N56vz review and owners lounge - Techno Art

Well still keeping the bottom raised is likely a good idea since the front vents will still have air drawn through them.

 

Yeah, I always do that with the laptops I use, but I was wondering if there are any coolers that work for laptops with no bottom intakes..

 

While I have posted here a few times, I never seem to understand the ins and outs of computers.

One thing I am sure of... This is an amazing laptop

I have searched high an low for the issue that seems to be haunting me on a regular basis and hope to receive some help (or send me in the right direction for help)

Over the past couple months I have been getting BSOD with this as the reboot info
View attachment 99048 While it was very infrequent, it is happening quite often now.

The only changes I have made w/ the computer (hardware) is, mem upgrade and installation of bigfoot wifi card. These were installed months ago with seemingly no issues. (Not sure if the BSOD is from these upgrades)

 

The mem-upgrade could be the problem, since the selectively tight latency-timing (that is hardset in the bios) might give you trouble on high loads, sustained writes, etc., even when just adding a second hynix chip with identical timing as the one put in as standard.

I'd recommend writing Asus about it, and call them very nasty things. (And then maybe add some swearwords from me as well, because of the 1.35v chips I have that I can't use, also because of the locked timing settings). It won't help, of course, but it might make you feel better afterwards.

 

So i've just replaced my 1366x768 matte display N56VZ HD version.. Since pixelation, screen door effect, colour, contrast and low brightness has actually been haunting me since i purchased this laptop despite its good gaming performance The stock one was AUO b156xtn02.4 with 45% colour gamut , 400:1 contrast ratio, 200 nits according to panelook.com. Since it made two small horizontal line on top right side of the panel so i think this is good excuse to throw money lol.

So i ask local shop for replacement and panel number they have is LG's LP156WH4-TLN2. It has 220 nits, 60% colour gamut, 400:1 contrast and glossy finish. Looking for notebook panel's review is a pain in the but fortunately i found this review.

Decided to purchase and voila.. It is much better panel overall. So far, i haven't seen screen door effect and happy with the brightness, colour, contrast, less pixelation and crispier output. However the downside is less viewing angle compared to stock one and i can live with glossy reflection


After installation, fn+f5/f6 works like it has to for brightness control :thumbsup:

Final words, my brother's n56vz 1920x1080 panel is still a better pane than my replacementl. In terms of crispness, slightly better colour, viewing angle and matte surface, no argue on that. But my point is there is still decent enough 1366x768 panel out there compared to asus' stock 1366x768 on n56vz. I wonder why asus does not use the panel they put in their budget notebook in the beginning. Since, in my opinion, it supports the idea of multimedia notebook well at least if they go HD panel route.

ciao.

Note : I once tried to experiment with 1920x1080 panel replacement but the lvds cable does not support it. It seems there are missing cable inside the stock lvds plug when i hold it.

 

Does ASUS make a set comparable but with more RAM? I installed Kingston mem (which was an excellent match) that has been tooling along fine... as I said earlier, until a month or so ago. (The Kingston mem has been on board since August 2012)

 

I did not even know they made 45% displays *shudder*.

 

Hi Tony
I think Asus has a memory recommendation page (Well at least they did) where you can compare your memory. When I upgraded the memory in my first Asus notebook I used PcWizard (Freeware) and found memory that had that exact same voltage and timings and I never had any problems.
Hope you have a good one.
IceJoki

 

Most of them are. "Good" ones will cover around 60. Very good ones will be close to sRGB at +70%. Those +90% are rare stuff for OEMs, at least here in Europe I rarely see them.

I agree, in 2013 this is BS, so many cameras, huge amount of HQ content (photo and video) and they give us these lousy panels.

 

Is the 1080p panel on the N56VJ the same as the one on the N56VZ?

Are the only differences between the two the graphics card and processor?

 

I think they've sold different VJ and VZ variants with both lower res panels and high res panels. Should be easy for the seller to confirm if it's the standard 1080 lg plate, though.

