Asus N550JV - user review and owners lounge

Lost HDMI audio again until rebooting; fixed with updated Intel gfx driver. Looks like the Intel gfx driver handles the HDMI audio connection... convoluted!

 

The integrated GPU is responsible for HDMI Audio.

The Intel HDMI HD Audio is part of the intel vga driver package. Once you download it from asus/intel and extract it, if you look at the folders you will notice a folder called HD Audio.

If installing the HD4600 drivers doesn't solve the audio problem, then manually open up the hdmi device (go to sound settings and you should see an "unplugged" hdmi audio option) right click it and go through the settings till you get to the driver part, and then manually select the Intel HD AUDIO .inf file .

 

ok great well do..do u recommend a ssd..or all of them are good..i did the 3dmark 11 test and got about 2700...so how is that???
and 1 more thing...when i restart my device it takes really long to boot again...about 2 to 3 min...but sleep wake is almost instantly...so whats up with that.
thanks alot

 

2700 3dmark11 is just right for stock clocks. With oc i did 3080 . For Firestrike score, base is around 1550 an oc topping 1820.

Sent from my Lumia 920 using Tapatalk

 

thank you very mush for the replies..1 last thing to know..about the reboot thing...is it normal to take that long about 2 min to restart or should i take mine back for a replacement???

 

Hi, I recently purchased an Asus N550JV and I have a problem when I plug in the headphones. Everytime I hear a constant white noise in the back ground. After reading through these posts I've seen people recommend uninstalling the RealTek drivers/updating them. When I tried to uninstall the Realtek drivers, it took all sound from my laptop and I had to get the audio driver reinstalled by Asus but the probleme persists. Any ideas on what to do?

 

Download and the install the driver from here -> https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/N550JV/#support
It's normal that if you deinstall the audio driver you don't have any sound until the next restart. If Windows itself can't find a driver then it will stay that way until you install one yourself. Nothing special.
You also don't need to deinstall the driver yourself, just run the driver setup and it will take care of these things and tell you what to do.

 

Hi, each time I boot it checks the dvd-rw and makes annoying noise, how can I disable this from BIOS as I tried removing it from Boot order and leave only de SSD but with no luck. Thanks!

 

Hi guys, I've been looking at this laptop for a while now and was planning on purchasing it. However, I found out that the machine had a problem with white noise when using headphones, which held me back. Then, I saw that the problem can be fixed by updating the Realtek drivers to the newest one. I was wondering how many people had their white noise problem fixed by this update since I see that it didn't work for everyone.

 

After updating to the newest Realtek drivers, my white noise problem disappeared.
I think the drivers made an improvement in the sound quality as well, compared to the drivers Windows installs for you when you uninstall the Realtek ones.

 

Yep, as Shikeu said, it's gone with the latest patch on the support site I linked 2 posts above yours.
I've got nothing to add, just wanted to confirm it once more.

 

Hi,

Can anybody please clarify what SSD dimensions will fit into the laptop?

Is the performance of the hard drive inside the laptop better than hooking one up through the optical drive slot? I was thinking of installing a SSD inside, and using the original hard drive in the optical drive slot.

Thanks in advance and apologies if this has been asked before.

 

did someone found a solution for this? thanks!

 

I have been having this problem while playing Far Cry 3 on high setting where it says that I am running low on memory and need to close the program. It has been happening few times before and I'm having trouble figuring out how to fix it. When I open task manager, it says that I am only using 35% of the memory which I think is not that low. I don't know much about computers and was hoping someone from the forum can help me. Thanks.

 

Darn. I've also noticed that my internet in general with this card is worse than with my old laptop's stock card. It's disappointing..

This happened to me earlier while playing Bastion. Not sure why, either.

 

Doing Prime95 torture test (max temps etc) clock rates constant 2.99 GHz on 4 cores and temps constant ~60 C and fan speed is at ~62% according to Cpuid HWmonitor. I have also dropped the cpu and cpu cache voltages -120mV. The power consumption went down from ~40 watts to ~30 watts. With notebook fancontrol temps rises a bit and cause fan stays of untill temps reach ~70 degrees and then fans kick in.

