*Official ASUS W90Vp Owners' Lounge*

Crysis did go up a few frames, the other games were already maxed out pretty much and couldnt go higher or were into hundreds of fps.

 

Make sure your cards are enabled. Run Vantage (Not 3Dmark06) and see what Vantage GPU score you get.

Make sure to flash your cards and install 9.4

Wintergarde make sure to tone down draw distance. With everything pumped up, Wintergarde can even make my desktop GTX 280 cry.

I did a half clear of Naxx25 tonight on my Hunter no problems (then I switched to my desktop for the last half to get away from the noise makers), and I had no problems what so ever through Military and Construct. Of course Envoy didn't drop, but why would it? Same holds true for every possible ranged upgrade. All Heroic gear just about and still rockin the Drake......

 

For these areas in WoW that are killing new systems what do you think is the limiting factor?

GPU VRAM, CPU Speed, GPU Speed?

The W90 can be overclocked both cpu & gpu but not much we can do about only having 512mb of Vram, honestly there are a lot of games now that need 1gb to max out (or close to max out) so that is one minor disadvantage.

 

Update: My restore is done! Looks like I forgot to backup my Win 7 partition lol so only have Vista I will have to install Win 7 all over again when I get home.

I think my new ram is ever so slightly better at overclocking than my old set.

I had a 2.85ghz max wprime bench on the old one, with the new unit I just got a 13.63 second 2.915ghz run (very highest setting of setfsb without ultra enabled) but I crashed at 3ghz.

So I maybe able to run stable/bench now at 2.8ghz if I am lucky instead of 2.7 like before.

 

Really Important Warning!

If you just got a new W90 from the newest shipment do not follow my guide to flash the GPU bios until I confirm something.

The new unit had two different kinds of flash types. When I used my old modified bios it flashed over the slave card fine, but the master card is the one with a new flash type I dont remember seeing before.

When I flashed over the Master it never flashed, I waited for about 20 minutes and finally had to hope for the best and power down. At power up I have no screen anymore.

I think I need to rip the new bios from the master and modify it as a new bios or the flash type is different and cant be flashed.

I can use help from everybody if your willing to open up WinFlash and take a screen shot or tell me what the flash type says for your cards, new and old owners both so I can see if there is a difference.

I MAY have hope of fixing my unit if the cards are reversible, as my slave card was flashed to a master, so in theory it can boot on its own, but not sure if the cards are identical and can be swapped, and in a desktop it doesnt matter what slot your card is in it will boot.

Should be safe to flash the slave to a master as that worked and thats all you need to do for the new drivers, but dont flash over the master with a old bios (I tried to put my overclock increased bios on there) its possible I just had bad luck and the flash failed too (had some stuff running, was overclocked etc)

 

Congratulations for your replacement Vicious!! many of us are waiting for the limit breaker update ;D...

P.D. Anybody knows how to deactivate the tactile volume control on the right of the keyboard? when playing it´s very disturbing...

Thank you very much

 

Lol congratulating me on the replacement I just broke like 10 minutes ago. I think im still in too much denial to be sad yet

(Plus I have faith in Ken helping me get it replaced again...)

 

thats why i asked if the modified bios of gpus works on new bios.

 

Thing is the checksum & file size of the new card is the same only flash type looked different. That to me just means the type of chip used and it should have no bearing on the bios itself.

My screenshots I have uploaded that I went to verify were after flash, so I couldn't tell if thats how the old one was before or not.

I was too impatient and busy at work to take the time to verify.

But it makes sense that there is a new bios or card type they used to fix the old problem, probably some kind of sync error between the two cards and since the master card was handling the sync it was the only one that needed changed.

 

Update: posting from the W90.... had quite a bit to do but fixed it when I got hom from work.

Luckily I dumped the original bios from both cards before I flashed.

I figured since I flashed the slave as a master I could swap the cards and boot with the old slave and with luck the bad master would still be detected and could be reflashed.

Problem # 1 went to swap the cards and the slave did fit in the master slot but the master wont go in the slave spot due to the heatsink on the back side.

It took a very long time and lots of carefull prying (was afraid I might break the pcb) and it finally came off. I found it was not just the thermal pads but it was actually glued on there.

A quick look at the cards and they appear to be exactly the same though.

I booted with only the master flashed slave in and got picture and my boot splash screen so I knew atleast in the very worst case I had one video card working and could use the unit.

After that shut down put the master in the slave spot and went into windows.

