*Official ASUS W90Vp Owners' Lounge*

yeah in my review i noted that the volume slider didnt work well for me, so i use the function key + f key combo.

I would have rather then left out that entire left media key thing and made the keyboard bigger/better as this is a desktop replacement unit, the keyboard really counts. the numberpad is too truncated and it has the embeded arrow keys.

this was my only real strike against the w90, I dont see myself doing any major excel work on here without going insane or getting an external keyboard.

 

After a week of ownership, here are a few impressions.

I find that I am a bit disappointed with the screen. It's as huge as I wanted and the colors are lovely but it has terrible viewing angles...especially vertical. It also has way more light leakage than I expected...and significantly more than my 4 year old XPS2.

It's not a deal breaker but it is very noticeable with darker colors. I was expecting a significant improvement over the past 4 years.

The weirdly different temps between the gpu's is odd but isn't much of a worry. The crappy touch controls are occasionally annoying but not seriously so.

It's a huge beast but not really that much more than the XPS2 I've been lugging across the globe forever.

A lighted keyboard would be very nice.

Why don't these desktop replacements come with little folding legs under the back to raise it up a half inch or so to aid in cooling? A half inch makes a huge difference. Better yet, with a chassis this fat, cooling intake from the side can't be impossible.

This forum and all the support in here influenced my decision to buy the W90. Good job to all.

Asus support, the one time I called them, was on the line almost instantly and very helpful.

So far, overall, I like it...no regrets.

 

I had the idea about the levers that come down to tilt it also, not for cooling reasons the w90 cools great, but for ergonomics, i cant type on mine well without a tilt, and I dont want to lug around a huge cooling pad just for tilt, so I have been using 2x 1" thick hotel guides as my tilt device that I keep in my drawer at work.

The card thing is normal, even my desktop does the same. One card is always under load while the other does nothing until you start gaming, also the cooling solution for one of the cards is sharing with the motherboard chipset.

The bleed is not normal, I hate bleed but mine has none, I did notice that the view angles can fool you into thinking you see bleed if you look at an angle but true bleed will show no matter what angle.

Oh one new thing to add thats "bad" since my review is a few of my music songs happen to hit just the right frequency to rattle something or cause a harmonics point so that I hear noise come from the speaker area. I can fix it by turning off/on certian audio settings for those songs but I would like it if the one setting I usually leave it on worked for all my music.

Its sad to say but the little 10" EEE 1000H that I am on right now has the best sound of any laptop I have ever heard esp given its size and cost. the W90 has more bass, and gets a bit louder but its not as clear and when I turn off the emulation software I think the EEE is actually louder.

The EEE is just pure pleasure to listen to music on, I must have been blessed with a great unit.

for the screen I had bad bleed on my G50V and it seemed to go away after having it for awhile so maybe the same will happen with your w90

 

Hey stack,
Yeah, I always like Beaker... fond memories from the Muppet show. Glad I could bring a laugh. I got his image a long time ago to use him for my spray in Counter Strike Source with my in game name "DeadMeat". The image and name just go so well together
I will PM you with the info (one I post enough verbiage to be able to PM) on the Colt as this is really not the forum for all of the details.

 

Yep, I would have rather the money been spent somewhere else than the touch controls to the left of the keyboard. The volume is literally broken, it is not possible to smoothly change volume to the desired level. This is one of those areas where touch is a step backwards anyways. A dial such as I had on a laptop a decade ago can be located without looking and adjusts volume just fine. The player controls at least have some logical use and while I wont use them I can see that others might. I would have put them on top where a ton of space is going to waste with a couple of mood lights.

That would open up the area where I would have put a better keyboard. Both in quality and size. In the end if this was designed by crab you have two dials up top to adjust the brightness and volume along with the touchkeys and underneath them a better keyboard. Less whiz bang but better functionality.

 

HHmm . . . installed the drive in the enclosure, it loaded the software automatically in Vista but there is no drive listed . . . eSATA and USB are both not working? I am searching the OCZ forums but cant find anything, any ideas? I am using an ULTRA external drive enclosure, connected to an eSATA port and power from the usb.

