Very weird power problem with G73JH

This morning i turned on my computer and i got a message that said my graphic drivers were not compatible with my graphic card or something like that, also windows was not in aero mode anymore. then i just restarted my computer and i've been having this weird power problem. I've never had any problems with this laptop until i overclocked my graphic card 3 weeks ago to 825/1100. Now the top of my screen flickers every now and then, black ops has very low fps when i play it...and now this stupid power problem that annoying the hell out of me.

Anybody know what this power problem could be and how to fix it? Also how can i put back the stock clocks, do i just change them back to stock in CCC or can i do a set to default? In any case what are the stock clocks because i had no problem before and wanna keep it like that.

Please check my video, it show the problem

Weird power problem with G73JH - YouTube

EDIT: i just restored CCC to default factory settings...lets see if this problem comes back, it didnt always appear right after i restarted my PC, so lets cross fingers and hope for the best.
For some weird reason, i have a feeling all my recent problem have been related to GPU OC

 

Pat, I agree, some cards seem to OC and DC better than others. I have noticed that when I boot up with a slight OC i have similar display issues, but if I use the same OC 750/1050 at 1.15 V after windows is loaded (about 90 seconds) I do not see the issue.

Did the power icon issue happen on battery and AC?

 

You might need to re-seat your gfx card, it seems like a case of the OC causing a expansion (under high heat) and contraction while not at work (loosens it self in the MXM socket)

While you are at it, you can carry out a re-pasting of the thermal paste.

Damaged from OCs that a card could not handle if the temps were not under control leads to other symptoms, with chunky pixels poping up randomly on windows desktop, you wouldn't even need to game to see it.

 

My CPU and GPU are freshly repasted with ICD, all issues have dissapeared when i did the "restore to factory" in CCC. I have seen many people with problem while OC their GPU, not because of heat, my GPU never went over 52 after repaste but because of some kind of vbios issues. In any case, i have no more problem, people should not OC their G73, laptops are not made to be OCd, and if you get away with it you are lucky. Most people have some kind of OC related problem sooner or later

 

Glad its fixed by the look of things Right from the start based on your descriptions it was clear your card wasn't really damaged in anyway.

ASUS has cut corners on components in their VRM circuitry and other areas like reducing the number of layers by expanding the PCB. So yeah one cant expect great overclocking or stability in long term overclocked usage. But you can make a difference if you are willing to mod the heatsink. Though clock gains are diminishing, its a matter of achieving some stable long term higher clocks.

 

Well, my screen flickering issues are back and those weird battery problems shown in the video above have came back this morning also....i don't know what to do anymore...CCC is on default settings

GUYS PLEEEEEEAAAAAAASE HELP!!!! This is annoying the out of me!!!

 

You might want to open up and post a picture of the adapter jack region and PCB.

Where you too hard on that region while re-pasting? Excessive force to pry the mobo out of the chassis?

 

Absolutely not...I have been very gentle with my computer. Also i have been repasted for more than 2 months and have had this problem for 2 days. Also i know its not the jack because my power supply and laptop never move, even if i try to move the plug around it doesnt change anything. While its doing this problem, the top of screen flickers a lot, they i might have 2-3 hours of everything is fine and then for 1h it starts again. ANyways, if it continues ot no one posts any troubleshooting, i will formatg my computer

 

Bad news, but we just sent in a laptop to have a GPU replaced because of this very problem.

9/10 times if the computer goes in to VGA mode for no reason then the card is trying to protect itself because something has happened or because it is on its way out.

It should be back tomorrow as a matter of fact so we see if Asus fixed the problem completely.

 

the vga mode thing happened once...i doubt my card is dying. i will formet next weekend and confirm if problem persists

 

Are you on the v93 Vbios? If you want you could give the stock BIOS a shot. I have it with me here:

 

Yes I am on v93, look at this thread also, maybe it could give you an idea. http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...ive-caused-bsod-start-lockup.html#post7842854
In any case, no problem in the last 24 hours. As i said previously, and would like to correct my previous post, GPU never went into VGA, it just disables AERO mode (transparent task bar and menu bars). I think something might be causeing this problem, but i doubt its hardware wise. I much prefer to format my PC before then flash back to previous Vbios. Will keep this thread updated every couple days to see whats happening with that problem.

 

Hi Pat!