 

My notebook model ( N56VM) is almost the same as this model except different graphic card which is apparently rebranded so I have a couple of questions:

• Is any additional cooling necessary (because this notebook have decent cooling)? If so what would you recommend me (budget does not matter I'll save up money)?
• What screwdriver bit do I use to to open the panel (see image image below)?
  
• Does the "unintelligent bios-tweaking, locked/overriden settings" for RAM upgrade affect my model too?

 

Hi all,

I did it, I bought a n76vz model.
Overall, it's ok.
The popping/cracking sound is the only problem I've encountered. The sound drivers from Asus are really bad, but there is a good solution... someone recommended installing a newer driver version from Realtek. I think this would work for N56 models so u could try it.
Original post by pht is here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/670037-asus-n76vz-7.html#post9207637.
The popping/cracking sound would still exist, but these drivers made it extremely hard to notice it.

Good luck everyone.

 

Hi guys,
I'm having trouble with my battery.. I'm roughly getting 2hs battery life. I'm using windows 8 "balanced" profile, with 50% brightness and tried it in different conditions and running different programs. I never get more than two hours. I downloaded BatteryBar toolbar and it displays Battery Wear between 10% and 20%, varying every time. I've only had my laptop for a couple of months and have taken good care of it (never undercharged nor overcharged it)
Anyone having similar issues? Or anyone knows what might be going on? I don't live in the US so returning the laptop/battery isn't possible.
Thanks!

 

So in the task manager do you have any tasks sitting there chewing up CPU?

 

Nope. At least nothing too significant. I removed almost all bloatware from Asus and run ccleaner and windows defender quite often.
What bothers me most is having almost 20% battery wear.. it's 2 months old!! I think there must be a software or configuration error because it's just not possible.

edit: out of nowhere, now my battery wear reads 44%.. between a few charge cycles this number goes up and down but I never had too much. Don't know whats going on here..

 

Hello, just bought N56vz and have one problem, the simple main tasks like opening up browsers, skype client,windows explorer etc happens with notable delay, while games run without problems.My old laptop do it quicker. On Nvidia settings the main graphics i set to gt 650, power plan - maximum perfomance, no bloatware, a did clean install of windows 7, just drivers from DVD. What else can i try to solve my problem?

 

1. Check your RAM usage
2.Update your drivers
3.Check for faulty HDD/RAM
4. If nothing is wrong, you might want to check your old laptop's hdd rpm or just pop in a ssd and you'll be staggered

 

Hi guys,

I currently own the N56vz and am relatively happy with it. It handles the day to day fairly well, however I'm not 100% satisfied with the battery life and the startup time.

Would you recommend me taking it back (as the wireless connectivity drops out fairly constantly) and getting the N550jv instead? The battery life would be a big plus for me.

Thanks for your time.

 

Hi

I bought the N56VZ (Asus N56VZ-S4267H with Windows 8) last month, and I'm really happy with it. I added a SSD (now I have ssd 256gb + hdd 1tb) and runs quite fast. I have only 2 problems:

- Stuttering in games: Solved with Crystal Disk Info (but it's not a permanent fix).
- WiFi issues: The N56VZ drops my wifi connection often, is really annoying.

Does anyone have the same problems? Thanks

 

It's possible that the window manager and everything else is running on a pipe to the nvidia card. And that might actually cause issues eventually (Don't you just love windows?) So try putting it back to "adaptive" in the graphics driver under performance settings.

Might also be an idea to do a clean install of the graphics drivers, including the intelhd4000 driver + chipset drivers first.

Honestly, if battery time (and battery wear) is most important to you, definitely get that instead. Personally, I'd go for one of the vivobooks with an apu+gcn card. Or one of the newer acer aspire versions with 740m cards and i5s. These are both quieter and more power-efficient (than the n550).