 

Ok, it is listed in device manager as OCZ Vertex v1.10 ATA device, just not assigned a drive letter.

 

Are you using usb for only power or did you try it for data as well? I would try plugging it in usb only and not using esata.

Failing that, you can try what I did; I installed my vertex in the second internal hdd position. It worked fine.

If you get you C: drive cloned over, (if that's what you're attempting), pull out the original 320 and put the vertex in that spot.

I didn't even try esata or usb...partly because I didn't have an enclosure handy.

 

I dont have my laptop yet, was just going to see the benefit of the eSATA over USB in real world application is all. I am not really sure what the best way to change everything over to the OCZ drive, guess I will need to look into it.

 

Its probably not formated yet, brand new drives often come unformated thus wont have a drive letter. I have had this happen to me a few times with new hard drives.

You can format it and it will get a drive letter from the Vista storage management.

Best way to change it all over will just be the free trial of Acronis I think, it can clone your drive while its attached as an external drive, then just swap them out.

Or swap first then clone it, no matter.

 

Ok thanks Vic, it is formatting now and has been assigned a drive letter. Anyone want me to run any specific tests on it connected to eSATA. I am kind of curious to see the difference in transfer rates between eSATA and USB (given the HDD restrictions on this current pc).

 

You will very clearly see the limit of usb since the drive is faster than the usb bandwidth. E-SATA is a must for a fast drive.

I like HDTune because its been the baseline for most of our HDD testing, but the SSD fans around here like that crystal tests and a few others as its more detailed and more suited for SSD testing.

There is one other one I really like but forget the name, it does many different tests with different sized files, I used it to test my flash drive. Its great because you see that a flash drive does not run full speed until you get up to a certain file size.

I hope you did quick format btw I always do.

 

These ones are a straight install for Win7 no modding needed with working ATI CCC . This CCC wil also work with Vista64 as well but the drivers portion will not

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonmob_win7-64.aspx


Edited:this post was meant for Vicious's Thread as someone was asking about Win7 drivers :Brainfart.

 

So now that the 9.5 drivers have been released and it looks like it fixed the texture issues does this mean I have to flash or was that only to be able to install good drivers?

 

WOOHOO!!! *crazy guy jumps in*

IM BACK!!!! whats up?

i didnt get an answer on my question about the power brick

Weight and wattage pull

 

You should be fine, i think back somewhere in the 600 pages of thread here that i read it only pulls 220. Someone correct me if i am wrong.

 

sweet thanks!

what about weight its gotta be a beast

 

In the range of 2 pounds i believe, but again don't quote me as mine still hasn't arrived.

 

Hey all,

I thought I recalled the topic of which version of HDMI are in the W90VP; but I could not find it when I chopped through the jungles of this thread. Nothing came up when ran a search for the answer. Which version of HDMI are these 4870's using? It is version 1.3 for sure since it can handle the higher resolutions but is it a, b or c? I wanted to know for use on my Samsung monitor and for my edification on a future flat panel TV purchase. Knowledge and data is my heroin

Come on folks gimme a fix, ol Beaker needs a ride on the brownstone train to geeksville!

 

Good guess, I just weighed mine on my postal scale, 2 pounds .2 ounces (without the power cords).

 

Any HDMI can push 1920x1200 even 1.0

1.3 made it much faster supporting 2560x1600 and adding the extra digial music stuff but I cant find any major difference between 1.3a/b/c that would really effect anything:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Multimedia_Interface

 

After much playing around, I believe I have the 9-4 drivers installed, using my original CCC.

I went about it in a slightly different way than in the guide but it seems to have worked.

Now, to overclock the gpu's, will I need a different CCC?