And on a side note I'm using windows 8.1 with latest drivers and bios is version is 206 because 207 caused my GT750m to disable itself. (It worked for few days and then it gave me error code 43). And for me also the newest realtek driver from asus removed the noise from headphone jack.

Anyways why can't I get higher clock rates from prime95?

 

Hi guys!
i've just switched the hdd with the ssd, and put the hdd in place of the odd.
I've then installed Windows 8.1 on the ssd, and enable secure boot and fast boot again.
However in the BIOS the main boot is still set to be the hdd, and when the notebook turns on I have to choose which operating system I want to start.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oscj5ikw51zf7gp/2013-11-30 13.17.16.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oscj5ikw51zf7gp/2013-11-30 13.17.16.jpg
So it starts from the hdd instead of the ssd.
Also, Windows Store isnt' able to connect.

1) How to disable the dual boot?
2) How to recognize the volumes? In the dual boot I've been asked which Windows 8.1 I want to start, but they are labeled only with "volume n.", and I don't know which is which.
3) If I format the hdd (without thouching the recovery partition, obviously) could I have some problems in the boot? Or it would start directly from the ssd?

Thank you!

 

Just got this beaty today
Installed my ssd with windows 7 and got it up and running.

Used notebookfancontrol to get some decent temps, works rock solid!

So far i've found one problem:
I'm using it on battery right now on balanced mode with brightness at low and after a few seconds the brightness dims even lower.
When i touch the screen it wont go to the normal level which i was on.
When i touch the screen with TWO fingers it will go back to the brightness level I had it on.... after a few seconds it dims again.
Very annoying while browsing etc, cuz you scroll constantly then.
The dimming problem is also there on other brightness levels.

Anybody has an idea how to fix it? I haven't found it in this topic so far.

/Edit: found the solution:
Setting in the intel graphics driver: energy options -> battery -> automatic screen brightness to off

 

Im finally buying this after owning a 13inch macbook pro retina from this year for $1504 that I returned. I was also going to get a UX302LG via ncix.com but its too much money (great specs though).

This is a great deal for the $1100 I got it on amazon for, hopefully the touch will be good and the problems everyone else has had negligible.

Quick question
1. I want to upgrade my ram from 8GB to 16GB for intensive apps like after effects, premiere pro. Which model of the 2x8 sticks would be best suited?
2. Can I update the graphics card?
3. Which model of the SSD would be best to install? I looked at the Samsung 840 lines, but am not sure for the Evo or pro. I'm waiting for a good deal to pop up on Slikdeals.
4. I also plan on removing the optical drive and swapping in a SSD AND keep the HDD as the secondary drive. However, is the 1TB 5400rpm good enough as my secondary drive or should I update?

Any other tips to improve performance and overall experience once it arrives would be really appreciated. I really don't believe there's a better computer out there at this
price. I almost looked at the lenovo y510p but the bulk, color scheme, trackpad issues, battery life, lack of touchscreen all got to me.

 

I'm having the strangest issue. I switched out my DVD drive for an SSD/HDD combo setup, and bought an external USB enclosure for the DVD drive. However, whenever I plug in the now external USB DVD drive, the drive will "flicker" and appear and rapidly disapear from device manager and "This PC". This happens no matter what port I plug it in to, and on other computers it works perfectly. Any thoughts?

 

Maybe get another one.
I had the same with my first HDD caddy plugged into my external ODD caddy when the HDD caddy wasn't working internal. So I had HDD -> HDD caddy -> ODD caddy -> USB to notebook.
The drive was always appearing and disappearing so I knew it was the HDD caddy causing problems and not any internal thing.
So in your case it might be a bad/not compatible controller or whatever in your ODD caddy.

 

Thx, looks like the latest drivers still have some bugs w/ HDMI audio. I no longer have reboot but sometimes have to restart the source a few times to get audio, be it a browser or a media player.

 

The weird thing is it works in every other computer I own just fine, which makes me think its an issue with a driver or my laptop or something like that.

 

Works in every other computer in USB 3.0 ports?