No matter what I did once in windows winflash would not open not sure if it was because it could not read the 2nd card or maybe because I was on battery power and not mains.

I figured I was going to have to use atiflash instead anyways.

So I knew I had to make my usb drive bootable to do that, googled and got the hp flash drive utility thing, then had to google to find some windows 98 dos files to boot into.

Got that setup tossed the original bios for the master on there as well as the atiflash files.

Restarted, typed atiflash and got all the paramiters listed.

I read it and found -i is the identify command.

atiflash -i

2 cards found
adapter 0
adapter 1

adapter 1 was the master I could tell from the flash type, that was good news it saw the card.

Then I read the paramiters again and found -p is the flash command.

atiflash -p 1 m97.bin

(atiflash program, -p flash command, #1 the adapter I want to flash, m97.bin was the name I gave the bios)

In 5 seconds it said it was done and to restart.

I turned off the machine, swapped the cards back around, reconnected the CF cable, screwed it all back together (except the bottom cover) and here I am booted up.

Both adapters are there and working, they still show linked, temps look good too suprrisingly.

It was an adventure for sure (because I had no heatsink on the master card in the slave slot I used the top of my kids vitamin bottle to hold the heat sink against the card lol, it actually didnt get too hot but WOW the master flashed slave acting as the primary card was very hot when I took it out.

So going to get off now feed the kids breakfast, then tear back into it.

I need to run some benches to see if I have the sync issue, then going to monitor the temps.

Take it apart and install the ICD24 I got from innovative cooling to see how much lower the temps are.

Then I will edit the new master bios and have to re-write the limit breaker guide.

I still want screen shots of your winflash screen esp if you have an older W90 so I can see if this is indeed a new master card. I maybe just had a bad flash.

but it has prompted me to redo the guide and teach everybody how to use ATIFlash instead of Winflash, it will be more work but much safer. I have never heard of a dos based flash fail, but this would not be the first time I heard a windows flash fail (though normally it is fine)

till later


edit: figured out why winflash was not opening for me when I got back up and running, you have to be on mains power and have atleast 35% battery charge. I currently have 32% and am on mains and I had to take a screen shot of the error message that pops up to read it as its only there for a split second.

also tested the first run of vantage and no tearing/flickering/desync or what ever you want to call it so this unit seems flawless with no issues. I dont know why but the keyboard feels much softer to type on, probably because I had to use my EEE for about a month.

 

Wow man, I remembered when I first built my PC and had problems. These are tremendous exercise for the brain, we learn really a lot, even more then the people who actually came up with everything we are dealing with, plus we get smarter.
Thank you for sharing ur experience, I will sure be very careful when I get my W90.

now, sometimes I think the Clevo M98NU, I want to see if you agree with me on the fallowing thoughts: The GTX280M are slightly more powerful then the 4870m but, sinse 280M doesn't support DX 10.1, the 4870m will continue to outperform 280m because it does support DX 10.1 and so, it gains around 25% more performance according to ATI. What do you think? thanks.

 

My thought on that is we will probably see the GTX280 and 4870 go head 2 head on many things. Some games will favor one card and other games the other.

But overall the GTX280 will probably be faster.

BUT it cost more

DX10.1 is indeed better than DX10 but pretty no game supports it. Assassins Creed used to support it and at that time ATI was dominating Nvidia by a large margin, but it was later removed at the next patch of the game. (cough nvida sponsored game cough*

Also the most important thing I think is you keep in mind what more performance IS.

If the dual 4870 is getting 120fps in a game and the GTX280 manages 130fps then the game is going to play the same on both systems.

Also you can tell from overclocking the 4870's and seeing no benefit that currently the cards are stronger than the cpu even manages to support.

The one thing I am affraid of is Crysis, people always seem to look to that game as the pinnicle of gpu performance and nvidia has always done much better in that game than ATI even more so when SLI goes up against Crossfire (again nvidia sponsored game lol) so I hope that Crysis doesnt blind people this time round when they try to judge the cards performance.

Also I think AW is getting the GDDR5 4870's I think those are going to beat the GTX280 easy, and there is a chance they may just work in the W90, its a long shot but a possibility.

Im actually now going to restart and flash the master again, this time I am using ATIFlash and modified the new bios directly. I still think it was just a bad flash as the bios was the same, maybe that 'flash type" for the new card is not supported with the WinFlash program.

Edit: Works

have the 800/1100 overclock limits on both cards again.

 

what is the highest over clock you have for your card?