Here's the current software info from the CCC;

Driver Packaging Version 8.60-090316a1-078238C-ATI
Catalyst® Version 09.4
Provider ATI Technologies Inc.
2D Driver Version 8.01.01.888
2D Driver File Path /REGISTRY/MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet001/Control/CLASS/{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}/0000
Direct3D Version 8.14.10.0655
OpenGL Version 6.14.10.8577
Catalyst® Control Center Version 2008.1109.2155.39248

 

well i got all drivers by vicious method just as mentioned in steps and everything is working fine since 2 weeks now

(thanks vicious)

 

Hi Vicious,
Thanks for the response. I should have been more clear in my questions. When I referenced the 1.3 and the higher resolution, I assumed that folks would know I meant the 2560 x 1600. I understand that the a/b/c is a testing ID and not marketing related (at least that is what is being reported). But I was wondering if anyone know which was in the 4870's. I found nodda on the AMD site that noted a specific designation of a/b/ or c. Just curious if anyone knew.

Thanks!

 

Honestly i think your the first to bring up the whole which HDMI do we have , so far no one has delved that deep into it yet. But i guess when ever you get the machine you will be .

 

Here are the benchmark scores of sager np9280(core i7-965, GTX280M) from xotic pc:



Our rival appears!
It only equips with single GTX280M. Now I am very curious about the performance of Sager NP9850 with GTX280M SLI

 

3.2ghz i7 nice! thats probably equal to about 3.5ghz on the QX9300 maybe even more.

But the 9850 cost more and doesnt look as nice, the W90 is a winner to me even if we lose some benchmarks.

Edit: Ouch it cost a lot more.. I just went and configured one $2540 to setup it up with the slowest i7 and the 6gb of ram and 2hdd the W90 comes with.

 

Does anyone have a modded 9.5 driver?

 

Well looks like I could be a three time loser

My newest, latest and greatest W90-X1 already shows signs of issues with the graphics.

I am getting what I can only describe as "banding" which are typically thick green/blue horizontal bands that flicker while playing games. It also appears as expected when running 3dmark06. It doesn't happen when just browsing the internet, working on the desktop, watching youtube vids, etc. Sometimes the whole screen will fill up with what can be compared to as a solid test pattern. In two instances the computer froze requiring a hard restart.

Once the "banding" issue starts the only way to fix it, is to restart the computer. This issue is not always there it could happen after 10mins, 30mins, 4 hours or not at all (that gaming session).

Thoughts? I really need to get this RMA monkey off my back.

P.S. It came with 8.55 drivers installed

 

Warhammer that sounds like a bad gpu, I get something like that when I overclock a card past stable points.

Not sure whats going on with the gpu's on the W90.

Are the getting bad cards?

Is there something causing the W90 to break the cards?

Just a hardware issue?

But what ever the case it seems to be the only real issue and Asus needs to really crack down on it because this is one of there highest selling and best notebooks in a long while.

 

Sorry about your misfortune with these things. You knew it had to be an rma'ed unit when you saw 3dmark installed. I noticed you were rationalizing this away when you originally posted but there it is. Now what I guess is the question? Myself, I would be getting more than a little pissy at this point.

 

Dang man. This is terrible. I'd be giving asus a call and demanding some sort of compensation. It was obviously a unit that was tampered with (otherwise you would have got a clean image without 3d06) and this being your third time, i would expect something from asus for all the hassle, after all its not like your buying one of their lower end notebooks. You bought the best because thats what you expected, a top preforming notebook. One RMA is acceptable but 3?! That's just a no no. Give asus a call and see if you can get some sort of compensation.

Its wrenches my gut to see someone that has to deal with all that.

 

Hey Striker - you around? Any updates on the 8/12gb of memory?

 

I had these issues with driver sets 9.1 and 9.3 when i had tried them and it was all based around the turbo vga driver and it overclocking the card . On 9.4 i have 0 issues be it overclocked or not . when i ran those previous drivers if i had the turbo VGA installed or i had overclocked manually it would artifact but then going right back to 9.4 problem was solved all togther and i could run 600/900 all day long without issue.

Have you flashed your card yet to install the latest drivers ? if not then you should think about trying before RMAing(again) . Granted this stuff should work out of the box but i truly believe its just a driver thing .

One more thing to try is just uninstall the Turbo VGA driver from the Programs Features section .

