Asus N550JV - user review and owners lounge

Every once in a while my audio will start to lag out/stutter and the screen will stutter for a few seconds. It has only frozen after this once, but this audio/visual stutter is happening more and more frequently. Usually it is when i playing LoL and have spotify/youtbe playing music in the background. Any ideas? I am on latest bios but it happened before I updated to it.

 

Stress test your cpu and gpu to try and fish out what might be causing it.

 

Another noob question and somewhat a dilemma here. In buying cooling pads what matter the most, the size or rpm? I'm somewhat torn between which cooling pad to get from these two: Cooler Master Storm SF-19 or a Cooler Master NotePal U2. I game quite a lot and technically this is my desktop so i rarely bring this from place to place. Oh and are dust filters like Dustx really working on these things? Thanks

 

The Cooler Master Storm SF-19 shall be really loud on high performance which you most likely will use when gaming etc. but shall be cooling 5-10°C as far as I read.
The Notepal U2/U3 have smaller fans but you can place them where you want and they are told be really silent.
I for myself have decided to go with a Notepal U3 but haven't ordered it yet as I haven't removed my desktop PC.

Higher sized fans with 140mm for example need less rpm for the same transport of air compared to a 80mm one and therefore stay quiet but one big fan isn't really pointable to the heat zones/fan outlets like the small ones so it's a bit tricky I guess.

 

Anybody updated to Win 8.1?

 

hi guys, just a precaution, do a security copy if something is wrong with 8.1 we can turn back to windows 8..

 

hi guys im going to be getting this laptop tomorrow and was just wondering whether or not it would be ok to leave it plugged in to the mains at all times as i am going to be using it as a desktop replacement. Would this be doing any harm to the battery ? Thanks

 

ah yes, everything seems fine except for bluetooth.

 

I use mine mostly plugged in too. It would be nice to be able to restrict battery charging somehow, but Asus doesn't provide this option. Current batteries wear out the most while fully charged. (charge/discharge cycles do that too of course)

However, the laptop does have a feature to prevent battery aging: it only charges the battery after it has dropped under 95% charge. This relieves the battery from the stress of charging back on every single plugin and also keeps the charge under 100% most of the time, which translates in less wear over time.

Bottom line is you should be fine even if you keep your unit plugged in 100% of the time.

 

No one who can help? Would be awesome if someone could let me know what HDD caddy would drop right into the DVD tray. Thanks!
Bob

 

From how I see it, keeping the battery 95-100% is worse if you intend to just treat the battery like it's in storage (whereas 35-40% is optimal for Li-ion). It is however, a lot less wear than if you were to drain your battery on a daily basis and then charging up again because cycling the battery is really where most of the capacity loss quickly piles up. I've had my Asus N53SV for 2 years before getting this N550JV and the original battery still performs the same 4:30 - 5:00 hours that it used to, and it's usually always settled at 100% charge most of the time with occasional battery usage during school.
(basically battery life has not noticeable depreciated)

 

Bluetooth isn't working on 8.1? I use a bluetooth mouse...should I hold off on the update then?

 

Thanks for the info

 

Hi Bob, This was actually discussed a few pages back i think. So just look at a few back there was a link to a suitable caddy as well

 

It also depends on the quality of lithium cells used by Asus. If the cells are not charged to high voltage even when they are reported to be 100% charged, then the battery inside the N550JV should have a good life span anyway. Since the battery is considered not to be "user replaceable", I tend to believe this is the case.

For whoever is interested in learning more about how lithium batteries behave in consumer electronics, read this. It's short and enlightening.

 

I did it successfully, with a bay I bought on ebay. I'll post the link! But it fit perfectly, even the old plastic part from the DVD-ROM popped right onto the bay. All the other OEM stuff fit perfectly fine (screws, brackets etc)

this should be it, but you might wanna double check with the seller to be 100% sure

http://www.ebay.com/itm/271106296773

 

Okay after upgrading to Windows 8.1, my Atheros Bluetooth driver had some problem, as I couldn't turn it off from PC Settings lol. But I then tried to uninstall the driver ( and delete driver data - this is important), after that install the driver again, which can be downloaded from the ASUS Support site. Now Bluetooth works perfectly.

But there is another problem. this freak thing appears for no reason:


I did some research on the Internet, and seemingly I need to re-enable SecureBoot in the UEFI. But there is no such option lol. Anyone has any idea how to fix this?

 

Load BIOS and go to Security and there move into the Secure Boot Menu, there should be the option to enable/disable SecureBoot.

 

The problem is there is no Secure Boot option in the BIOS lol.

 

Is there a way to force your fan to run at whatever % you want for this laptop, since speedfan doesn't work on it?

 

There must be.
If you have the N550JV and you can flash the BIOS files from the N550JV download page why shouldn't there be this point?
Even if you enable "Launch CSM" and disable "Fast Boot" there is the point "Secure Boot menu" under the tab "Security".