 

Hey guys
I got my n550jv last week. I looked up first 20 pages of this thread and didn't get any answers for my question so sorry if it's repetitive question.
anyway I started playing some games with laptop and noticed the top left of it gets very hot so i got speccy for looking up the temperature and saw that it was around 85-90 during playing assassins creed 4.
It's my first laptop so I'm not really expert in what should the temperature be! so i did some tests!
Btw i didn't use cooling pad for this tests!

on normal usage like watching movies the temperature of cpu and motherboard is about 47C to 55-57c(in power saving mode in balance mode it goes up to 59-61c)

I strest tested cpu and gpu using msi kombostor and prime95.
The result was that gpu was around 80-81c in 100% usage
cpu got to 93c in 100% usage with turbo on(motherboard got to 94) without it, it's about 86-87c

so the question is that is this numbers normal? are yours the same too? and is it normal for n550 to get this hot on full use? can it take it? or is it something wrong with my cooling system and i should be worried?

 

Hmmmm. I have no other computers with USB 3 ports. Would that matter? The enclosure itself is puportedly USB 3.0.

 

Hey coercitiv, do you tend to move your laptop a lot?

I'm going to try doing your modification because I am frustrated with this keyboard problem. I use this laptop for school and this bug occurs when I move it around. But if I get it at some random, specific position it starts working normally.

 

Hi,
I would also like to upgrade the wireless card and router to AC using the Intel AC 7260 and I would like to know if it works on dual band, I saw the 2 cables Main and Aux for the current Atheros card but are they enough for Intel?(seems to be the same form with also 2 connectors) will it work on 5 GHz? I do not want to spend lots of money for the card and especialy for an AC or dual band router just to find out that my new Intel 7260 card does work only on 2.4 GHz because there is no proper antena for it in the laptop.

Thanks!

 

Yeah, I take this unit to work every day.

If you can easily reproduce the problem you could have it repaired under warranty. Otherwise, the mod is a viable option, keyboard has been reliable ever since.

 

for gaming, do I have to switch some settings to enable the GT 750M usage? because i think it only uses the Intel HD 4600 at the moment and I'd like to get a better performance.

I also have some problems with the trackpad and mouse.
Sometimes when I scroll, itll go all the way to the bottom of the page when I only used the finger-scroll to just scroll a little bit. Is there a way to control the trackpad scrolling speed? This is really annoying when I scroll and it goes completely past what I'm trying to see.

Also, when I use the touchpad as the mouse it is inaccurate, lags at times and doesnt feel like it moves with my finger.

Apparently all the drivers are the latest, but these are the problems I've had so far.

 

I have switched to this card, but sadly I don't use it for 5GHz.
However, there is a thread on the 7260 card and the people who have posted in it have been able to reach max AC speed with certain settings on 5GHz.
The link to the thread is here : http://forum.notebookreview.com/networking-wireless/716325-intel-7260-a.html

 

Should switch automatically if you have recent-ish nVidia drivers.

Alternatively you can install the nVidia control panel thingy (forget its brand name) and manually set profiles for games, including forcing the laptop to use the 750M.

 

I have a weird touchpad issue - in one particular program (Lightroom) every click done using the buttons integrated in the touchpad registers twice. Specifically, in Lightroom to zoom in on a picture you click once on it, and click again to zoom out. However, on this laptop one click zooms in and then instantly zooms out, like you are clicking twice quickly. This doesn't happen with an external mouse or when tapping the middle of the touchpad to do a simulated mouse click.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this, and can anyone suggest a fix?

 

I used your suggestion. After 24 hours of usage and carrying around, it seems to work.

I think the problem is not just the battery pushing on the cable, because with the changes, the battery is still pushing against the cable. However, the original layout causing the battery pushing the cable down hard on a gird at the base (or top where touchpad is). that would cause the pinch on a strand which responsible for certain keys.

Thanks to coercitiv for this discovery.

I've been using this laptop for photo/video with Lightroom. I don't run into this issue as you stated.

you may want to check for latest touchpad driver from Asus just to be sure.

 

General upgrade question. Planning to upgrade ram and primary HD -> SSD shortly. Was wondering about battery removal since this has not generally been explicitly mentioned in the posts here.