Wifi can be a lot of things. Even with the most expensive modems, a 2.4Ghz transmission is only ever merely "unstable" at the best of times. I've honestly not seen a clear example so far of a cheap wifi modem performing worse as a client in a network when compared to the more expensive ones. I keep hearing about people who insist they get 1000Gbps connections to their 100kb/s adsl downloads, and so on. But signal strength has to do with the antenna and the noise level in your area. And generally speaking, not the wifi modem itself.

...What sort of stuttering? Are you running very demanding games in 1920x1080? Or are you running games on the intel graphics rather than the nvidia card?

Thing is that - and I suspect this concerns ervins too - on many of the n56 stock versions, they've preinstalled an nvidia driver with a rewritten stock 580m driver. Basically just changed the name of the driver so it says 650m, and added some extra info. What that causes is that when you try to update the driver to a newer 650m driver, the id in that driver fails match the new one, and "things" start to break.

So if you run into a lot of curious issues with this, try uninstalling the nvidia driver. Then boot into safe-mode, install an updated intel driver. Then install another 650m package from nvidia.

Asus should of course have done something about this long ago. And at the very least offered a stock driver that avoids the issue. But.. that's not going to happen, is it.

 

How can I know which one is running?

And what about the wifi? Do you have the same problems?

Update: After updating the wireless drivers (Intel Wireles N2230) from the intel website, seems to be fixed...

 

Yikes. ..default package comes with the azurewave wifi drivers. So if you had an intel modem, that explains things, yes. (Same that happened with someone who had different touchpad hardware.. they only had trouble with it of course, until they installed new drivers).

One way to check is to install something like MSI Afterburner, or hwinfo64. Then put up a graph for the gpu activity (or you don't need that in MSI Afterburner). Then when you start an application with any gpu activity on the nvidia card (select it in the "profiles" part of the nvidia control panel), the clock speed, memory speed, and gpu activity goes up. In hwinfo64 you have another set of data for the intel igp.

..Actually, I think you can hook off something in the nvidia panels to let an nvidia icon pop up once an app is running on the nvidia card. But it's completely reliable once you set the profiles. Find the program in the list, or search and find the executable, select "high performance NVIDIA blabla" and the program will start on the gpu.

Those profiles tend to update according to "majority" preferences as well, when you update the drivers. And the computer will obey those as long as the global profile is set to follow the profiles for individual applications. It's usually very easy to get this to work as you'd expect. So if it doesn't, consider just reinstalling the drivers (or download a new package from nvidia.com), and select "clean install". It'll erase any profiles or weird things set by earlier drivers, dual screen settings that somehow carry over, etc.

 

Thanks a bunch for getting back to me Nipsen. I'm sort of on the fence about the whole thing. I mean the battery life is a plus, but the glossy screen and screen bezel for that matter also would be an improvement.

The wireless I think I've worked out to be is an issue with the intel drivers not being optimized for the wireless adapter itself. I've heard of others having similar issues with dropouts and antennas not turning on and whatnot.

I'll see what I can do, but thank you for the time all the same. Appreciate it.

 

..I'll give you two reasons to stick with the n56, though. Cooling is never going to give out on you. Or the laptop won't end up eventually getting hot and throttle, or regularly heat up so much that you know the goop is vaporizing. And the fan is typically completely quiet (one of the few laptops with a magnetically suspended fan for some reason). Get an ssd.. preferably a clean install, and the laptop is really comfortable to use, imo.

Agree about the battery, though. You struggle to get past 3h while doing any work very quickly. So if you play games and film on it (occasionally off power) it's a good pick. If it's a typewriter you're using mostly at home, or you can get a second battery for, while maybe using an external monitor (hdmi on nvidia cards is very good) -- not a bad pick. But like I wrote in the review as well, lots of alternatives out there for just typewriters and internet browser laptops.

