any problems....reboot and install latest from ATI....make sure to have latest Vbios first...

 

where can i download the stock drivers, this is a pain in the friggin . I had everything runnin fine and i had to futz with it.

 

The stock drivers will be on the blue driver CD that came with the notebook when you bought it.

 

mine didnt come with that disk..." G73JH Notebook ATI Graphics Driver 8.683.0.0 "

can anybody tell me if thats the right stock driver?

 

http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=8je5Ot4HBnKOdT81

Stock driver is located under the "download" tab under "VGA".

 

thanks, i feel like a dumb

ok, i got the stock drivers back up and running, now my only problem is that when I run crysis it runs in a window instead of full screen, anyone know how i can fix this ? starcraft2 doesnt have this problem

thanks

 

try pressing RIGHT ALT and ENTER

 

hey thanks, that worked

 

...that's what we all are here for my friend...enjoy the new lappy...I love mine also...

 

Very good advice. Most of my friends have never updated beyond stock and are fine using it everyday. I stopped tweaking at bios 2.09 and the new vbios.

Cheers,

 

thx....and yea I have never needed to do any type of overclocking myself....but this is my first gaming laptop...but if you know what your doing then great....if your average on this issue I would just game and enjoy it for as long as ya can....then years down the road if you need to OC then go for it... ...this laptop is a beast without OCing I think...

 

did any of you buy your lappy at bestbuy, because mine didnt come with a win7 cd, in case i need to reformat in the future

 

yes I did...and no it doesn't come with a cd...but when I did a fresh install...there is a partition on the harddrive...and I rebooted and pressed f8 I believe and it reinstalled win 7 fresh...also when you turn your lappy on for the first time you should of made your backup disks when it asked...

 

Surprised no one mentioned the alternative to ATI Overdrive

Anyways as others have pointed out, you dont really need to overclock, those clocks I have there are more for show lol, I never use them (but they are stable so I could if I wanted to)

When I need/want to OC, I use the AMD GPU Clock Tool

 

crappyalloy what program did you use to OC your 5870?

edit: nevermind I missed it in your post the first time

 

Is it normal for GPU-Z not to show fan speeds? my temps seem okay though, about 50c at idle and something like 70c under load

 

Yes GPU-Z does not show correct fan speeds, only two programs I know do, Everest (Ok not so sure about that one lol but thats what ive read), and the latest version of HwInfo32

And your temps seem to be a little better then average actually