This thread is for people who are disappointed with the Asus G73

This is my second Asus G73-A1.

I returned my first one due to somewhat loud fan when just surfing the net. I had it for about 1 week.

Now my second one is still audible at the same level.
I bought this notebook because I read a lot of reviews saying that it is a really quiet laptop.

I guess I have sensitive hearing.

Having a laptop in front of me and still hearing the fan as I walk 7 feet away is a little bothersome for me.

I guess I will have to use the money to build a more quiet computer.


What are the reasons that you don't like your Asus G73?

 

Try downclocking the GPU.

 

Thanks for the suggestion.

Also, is there anyway that I can adjust the fans speed? The fan that I hear the most and is annoyed the most is the fan on the right hand side as I face the monitor.

 

There's something wrong with your laptop. Mine is barely audible.

 

I am one who is very contented with the G73. I read about heat issues, screen issues, keyboard issues, etc2 but I mine has been perfect after I exchanged my first one that has GSOD.

 

Maybe that's an indication your music isn't loud enough.

Seriously, the G73 is my first laptop and from what I've read, compared to other laptops, the fans in the G73 are considerably quieter. Could it be you don't have a point of reference? I can tell you that the fans in my desktop, although sitting further away, are much louder than the fans in my G73.

You might want to put aside a little of the money for a long extension cord if you want it to be somewhat portable.

 

First one here!

Quiet, 1200 bucks, works great, LG screen. Perfect!

Great performance and a great laptop!

 

My keyboard won't light up. And I've got the GSOD problem like many others. So yeah, I'm pretty damn disappointed. I'm still not sure if the GSOD is truly hardware or if I should wait and hope for a fix.

When it plays the games, for however long it lasts, it plays beautifully. If those 2 little problems were solved, I honestly couldn't think of a better laptop!

 

Updated to BIOS 206 and now my illuminated keyboard wont light up. That's the only complaint I have with this machine.

 

It really depends on the unit itself. I'm on my 3rd G73JH. The first 2 had sooo many problems but this one is decent. When I updated my GPU driver to 10.4 my right side fan got waaaay louder but recently it has gone back to almost silent at idle. It's usually hit or miss with these G73's

 

I'm on my second one as well and this one still GSOD's (10.3/10.4/10.6) without the Clevo vbios. I'm still thinking if I should go for a 3rd one, I'll give it a few more days. There's also the FN+ESC=freeze that still needs to be addressed.

 

I don't understand why people keep doing that? Sorry to say, I guess this is yet another warning to others.

 

I don't think anything is wrong with his g73. You are going to hear fan noise in a silent room just browsing the web.

 

^ exactly, don't buy a high performance gaming laptop and expect it to be dead silent... the G73 is a beast and I think the idle fan noise is reasonably low for the kind of hardware in this thing... sorry to anyone who's had a bad experience with theirs but 3 months into my G73 and I can only say good things about it, 100s of hours of Gaming, Movies, and Music without a hiccup

 

The heat has to go somewhere, almost any laptop will have a fan constantly running at some speed.

Where are you using it? Is it on a table or on bed/sofa etc. If the bottom vent is being blocked, it'll get a lot hotter no matter what you are doing and turn up the fans trying to prevent it from overheating. This thing is MUCH quieter than my g71 was, especially when playing games.

 

Mine is so quiet, a lot of times I worry that maybe the fans aren't running. So then I'm rushing around trying to check temps, but always find them normal.

Quiet and cool...... can't beat that.

I believe it is possible that there may have been a bad batch of units somewhere along the line.

But more importantly, I believe a lot of people having problems are people who have messed with their unit (eg BIOS, beta drivers, etc) and it is these "attempted" upgrades that have led to their problems.

In my case, I am running everything stock, except for the Creative software, which I uninstalled, and I can assure everyone who reads this, that my ASUS G73JH-RBBX05 (yes, from BestBuy), is running just fantastic. When I can find a bracket, I will install a second 500GB HDD, and I'm pretty sure I wont have to do anything else to it for a long while.

Before anyone brings out their flame thrower, may I state that: This is just a personal opinion, to which we all are entitled.

 

Makes me wonder if his GPU isnt downclocking at idle.

Id bet if it did, then the fans would quiet down.