Simple: No.
Not so simple: There is another program that hasn't yet support for it, maybe they're working on it, maybe not. I guess SpeedFan simply hasn't got support for Series 8 mainboards so it doesn't work but I don't know exactly where the problem is.

 

I mean, it's pretty irritating if the throttle kicks in just because them fans don't work hard enough even when they are capable of doing so. Do both fans ever go up to 100% under very heavy load? Or, rather, has anyone ever successfully measure this laptop's maximum RPM in action?

Also, could you tell me what's the name of that speedfan-alternative program? I will keep my eyes on it in case the developer decides to provide support for this laptop's mb.

 

My thoughts. I don't know why Asus isn't capable of using what they built in.
The other program is: NotebookFanControl
It's a german board where I'm active for several years now and I'm daily checking everything there I care about so I'd tell you people anyway.
Kallogan has taken a look there, too.

 

Thank you. I'll take a look at it when I get back home.

 

That is why i'm so frustrated. I even reflashed 207 but that option is still no where to be found. Oh yeah previously Asus replaced my motherboard, so is that the reason hmm.

 

Last night I upgraded to Win 8.1

First attempt was unsuccessful due to a driver problem (blue screen follow by automatic revert to Win 8). The most probable cause should have been the external soundcard which i forgot plugged in through the update process, but since I didn't have the patience to look through logs and see which driver caused the issue I decided to play as safe as possible and remove/update as many drivers as possible.So I updated both the Nvidia driver and Intel driver to versions compatible with Win 8.1 (the Intel driver is a beta actually). I have also removed the Atheros Wifi and Bluetooth drivers and installed the ones which came through Windows Update.

The second attempt went along with no problems, everything works and I have no missing or incompatible drivers.

The most unexpected fact about this update for me is it may have significantly shrank the OS disk footprint. Even with the old windows files, install logs and dump files still on disk (total over 5GB), I now have more free space than before the update started , and I do keep my system tidy.

 

After updating to 8.1, my touchpad has been very very laggy for multitouch gestures. Did anyone else experience this?

 

nope touch pad is fine for me. have u tried reinstalling the driver?

 

Has anyone tried Synaptics touchpad driver instead of the asus one? Since the latter is a bit laggy I was thinking about trying the first...

@007math, try this and let me now: http://drivers.synaptics.com/Synapt...7-32_XP64_Vista64_Win7-64_Signed_Acme_Inc.zip
Just remember to uninstall asus driver first!

 

Hmm, Thanks for the info. I'm just unsure if whether the Notepal U3 will be able to get reduce temps as I've read that they weren't able to do any help at all. Thanks for the info again

 

So before I upgrade to 8.1, I need to install all the 8.1 drivers first?

 

I can tell you: No.
I guess you should but yesterday I installed a clean Windows 8 on my new SSD, installed all updates and all the drivers of the N550JV support site except graphics drivers because I always download them directly from Nvidia and Intel, then updated to Windows 8.1 and don't have any problems, even Bluetooth works without problems.
On the other hand: It's just one Wifi and one Bluetooth driver for now so I'd say update them so you won't get any problems.

If you are not in a hurry then wait until I get my U3, I will order it the next days and then I can see how much it helps

 

That would be great! I'd love to know the results

 

No, that should not be necessary.

In my case however, after a failed upgrade, I went the safer route to update drivers and/or use as many drivers from Microsoft Update as possible, in order to minimize issues on second attempt.

Don't forget that while our N550JV machines are similar, they can be quite different from a software/driver perspective. For example, I'm using two rather old USB external soundcards with this machine, both of which barely got driver updates for Windows 7 x64. One of the drivers is actually a beta, it never made it to final release. Both of them still work after the update.

 

Okay, so my laggy touchpad somehow fixed itself. However, has anyone noticed a negative impact on battery life with 8.1?

 

I'm considering purchasing the N550JV. However, I've read its display is a panel infamous for orange-looking reds (a.k.a. orangegate). That would be a serious dealbreaker for me. I haven't been able to find any mention of it in this thread, so I'm guessing it's fixed. Just to be sure though, could someone confirm that?

Also, I'm curious whether the touchscreen exhibits any sparkle or grain at all. Again, I'm guessing not. But the previous notebook (also touchscreen) that I tried, did - despite receiving praise for its display all over.

 

I have never experienced such color deformation M_Bos ...
So far my matt Full HD Panel ( LGD0323 ) is almost perfect ( except for little backlight bleeding in uppor right corner )

Also, can somebody give me a hint why my ice storm score is so low ?



it should be around 78k I think...

 

There is no orange problem for this notebook.
If there would be someone would have noticed and complained and I can't find anything like that and haven't read about it here(reading and writing here everyday since page 39 ).
The display is really one of the nicest I have seen so far, crisp and really nice colors.

For the touchscreen part I can't answer you, mine is matte.