My top of the screen flickers a lot as well I will call it similiar to having a line across the top of the screen about 1 inch down from the top and the screen appears to jolt. This happens when my clocks change and it does it every single time and has done it for as long as I can remember. Normally when I switch from my stock to gaming clocks or if I watch a movie an it selects 500/1000.

I was told this was fixed by using OD2 with the correct timings but nope its still an issue for me and others. Its annoying but does no harm from what I have seen. I have not seen the others issues that you are seeing before though could just be something wrong with your drivers maybe.

 

Yes i'm pretty sure you are right. My screen flickering though is the first 10-20 lines out of 900...its really less than a millimeter but its still anoying. In any case, my biggest problem was the one where my G73 would switch between battery and AC every half second...but this problem is not constant at all, sometimes it could do this for 1-2 hours non stop, and then, like now, no problem for over 24 hours. Hopefully, it is a driver problem because if like the other guy said, i damaged my GPU, (which i really doubt), it would still suck.

Bottom line, my G73 handles pretty much all games perfectly with beautiful graphics, i'm not overclocking my laptop anymore. Unlike PCs, these devices are not ment to be OCd, and if they are, hey eventuelly have these little annoying problem.

Thanks for all your help and suggestions guys, I'm thinking about waiting for Asus to make a G74 with the ATI 6970 or maybe even 6990 and then i will likely upgrade.

 

I would personally rule out the brick and plug before considering a damaged GPU or Jack (mobo) if its flicking on and off it might just be something simple like a faulty fuse in the plug.

You will be waiting a very long time, there is no chance of this happening for many reasons that Asus will not risk going high end and they are only using Nvidia cards in their G Series since they failed to implement ATI and the biggest reason of all being they have soldered the 560M onto their boards.

 

what do you mean by risk going high end??? I though asus wanted to compete with Dell and be more realistic price wise...i'd be very dissapointed if Asus keep putting mid-end card in their laptop like the 560...i would love to see the 580 at least. Can you please explain why do you say that?

 

Asus JH High End (Fail) - Every G Series model from then on has been a mid range card and also has been an Nvidia card and now it is soldered onto the board. Not really much clearer than that the route they are taking to be honest.

Asus will continue along this reasonably problem free and very profitable route, it also means we will be bottlenecking just in time for their next mid range model.

They maybe one day will consider a one off high end model.. I doubt it will happen though.

 

They should give the user the choice....not the wallet. They know most people will buy the mid-range model, they should make a performance model for the enthousiasts to compete with alienware

 

But they wouldn't compete because that is exactly it they would have to raise the price to compete with Alienware's price and it would not be profitable to do so because if consumers have the choice between Asus or Alienware models around the same price with the same hardware,... maybe its just me but I want my bloody CPU loading lights to be that of the eyes of an alien!

So people would pick Alienware over Asus. Alienware dont do mid range gaming models for the price that Asus can produce them at so Asus are holding that sector of the market at the moment and reaping the glory! For high end, heavy and stuffed full of fancy features you must pay the price to be rewarded.

 

how is the 560 in the G74 in that case? I,ve been thinking of selling my G73JH, would you recommend the G74 3DE model? I can see that the M18x uses that exact same card, would that mean that its worth the money?

 

The 560M is a good card but its no way worth upgrading your JH for as results have shown that our 5870M is on PAR with it or only slightly beaten.

Upgrading to a 920XM would also put you on par with the 2630QM. The m18x comes stock with the 560M but rarely will someone buy that deal, normally people will pay the extra to get the 6990M with it or a crossfire/SLI setup and that is where the cost will skyrocket.

 

The G73JH's 5870 is a very powerful card, and there only very few titles that actually need backing off on the eye candy to make frame rates 30 plus all the time.

Don't sell it if the power brick switching issues are solved from a clean install.

The G73JH has the best option of paring up with a 920XM pretty cheap on ebay now $244- 255ish. That will give the stock m17x R3 a run for its money.

Alienware is only good if you are going dual GPU, and that too when there are deals to be had on the outlet models. I would never buy brand new I see no point spending that much cash on brand new builds. Yeah I am cheap but cost-to-performance ratio in comparison to a 1500USD monster desktop matters. It does to my wallet altleast. Outlet certified refurbs look and smell brand new, infact they are except for some changes to chassis or other components that are reused.