 

Mine's really quiet too, aside from the occasional static noise from God knows where. Maybe hardware or software....still unknown.

 

I was a little dissapointed with the fan of the Ati being audible even at idle too. But then I found out by reading these forums that people who claim it's silent are simply having a hearing problem. I also thought at first mine was having a problem untill I realised the problem wasn't the laptop.

I can hear the harddisks and the fan clearly. Some people say they can't even hear the laptop untill they come close. I should have realised earlier they can't even hear the harddisks at a normal distance. Since the harddisks are the same for everyone it just means that some people just clearly hear more.

Fact is that the fan runs for everyone and that it's audible. Those that claim it's silent when idle have a hearing problem.

We will see if Ati is able to fix it's mistake with regard to the memory not down clocking. With 100 MHz more of the core and about 200 MHz on the memory the battery will run 20 minutes longer and the fan can run more slowly.

Other than that I'm quite happy with my G73JH. I don't seem to have any problems yet and if you want an Alienware resembling this laptop with 1 GPU you pay 1000 euro more.

 

Asus support is my main complaint. The G73 is a "nice" system when working.

 

While I agree with you on most fronts, the HDD noise thing even if exact same model, etc can actually have lower noises. I've had this problem a lot. I think for the most part, most HDDs seem to be audiable. I know I can generally hear it.

My x3 came with hitachi's and were very audible to me, while my friend had the seagate 320s and his was pretty much dead silent(yes, I heard how quiet they were myself). Granted, in this case they were different brand. But I've had cases where same brand, same model yet one was louder than the other. So sometimes I feel some ppl can be telling the truth on that front.

As for the fan thing, I know I can certainly hear mine. But it still comes down to how quiet it is compared to say, a Clevo, or I'm sure even AW might idle louder(total assumption). Honestly I believe too that if ATI could have gotten Powerplay to work properly on the 5870m the fan could even be turned off.

I was looking at images of my NV7901u that came with a 5650m, it downclocked to 100/150mhz, and idled around 38c in 75f room(this was sharing one fan with a i5 430 too). Besides the CPU fan problem I had with it. It was dead silent on idle, so while I'm sure the 5870m wouldnt need to be clocked down that low. It shows that if it would be clocked down more, the idle would drop a lot and thus fan could run less/quieter.

 

Yeah, I think I may have beenspoiled because I have a Dell XPS M1710 gamer notebook with 7950GTX for reference and it's silent at idle. This is because both fans don't turn and still keep the temps stable and the harddisk is hardly audible too.

So yes, it's about what you compare it to but the G73JH isn't silent when idle.

 

I think it's just going to vary because some people live in colder areas, so the fan might be running at different speeds depending on room temperature. People who are expecting silence at idle are really unrealistic. The only thing that will come close to silence is a watercooled desktop, but even then you'll still hear the fans.

In any case I would suggest reapplying thermal paste, blow some compressed air through the vents if you haven't done it a while to clear out some of the dust bunnies that might trap hot air inside the case, and see if you see any difference. Only reapply thermal paste if you feel comfortable doing so. I hear it can be a pain in the butt to do it on the g73 however.

 

I agree and to expand further on what Flaring Afro mentioned earlier, how quiet depends on various factors. Such factors as is it sitting on a soft or hard surface, room acoustics, OEM parts, pitch, expectations, hearing, missing second hard drive cage and so on.

As an example, I remember a number of years back a friend was not happy with his new Western Digital drive he had just purchased, said it was loud. I said, no wonder it's loud, you have the drive sitting lose on top of a CD Cake Box and the shape of the plastic is acting like a megaphone.

I agree with this, too. Compared to other laptops, the G73 at idle is quiet. Unless of course, you place it on a Cake Box.

 

Im quite dissapointed by the G73.

- The fan is noisy
- The i7 doesnt seem as a massive improvement over the dual cores.
- Did I mention the fan is noisy?

 

I'm mainly disappointed by GSOD/PSOD problem, because I do not know whether It'll be fixed after RMA (I mean GSOD)...

 

1) The noisy fan issue can be caused by poor thermal grease / contact on something that is hot (cpu/gpu), or from a failing fan, or a poorly seated fan.