But it can be a bit of a weird experience trying out different brands and models.. some of the ones that get fantastic reviews just feel like.. toys. Plastic toys. View-angles you have to aim on with one eye, backlight that has you squint in the dark, and so on. And they cost a fortune, right, because they're new and shiny So it's not that strange, I think, that you see so many people on for example forums like this who find one laptop they like, and then stick with it. Just saying that it's not always a good idea to buy something on reviews alone, so testing some in person is a good idea. I mean, I tried to write down what I thought was important, and to give people some reference. But it's hard to tell what other people will focus on.

 

About the WIFI issues. I have an N56DP (AMD based version of the N56) and had terrible performance and dropouts with wifi until I forced my wifi router to run on 40MHz wide mode. Boom, wifi went from 1MB/s or less and dying all the time to 6 to 7 MB/s and rock solid stable. Worth a look.

 

Hey guys, I bought Cooler Master u3 to keep my nv56vm cool while gaming. What would be the best position of the fans?

 

One near the exhaust. The others.... just look for warm/heat spot on the bottom cover and look which need the most

 

After 1 year with this Laptop I changed the thermal compound, from both the CPU and GPU. Now the temp when idle stays about 40C and 44C when browsing. I used Arctic Silver 5 as the compound replacement.

 

oh damn a piece of my subwoofer broke off into the port. will warranty cover a new subwoofer? and what's the best way to take the broken piece out gah.

edit: "The warranty does not cover any monitor, batteries, free or special bundled accessories, which may have been delivered together with your ASUS Notebook."

Guess that answers my first question

 

..how generous.. Could be that your warranty at the shop you bought the laptop is broader, though.

(Usually you have the choice between busting the port a bit, or removing the module from the motherboard.)

 

After several months with my N56VZ, I feel some things need to be said:

It is a very nice, quiet, fast laptop, with a gorgeous display.

Now, you need to be aware that the text (especially technical - menus and such) displayed by many programs will be very small, due to the resolution of the screen. Lower-res screen will show the same font larger, since their pixels are bigger.

The keyboard is my main problem: first of all, ASUS left out the Num Locklight, and put the Caps lock in the front edge where it is always hidden. This is a silly design choice for a laptop, which often sits on your lap. Implementing the status lights right in the Num Lock and Caps lock keys would have been both practical and nice.

The arrow keys get in the way all too often, being centered under the Return key.

The touchpad works fine, but I have not yet found a way to disable the three-finger trick, which hides the current working screen and displays the desktop instead, always by surprize.

Maybe my age makes the transition from an old asus to this nice racer a little longer...

 

Hello friends! Long time ago as I posted here. Now I've got a rather weird / serious problem with my 1 year old N56VZ notebook:

2-3 months ago the boot-up process of my notebook started to fail sometimes and by time now even more often. Today is the first time as I am not able to boot my notebook anymore. The problem here is that I press the power button and there is no screen and no flash up of the keyboard (as usual) anymore. You see the front LEDs and you hear the fan of harddisk and CPU/GPU but the screen remain black and Windows isn't booting. Also, the USB supply is still working well and DVD check (plopping sound) too. I had this a couple of times now and normally after like 10-20 times of turning-off and again on the notebook (long press of power button for turning off), it suddenly booted up again. But for some reason this work-around does not work anymore. I tried like 100 times turning off and on again, but no success.

I already tried to remove the battery, wait some time and put it in again. No success.
Tried to reconnect the harddisk and RAMs. No help.
Tried to boot-up with battery supply and power supply, while at power supply it seem to restart automatically after turning off (no idea why).
Disconnected all USB devices and LAN. No change.

I don't want to sent to repair as this is my main working station (not able to wait months for getting it back). So, please give me any advice when you are able to. I really would like to get an idea what the reason of such behaviour could be. Any help is welcome. Thanks in advanced!

 

Sounds like a solder point somewhere in the notebook slowly dying to thermal expansion/contraction. I think repair is your only option.

 

meh, im having graphic driver issues (nvkflt.sys, BSOD when gaming). How do I open BIOS when booting? I tried every F key already.

 

Do an advanced restart from the settings menu - change pc settings - general.