I have bought a lot of brands, various laptops, even the m18x's over all build quality can't match the G73JH's. My fan pins on the m18x just popped out and the frail 4 wire connector broke off. Everything else is super strong in the m18x, but that one problem alone is a serious problem in build quality. Its the fans after all. Very important.

No such issues on the G73JH, its built to last. Its the real mainstream high end gamer machine. Yeah it needs some work with BIOS, vBIOS, repasting, but usually after all that its great.

I have bought the refurb G73JHs from newegg for like 4 people I know, all of them very happy. I had just one issue with my own very first model, it died after a normal restart on the very first day. Bios corruption. But after that one bad experience its all smooth sailing so far.

Did I sound like an ASUS sales guy?

 

Ya actually that 920xm looks delicious! How are the reliability with that CPU, any problem? Any overheating issues??? Will i have any bad surprises just like i did with the OC of GPU?

Also i see on ebay they are mostly all engineering samples...what does that mean?

 

QS means qualification samples, final samples sent by Intel to mobo vendors and other ODMs. They are exactly like the retail versions just that they have microcode to show up that they are ES/QS versions.

No issues at all. Just enjoy the extra performance from overclocking those babies

 

Are there any special need to install or is it just a simple swap? I heared we might have to flash bios to have the CPU reconized by the computer?

 

As of 209/211 the XM CPUs are supported.

Its a simple swap. Once you do that your will see new features unlocked in the BIOS from where you can set the TDC/TDP settings for BIOS level overclocking.

 

Best way to overclock them is to use Throttlestop within windows the BIOS is funky and TS is much more customisable.

@Pat if u are thinking of buying one most of the questions I asked are in this thread. I spent about a month of asking questions before buying one

 

awesome! so any 920xm from ebay is good? what about the 940?

 

just saw your post, thx bud ill take a careful look at it tomorrow

i see you have abour 20 pages so let me ask you this here:

im not a heavy gamer, although i am a heavy addict to having the most powerful technology i can put my hands on

was swapping you 720 for a 920

1- worth it
2- easy (i know how to take my g73jh apart no problem)
3- stable and problem free
4- big difference in heat on a normal usage level

thanks many!

 

1-Yep
2-Yep ( but you need to research and understand how they work all explained in my overclocking post in my sig. ~Throttlestop is the key.
3-Yep unless you intend to run all 4 cores at 3.8ghz
4- 4 cores running at 1.6ghz vs 4 cores running at 3.2ghz. You will see an increase in heat of course and when you put load on clocks this high but general use and gaming I use 3.2-3.8ghz on all 4 cores and I dont see above 85oC, between 2-3ghz you should see only a slight difference under normal use to the 720QM.

As mentioned the QS model is the way to go!

 

Over 48 hours and no AC/Battery problem or any screen flickering!

 

What did you do different?

 

nothing.....

 

well, today at 2am eastern time, the problem came back for about 2 minutes. How can i really know if my gpu is damaged? is there a way to stress it and see if thats the problem?

 

I don't think your GPU has a problem, I think your DC jack has! The same thing recently happened to me - I stressed the card (some bitcoin mining overnight) and then in the morning when I moved the laptop it switched to battery mode, back to AC etc... it was the power socket - needed a little push down to work. I packed the laptop and got to work, where it worked perfectly, then back home - also worked perfectly (even when placed on my lap, so the cable got in all weird angles). Then on weekend I played Deus Ex: Human Revolution - and after about 3 hours of playing, the same thing as before happened - it just needed a little "push" but it got worse quickly, in the end I had to "hang" the power brick on the cable to get a connection.
I realized something is seriously bad and started backing up data (or rather making sure my backup is complete) - in the process it stopped working altogether and I had to push REALLY HARD to get the power - and I managed to backup everything just in time.

I brought it to the store, though it is under warranty they were able to look inside to see if it's just the plug or something worse - the plug was burnt and there were burn marks on the motherboard as well, so we sent it to RMA.

The problem only manifested after I stressed the laptop really really hard (and I had GPU overclocked slightly, memory downclocked on the other hand) - it was a cold solder connection.

I forgot to mention, that when playing with the plug "so-so working" it did the weird thing in the end that it would stay on "AC" but slow down and do artefacts - adjusting the cable worked until it stopped working altogether. The cold connection was just not able to transfer the amps needed to run this beast, heated up and melted.