2) You need to use applications that are multicore aware to take advantage of the i7. For example, I recoded a video to dvd using ConvertXtoDVD 4, and in the settings, it defaults to only using 2 cores in MP setups. I changed it to "8", and was getting 200fps on the conversion.

 

It is a really quiet GAMING laptop, not a really quiet laptop.

It's like having a quiet porche.

It won't be a huge improvement in dual core programs. In fact, due to low clock speed per core, it might be worse. But in quad-core programs, it will.

 

A macbook or an imac will be the quietest computers you'll ever buy.
I cannot hear them in a quite room even sitting right in front. My ears need to be touching the back of a macbook to hear it and the noise is the CPU whine not the fan.

You could build a completely passively cooled PC desktop with Passive PSU, GFX and a decent tower cooler for the CPU without a fan. that would be a good option too.

Or put your G73 in a seperate room, run the HDMI cable to a monitor in your room and use wireless keyboard and mice

 

Or try using the power saving modes in Power4Gear Hybrid. Things get mighty quiet in "Quiet Office" mode. Tho my unit will only softly purr in High Performance mode. Basically I only hear it when it's under load.

 

Wow. First of all, totally not true. Second, even if they are generally quiet, they don't have the power the g73 does. Third, you can't use them on anything that is heat sensitive, macbooks get extremely hot.

You want a quiet computer? Don't get anything that is "powerful", because powerful = heat = fans = noise.

Also, your choice of computer product is at odds with your sig.

 

I can understand that having a gaming laptop sound like a jet engine would be annoying, but the G73JH doesn't even come close. If you're gaming in bed, and not keeping the person sleeping next to you awake, you're not doing it right.

 

I'm currently sitting in the dark, with the G73 almost done re-encoding a 727mb Xfire video.

Keyboard backlight on, cores unparked, and the G73 is blazing the encode. I turned off my airconditioning and unplugged my earphones and it is ABSOLUTELY SILENT.

GPU temp is at 63C and the CPU is at 50C while encoding WITHOUT an airconditioner on.

Absolutely delighted with my purchase.

Only thing that is bothers me is that I ordered via Amazon/TigerDirect and the computer was shipped to me in a huge bloody box. The entire red ROG box inside another box which brought the volumetric weight to 33lbs (15.4kg).

Ended up paying $259 for shipping. :O Now that I've come across this forum, I can only WISH that I had placed my order with powernotebooks, gentech ( Ken Lee had rave reviews), or had the option of upgrading parts with xoticpc.

Only saving grace is that everything with the laptop works brilliantly and outshines every one of my peers.

 

I have only one miniscule issue, when I put my computer to sleep, all 3 temps in AMD clock tool show around 55 degrees Celsius (fans barely audible). When I wake it up , (10-20 minutes) temps drop to the high 40 degree range but the GPU fan comes on full blast and will not slow down until a reboot. I have not changed any stock drivers, but I have removed power4gear, and then put it back. I have used standard windows power schemes and the power4gear schemes but the problem persists. My workaround is to not use sleep; hibernation does not cause the issue. I know Mark had this issue, and a MB replacement solved it, but I can't see RMA ing for something so trivial.
Not to be a wise a$$ but does everyone know spell check is available B4 posting?

 

Well mine overheated i guess when juice was slightly spilled on it and i cleaned it as quick as i could and then it began with overheating of 70C at idling! I am about RMA in a little bit a hour or so when the fedex opens, well my friend was trying to put thermal paste on both the cpu and gpu which he couldn't get to the gpu anyway it just wouldn't turn on and it fried, so putting thermal paste on just too improve cooling is worse for this machine sad so sad. Also i did overclock the card mostly at the highest 815/1100 and well played most games at 1080P or 1600x900. Not the greatest machine to overclock i guess.

 

This may be true if you are working in excel or word, however, if you install bootcamp and play games under windows the Macbook Pro is the loudest laptop you'll ever hear. The fans cranks up to over 6000rpm and stay there the entire gaming session. This is one of the reasons I bought the G73. The MBP just wasn't an effective gaming platform. It did ok as a compromise for a work/play hybrid while traveling but in no way is it silent while playing. My G73 has some fan noise while playing but nothing like the wind tunnel on the MBP.

Cheers,