 

nvkflt.sys is part of the nvidia driver, no? I don't really know for sure, but it's probable that it's caused by one out of two things:
1. Conflict with windows power/acpi settings and modes. Or inconsistent acpi settings through the asus acpi driver package and the bios settings (say, from using an early bios with new acpi driver, or the other way around).
2. Overheats while running forced clock-settings.

Either will make the nvidia driver expect the card is set to a certain clock-speed and state. But the hardware abstraction layer will set and then report something the nvidia driver hasn't set (or expect). Which then causes the b'sod.

So.. basically check if you're having overheats (or that the temp hits the roof even if the card clocks down, idle temps too high, etc.). And make sure you update the bios (use the flash-tool in the bios screen if you can - less likely to fail), the nvidia driver (from the nvidia homepage), the intel hd4000 driver (from intel's pages), and the asus acpi package. It's called ATKACPI something, and is part of another package with the power tools and the on-screen indicators, both available on asus support web.

 

Bummer, seems like noone else has a solution for this other than to send & repair.

Do you think I can keep my harddrive for using it for a rental device?

 

That shouldn't be a problem, at least.

(But yes, without voiding your warranty, there's no good way to simply remove a pin like that. Thin forceps and breaking the plastic might work, though.)

 

So, seems like my notebook got repaired already after 3 days. That's fast I would say and now waiting to receive it.

Related to SSD: I saw that Samsung got a new series called "840 Evo" which sounds pretty promising so far. I want to give it a try. It has similar benchmark results as the 840 Pro series (because of TurboCache). Do you think this will work well in my N56VZ? I heard that there could be a problem with the Nvidia chip so that it would run only at SATA 1 speed. Is that correct? It seems to support also the RAPID mode. Could you explain me how I can set it up for this mode?

 

Turbocache is just an on-disk piece of storage that's slightly faster than the other ram, used to cache down frequently used files. What you see is that benchmarks peak, but flatten out and drop on sustained reads.

Rapid.. excuse me.. RAPID mode is part of their software suite, and is essentially a ramdisk setup. It's using a piece of system ram for "hotswapping" files the software algorithm determines will be a good idea. I don't really know how well this works over other ramdisk setups, but since it's easy to set up and handled by the software, it's not a bad thing. Essentially just download or install their driver/software suite, and that's all there is to it.

Until the system croaks and starts writing bad data to the disc in a recovery attempt, of course. But that will /never/ happen.

Nvidia driver/chip causing the sata bus to be only able to run on sata 1 speeds sounds so instantly both unabashedly clever and authoritative that it must have been invented by a Macbook user.

..I don't know. It's possible that something physically actually does cause some systems to drop down to sata1 speeds. Right before the bus burns up, perhaps - I've heard about faults like that. But there have been no limitations on the sata3 capability on the hm76 chipset on any of the nx6 bioses or systems. The idea that the nvidia chipset uses sata for IO. And that sata therefore is slower, etc. That is, like I said, clearly in MacWorld overdose territory.

Crippled ram-timing, yes. But sata 3 is enabled. The last models (nx3) had bioses forced to sata2, though.

Oh, and they don't repair the laptop, they just take out everything on the inside and swap it. Or just swap the entire laptop and then send back a new one.

Anything else?

 

Thanks for the explaination nipsen! I So I guess I don't have to worry that the EVO series would not work with my N56VZ at maximum possible speed? For me RAPID sounds pretty handy to me and even better when there is no effort to set it up correctly. For the installatioon itself, is there something I should pay attention to (e.g. setting options in Bios)?

Last but not least what are the difference between the basic and notebook/desktop kit versions? I hope the basic has everything I need. Thanks in advance!

 

Not sure ..But the laptop version has got a usb3.0 to sata interface, I think. Useful, if you don't have one and want to copy something from your old drive.

No need to change anything in bios. No worries. It really is just another hard-drive. I've heard about people who have problems using the recovery partitions, and ending up with some specifically set package of hdd and chipset drivers causing problems for the new drive (this wouldn't happen on a fresh install). But other than that, I can't think of anything.