Have you disabled throttling? I don't know if this one is using the CPU more than the other 2 tests but if so and the notebooks warms up it will throttle and ruin your score.

I had around 72k but that was with the pre-installed driver("graphics driver wasn't accepted" message).
Though I can't remember if I already knew about throttling at that point...hm.
Maybe try again and see if it's the same?

 

Has anyone tried overclocking the gpu on this. I just got my laptop and i am playing Bioshock Infinite on the high settings preset at around 30fps, minimum of about 27 and maximum of around 33/34 on 1080p resolution. Is there anyway to make this higher by overclocking? how would one go about doing this? thanks

 

By the way, Asus has released new Wireless Drivers & Bluetooth Drivers for Windows 8.1 in their downloads.

 

I am running at +100 on core, + 200 on memory, resulting in 1250 core clock and 1100 memory clock.
I dunno about frame rates in games, but 3dmark11 score jumped from 2700 to 3050.

When i run benchmark again today, i got the "right" results ... dunno why, first i run bench with no overlock, then with overlocking

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/1432061

 

Hi all, I've spent several days reading through this thread and couldn't find an answer to my question - I'm used to using a bootable flash or cd/dvd with Norton Ghost for more than 10 years now (win 2000 - 7) for creating windows partition image, but with N550JV and preinstalled win8 for some reason the Ghost is not working (booting from cd),

Is there any similar app that can be booted from flash/cd that will create such image of win8 (and all other system partitions/mbr etc..), that can easily restore things to the way they were after I format hdd, repartition it and install windows 7?

I've created an image using Acronis True Image but that was not a bootable option and I'm not sure if all would work ok if I try and restore the image using Acronis in win7.

 

anyone else having issues with Win 8.1 installation? I can never get past the reboot, it keeps reverting me back to Win 8. Keeps giving me error 0x80070002

 

The error code seems to be related to an incomplete update download, people's first reaction on the net is to recommend deleting the update folder to force a new download. You can try to do that, folder name is "C:\$Windows.~BT" and you can safely delete it, but I doubt it will fix the issue.

My best guess this error code means some kind of incompatible system setup. For example people got this error with Windows 8.1 Preview when their language was set to anything bur EN-US. This is obviously not applicable anymore but it does shed some light on what the error code is... uhm... "trying to say"

However, I noticed an interesting thread on superuser. The user getting the same error as you had multiple boot partitions and had to set his Windows partition to Active in order for the update to complete successfully.

Now, from your history in this thread is understand you have cloned your HDD partitions to a SSD. I think the first thing to do would be to check if your Windows partition is marked as active or if there is a small System Reserved partition marked as active on your disk. I am not familiar to the partition setup on a OEM edition HDD since I bought my unit without an OS, but I'm sure other users on the forum can tell whether your disk is similarly partitioned to their HDD or not.

You can check your partition setup using Disk Management (shortcut found in Win+X menu).

 

@jaksam: I used Easeup Todo backup as recommended here in the thread to create the partition clone. I believe it also support backup and create the image.

@JonnyThrice: I just updated my Win 8 to 8.1 environment. There is only one issue with my wifi 7260 ac due to the need of different driver for 8.1. Otherwise, everything else went smooth.
(I check for list of all drivers needed for my 8.1 and download the wifi prior to upgrading).

 

Anyone else having audio output lag ? When I adjust audio after fresh start I get audio after 2-3 seconds. Updated the driver, problem still persists.

 

Thanks for the reply! I deleted my "C:\$Windows.~BT folder. I'm also trying to check for "Active" partitions. Many of them have "Mark partition as Active" blanked out when I right click on them. Either meaning they are not available to activate, or they are already Active. My main partition is the same way. What does that mean?

???

 

I have not found any problems with the actual installation of 8.1.
The update from 8 to 8.1 went smoothly, then I just updated the bluetooth/wifi drivers.

However, now on 8.1, windows media player seems to be crashing more often. (and it seems to crash explorer)

 

well it's abt time to use something better, for example foobar2000 or winamp?

 

The "fix" used by the posters on superuser was to mark the system partition as active, not other ones.

Marking a partition as active means that the computer will use the loader on that partition to start the operating system. On some system configurations the partition that is in charge when the computer boots is not necessarily the one with the operating system on it. It may just be a small partition containing a loader that lets the user select between multiple operating systems. In my case for example, there are two partitions on my disk: the first is a small 350MB one, marked as active and in charge of the boot selection, while the second one contains the operating system.

In your case there are probably even more partitions, including a 'recovery partition'. People on the superuser thread report that on certain OEM computers Win 8.1 upgrade process gets confused by the way partitions are configured. Normally that should not be the case, but since you have cloned your partitions... bits might be different

However, if the partition containing your operating system is already marked as Active I strongly suggest not to play around with this setting. The issue may very well lie somewhere else and marking the wrong partition as active can stop your system from booting.