Good luck

 

Hey all im wondering...

is there a way i can hook (say) an Xbox360 up to this and be able to enjoy it. i see it has an HDMI port but is it a one-way or can it be made to support an input as well. i have been trying to figure this out for a long whilw but all i could find were programs and external devices that run in excess of 150$
i want to just be able to plug and play the 360 on it.

PLZHLP!!!

 

Nope its output only . You can buy a USB adapter for video input but there horrible and lag something terrible.

 

Good to hear Thank ya sir

 

There has GOT to be some wy to hook it up!

I have SEEN it done (Notebooks AND Deskops) How the FORK do you do that?!?

 

Nope because again its only an output . What you may have seen is what i described like a USB tuner card or in the case of a desktop a PCI TV tuner card which has video in and out . These solutions work but are not ideal and you wont get say 1080p youll be limited to like 480i/p at the very most.

 

If you want good quality and HD resolution there is a way to do it. Go look at a HAVA. Im going to get one down the line.

Lets you stream your stuff to any networked computer, and even over the internet, + record too.

Way better than those SD quality USB adapters, plus more straightforward than a TV tuner card.

There are a few other rip off products that copied the HAVA but they are not as good or cost more.

 

Those streaming things work for movies and such but from everything ive read to date are crappy for games because of the lag, though maybe that has changed.

 

hey guys!!
I sudden found this in the internet
will this work on the W90 with QX9300

http://download.desktopboards.net/idcc/index.php


http://download.desktopboards.net/idcc/IDCC_Demo.htm

is there any one take a try on W90

 

Na the HAVA is DESIGNED for things like gaming. No lag it doesnt use USB it uses Gigabit Ethernet, and it doesnt rely on your computer hardware to decode/render like a TV Tuner it does it all for you and just streams it.

 

OK u say it uses gigabit so what kind of input adapter would i need to run it on the W90?

 

Just a network cable id imagine since its going from the hava box to the W90. So 360 to hava then hava to W90. Or wireless . Id imagine though since its Gigabit then it has line connections as well as wireless built into it.

 

I posted this in the New W90 thread too but then I found this thread and thought it was more likely to be read here so please excuse the 'repost'....

I'm not an official owner, but I'm seriously considering getting one of these desktop replacement "notebooks". However I had a $1400+ hp w/ nvidia go7600 17" dv9339us fry on me 6months out of 1yr hp warranty last year, with no support other than that they would fix it for $400+ (regardless of how much I called and complained and quoted news reports of mfg defective nvidia notebook gpus of that generation).

As you might guess I am a bit shy of dropping a lot of money on another hot running gaming desktop replacement. I like that the W90 comes with 2 yr parts/labor and 1yr accidental , but does anyone know how good Asus support is generally on high end notebook failures? I was thinking of getting the X2 (quad) from newegg.. I'd actually like the option of extending the warranty at least another year if that is available. I really don't want to risk a repeat loss on another even more expensive desktop replacement. I'm already in the hole with a $1.5k brick. Any info relating to any of this is appreciated.. thnx.

 

There support and warrantys are great ,you can also extend the warranty another year when/if you get it . So if all that is holding you back from getting it is the protection of a good warranty then dont hesitate to buy one.

 

Just hook it to your router like any other computer, or if you want a direct connection just a simple crossover cable works.

It becomes part of your network and can stream to multiple devices at once.

 

I hear you. I had a 3.2 P4 DTR that ran hot enough I literally cooked an egg at the exhaust port just to see if i could. Thing had horrible heat issues and I wouldnt want to go there again. My W90 runs much cooler that that one did. I have had several laptops put out similar heat to the W90 both measured at the chips and the ol stick the hand in front of the exhaust method that ran reliably over the long term so I am hopeful.

 

I work at a computer repair and hosting business, im quite often the one calling companies like asus for getting rmas and whatnot and i can assure that not only is Asus build quality MUCH better then hp (plastic chassis heats up and flexes causing mobo to crack) but their support is by far better then anyone elses. Out of all the companies i have to call from LG to MSI, the best by far is asus. They never have any problems with returning something for an RMA. And the turn around time is always fast when the parts/a new unit are already in stock. If warranty is what your worried about here, dont fret in putting some faith in asus.