 

I have had my N56vz for around one year and recently I started seeing an issue where my computer would detect a headphone being plugged in/out nonstop. It is really annoying because my music would suddenly get cut off when the system thinks a headphone was plugged in/out. Any help?

 

Um.. well, there's a "hardware based" switch on basically all modern 3.5mm and 2.5mm jacks now that can be used for detecting whether one is inserted or not. It's essentially a contact point on one of the contact rings in the jack(if you look at a headphone jack, it has these sectors that are separated by a non-conductive material. For a stereo signal you only really need one+ground. The jacks have four points, I think).

When the contact point in the headphone contact module starts to corrode a bit, that hardware switch is essentially flipped. If you keep the laptop in your backpack, it rains a lot where you live, etc. And that would switch the headphone jack "on" and disable the main speaker array. Same as on a mobile phone you have in your pocket a lot, and where the sim-card suddenly stops working, etc., because the surface contacts stop working. Can just scrape carefully on it, and insert it again, and it works for another few years.

Same thing here. Just take any 3.5mm jack and insert and pull it out a few times. Should normally not need to do anything more than that. It survives some /non-conductive/ lubricant spray as well, but it's normally not very useful in the end to spray anything in these modules, since they're not really that well isolated on the mainboard.

All other non-soldered and non-isolated contacts inside the laptop also work on this principle. But usb connectors on the mainboard and card-readers, dram slots, etc., typically don't stop working in the same way. Remember a friend who went ahead and bought some dram with particularly expensive copper alloy, though. He spent so much money on that ram. And it suddenly stopped working, because pure copper.. corrodes. Everyone were shocked, because they only learned the equations for surface pressure in the physics courses, and skipped the adventure about the electron and an atom's layers.

 

Hey. I've been having a problem on my n56vz and I was wondering if anyone else has had a similar problem, or knows how to fix it.

So my laptop is fine after I have just turned it on. Then I notice that later on in the day (after my laptop has been on for some amount of time), the two finger scrolling and all other multitouch gestures do not work. The only way to solve this is by restarting my laptop, which is fairly annoying.

Has anyone else had this problem, or does anyone know what the problem could be?

Thanks!

 

Had the same issue. Anytime I let my laptop go to sleep the gestures would stop working.

I had to update my touchpad drivers. Here's the three files I updated, in order, to fix it:

ATKPackage_ASUS_Win7_8_VER100026.zip
SmartGesture_Win8_64_Z1035.zip
Touchpad_Elantech_Win7_64_Z10590.zip

They are available on support.asus.com

 

Hi fellas, I've been reading this thread a long time ago, before and after getting my N56VZ, and now my N56VZ is already 7 months old.
Recently, I experienced a problem with my right speaker, the sound coming from the right speaker sounded terrible, like putting the volume to gain 300%, it was like that for a few minutes.
Then later, the sound from the right speaker was gone, until now I can't seem to make it work, the right speaker randomly makes sound for a short second but not frequently, this happened twice only.

I think it's a hardware problem. Can anyone guide me how can I fix this? Will I need to replace or is there something I can do?
Also, does putting a smartphone near the laptop a bad idea? I'm really frustrated that I get to have this problem.

UPDATE: the right speaker seems to work again, but like I stated above, it sounds terrible...

Thanks in advance.

 

Sounds like an electrical failure. Likely need a new mobo.

 

It's possible to get interference with electrical equipment on the 800Mhz-1900Mhz bands, but usually not a problem -- not big enough speakers, not enough electronics that can be affected, that sort of thing..

Agree it's probably either a contact on the mainboard about to break, or bad contact on one of the speakers. It's rarely easy to fix that, even if you open it up and solder new contact points. Or, that often isn't the problem, or the only problem - the speaker could be damaged, or you had uneven current to the components from the beginning, that sort of thing.