I am assuming the battery should be removed and ac adapter unplugged during any RAM/HD upgrade? Is there anything to be careful of in removing the battery or be sure the system is fully powered off?

Also, I did notice the stock RAM appears to have some kind of extra heat sinking pads (from youtube videos). Is there likely to be any issue in installing new RAM that does not have these? (8GBx2 upgrade from crucial, 12800 speed, etc).

Thanks!

 

ive also been having problems with the touchpad. mouse lags behind sometimes and the scroll will sometimes become erratic and go all over the place

 

Nope, battery came out easily, nothing to plug in iirc. RAM heatsinks are optional. Having them helps cool RAM temp and preserve its life.

 

Found the answer

 

If you have question and find the answer just edit it in in case someone else has the same question.

 

I'm planning to get ssd as main boot drive and my HDD will be moved to the optical drive with a caddy. The problem I'm facing is what should i do with the blu-ray drive? should i get an enclosure for that or is there some method to use it externally?

 

You would want an external enclosure, the only issue is you wont have a bezel for it.

 

I have been experiencing this problem fora while now.
When ever certain videos are played through my Chrome browser it distorts my taskbar icons beside the time and also distorts the desktop icons as you can see in the images attatched the desktop icons are now below the taskbar. i also cannot see the charms when the cursor is moved to the side of the screen. to correct this i restart explorer from the taskmanager..
Does anyone know a proper fix?
Images attatched below

 

Have you got any recommendation? what do you mean I wont have bezel for it? for the bluray or laptop

 

I give up! I don't usually turn to asking online for help, but having this new laptop and being new to Windows 8, I am not sure where the problem is. So far I searched and I have not found any answers to my seemingly basic problem. Here it is:

My bluetooth does not seem to work. I have the Bose soundlink and my laptop just keeps on "your pc is searching for and can be discovered by bluetooth devices" status when my speaker is on discoverable mode. I have an android phone and I tried to see if it can detect both and I found it can only detect and connect to the Bose speaker (which means the bluetooth on my laptop is not working).
I checked for driver updates but it just says my drivers are up to date. I need help please
TIA

Driver version:


Windows troubleshooting results:

 

Have you switched bluetooth on in metro? Had the same problem with wifi recently. Took me a while before i figured it out. Swipe in from the left to access your charms bar> settings > change pc settings > wireless> toggle bluetooth on.

 

I've read about that and actually the menu path I'm seeing is this:
from charms: settings > change pc settings > pc and devices > bluetooth

And there is no bluetooth toggle. As soon as I select "bluetooth" (image below), the laptop starts to look for devices and nothing happens. It is during this time I set my BT speaker to discoverable but the laptop could not see it. At the same time my android phone can see the BT speaker but not the laptop. The laptop could not see my phone as well.

 

Ok, I did some more research and found a lot of complaints on Dell laptops where bluetooth stopped working after upgrading from Windows 8 to 8.1. Unfortunately I was not able to test my bluetooth while I was still on Windows 8. Though my friend has the same laptop model and have Windows 8.1 as well and his bluetooth is also having issues. I remember testing the bluetooth conectivity to Bose speakers on a same model laptop in the store and it worked. It was running Windows 8.

So I think now the issue is with ASUS' drivers not compatible with Windows 8.1. Dell came up with an update and their bluetooth problem seems to be fixed.
I am wondering why after 134 pages of this thread, no one seems to be complaining about the same issue (assuming most upgraded to Windows 8.1 already)

 

Ok fixed it. Updater does not recognize the new bluetooth driver for 8.1 so I had to uninstall the old windows 8 driver and manually install the new one. It's working now.
That was extremely annoying.

 

Hi yall. I just updated to Windows 8.1 Nothing seems wrong, except how I have this freaking stupid "Windows features configuration" stuff every time I restart.

Do I have to install further Asus Drivers? I went to ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download N550JV but the link is dead for Windows 8.1

I'm really tempted to install Windows 7 and just be done with all of this. Is that process any easier?

 

Link worked for me.
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download N550JV

So far I've only downloaded and installed BT drivers. You didn't have issues with bluetooth after upgrade to 8.1?