 

At stock clocks and with good repasting you should be able to do 10 loops of 3DMark 11 easy. If it crashes then the GPU could be the culprit. I use the word "could be" because that alone cant guarantee its the card, but the chances will increase that it is the GPU.

Also given your ac power switching issue can come back unpredictably, it might skew the results by giving the card time to cool in between.

Worth a shot.

 

your problem seems to be cause by expanding metal due to hotter gpu, mine does this randomly, could be fine for 72 hours and then boom, like tonight, for 2-3 hours straight, no matter if i let the laptop cool down, idle or get hot, doesnt make a difference. my gpu is at 51 right now, has been for a couple of hours

will try that over the weekend thanks

 

OMG!!! Today its going crazy...no way of stopping it, the damn power icons!!! Is there a way to disabled them???

 

You can remove the ATK drivers but then you wont see any of the on screen display notifications.

 

Ok guys i,ve got an update on the situation. I've tried to isolate the variables and maybe a more computer tech savy person will be able to pinpoint the culprit of my problem

So for the past 2 days, this ac/battery problem has been going on almost non stop. I ran about 1 hour of furmark at maxed settings to get an average of 15 fps (usually) After an hour, the GPU has not crashed or has not done anything unusual. Although i wanst able to fully complete furmark because of that stupid ac/battery power problem, i was able to get a printscreen of the first half hour. During the test, the fps went from 1 to 16 fps depending if the computer was recognizing it was on AC power, when it deteted it was on battery, the frame rate dropped to amost 0 fps per second. There were some moment in the test where for 1 minute or 2, the computer was really on AC, in that case, the GPU acted like it should and gave me a stable 15fps, the temps also increased to about 75. When i had that AC/battery problem during the test, the temps were going down to about 60. Here is the screen:

The green squares show how my GPU reacted when laptop was in AC mode and the AC/power problem stopped for a min or 2. Interesting fact, at the end of the 1h run, my battery was at 13% remaining. I'm not 100% sure, but i think this is a clear signal that the PSU might have a major part in my problem, i also think this proves my GPU is not damaged and runs like it should.

Anybody has a credible 2nd opinion on this?

 

aNYBODY CAN HELP?

 

Dang why didn't i think of this, ofcourse, If your PSU is flaking out you definitely will get such messages.

If you have access to a multimeter you can probe the voltage coming out of the jack on the adapter, its going to be a bit of a wait to watch for it. The moment is happens on your laptop, remove it out and probe with a multimeter to check what the voltage is on that end.

If its the PSU, the voltage should fluctuate by a lot, dropping to low voltages or maybe even zero before going back upto 19.3~19.8 volts.

 

yup, i think all signs are pointing to that, other interesting discovery, when my PSU is plugged in a power bar with about 5 other electronics, the problem is almost constant. when pluged in a power outlet by itself, it does it once every hour or more but not like in my video, it goes in battery mode then back in AC only once and then the power is stable for another few minutes/hours

 

Just to check, your noticing this regardless of what outlet you used, right? I mean changing outlets to a totally different one didn't seem to reduce the problem, yes?

 

havent checked any other outlet then those in my room...

EDIT: as of today, even when plugged into an outlet by itself, the problem can last about 30 seconds and then be silent for a few more minutes.

 

Is it possible for you to have a look with another outlet? Though I am strongly expecting the problem to persist.

 

what i will do instead is monitor the AC Adapter with a voltmeter, i think this will completely isolate the problem

 

Set your voltmeter to measure "V' depending on your brand and model of voltmeter, it should show a display of 'V' or 'Volts'.

Then connect the black prob of the multimeter to the outer rim of the adapter's jack while touching the inner rod with the red probe (or whatever colored probe you have)


In case you have connected them in the reverse order you will see a negative voltage. No problem, just switch the probes around and you get the correct positive read out.

 

Alright i went and did some testing with my voltmeter. Here are the results:

As soon as the problem appeared i starting taking readings: The voltage was always stable at 19.26V. But the amps were flickering between 0.045 and 0.046. At the time the problem was not active, the amperage was stable at 0.045ma. Not sure if 1mA is enough to cause this problem though...what do you guys think?

 

The variance is too small and the adapter is performing according to specs. Amps will be close to 5-6 only under load when the laptop draws it. So the readings you are seeing there are correct close to zero.

Unfortunately the problem now is with the power jack board on the G73JH or somewhere on the board. Only these two places.