 

Also, ATI doesnt have Physx to help the perfomance of the graphics card, so the 4870 is raw power, and gtx 280 has software enhancement, which many games support. Without physx, i would say the are neck and neck, but realisticly, no one would use the gtx without physx based on principal.

Nothing against nvidia (other than 4 dead gpus... but im not bitter ) just think that all the hype about this card is not really justified until realworld comparisons are in place.

 

Old cards I did like 650/1000 I think, I dont remember.

New ones I have not tried yet.

I just got back into windows after putting ICD on my CPU.

What a pain to take out the cpu cooler, and then putting it back in without touching the paste until I was ready to compress it.

Oh and I managed to take off the warrenty seal sticker without breaking it when taking off the heatsink but was not paying attention when putting it back on and then broke it

The fan comes off the heatsink didnt know that until I thought I broke it lol. But I could not get the fan to sink back into the heatsink slot like it was, not its just pushed up next to it.

But temps still seem lower, 1 or 2c lower idle but testing load temps now and thats what really counts.

 

I just waiting to see if Vicious card do use a new bios or if they are the same.

 

Yeah im interested in that as well. Let us know when you get some free time vicious.

 

No worries, take the one off of the battery and put it on there...

 

Asus told me over the phone that as long as you can prove you know what you are doing, dont worry about the sticker. I asked because i want to get 5Ghz wireless card, since our Top of the line laptop's came with crappy wireless cards that only do 2.4Ghz. I still dont trust some tech over the phone telling me that.

 

well ,let me know when you do your next set of runs...but over clock only the video cards and no cpu/memory/fsb over clocking... everything at 2.0 ghz. we we're trying to get an idea of what the cards do by them selves.. thanks in advance.

 

Its gonna be like before a gpu overclock did nothing unless it was a maxed out custom extreme test as the cpu was holding it back.

I guess now is as good as time as any to get into eww more vantage testing.

lol.

As far as the ICD temps same after as before, but it looked like a good solid application of AS5 was on there before and I am sure the fans speed keeps the cpu in the same temp range, I should have paid attention to the cpu fan speed and not just the temps before I switched.

I even applied it 2x just to see if I did a bad install.

I may get a better change in the GPU's as for one I already broke the seal on the stock TIM and I also plan to use the ICD to replace the thermal pads.

 

True or not true that the CPU can be the limiting factor in games as far as FPS? True or not true that relieving the CPU in complex calculations needed while games are running will boost CPU performance? True or not true that Physx relieves the CPU of these calculations and allocates approx 10% (that number is from word of mouth from developer that worked at Ageia so dont quote that entirely) of the GPU streams to compute these calculations, so the said 240 streams would be reduced to 216 and in return allow the processor to work more efficiently? Which is why i said physx is in fact an enhancement. But i could be wrong.

 

just noticed what i said

 

So I ordered my W90 from Ken on 4/27/09 and have been patiently waiting through every delay. I was really hoping to get mine from the 06/02 shipment but I wasn't so lucky. So now I am being told that there will be another shipment this week, not sure anymore if that is completely true or not Unfortunately I paid in advance to save $70 which retrospectively might have been a mistake. If I decide to cancel now how hard will it be to get my money back? Did anyone here go through this process with Ken before? I am really not sure what to do. I hate newegg but at this point I would rather get my money back and order from them

 

I highly recommend you do not, but if you do you wont have problems getting your money back.

Newegg may not get it any faster and you wont get the A1 model.

I had to wait like 6 weeks for my RMA? Then when I broke it this morning after having it half a day I was at the reality I may not get it back fixed again for another 6 weeks and still I was willing to wait. All good things come with time and your patience will pay off.

Heck if I was a new customer id wait 30 days and buy it then so I can get free windows 7.

 

And, unlike the other opinion, I would have canceled already. 1 1/2 months is IMHO way to long if they are going to charge your card. I can see pre-ordering and having the card charged when your item shipped (which is, by the way the correct way to do buisness IMHO), but look at it this way, I am sure they appreciate the 2k+ loan you made them interest free for the last month and a half....

A better weay of them doing this would have been takeing a "security deposit" of say 500 or so to gaurentee your order, instead of paying all up front. Right now, you have 2k+ loaned out basically.

Jason of XOTICPC, who I ordered from, charges the card when your laptop is shipped to you btw, which means my money wasnt tied up untill the laptop shipped.

 

Thanks Vicious. Newegg currently has the non A-1 model in stock. I don't really care about blue ray or an extra HD, otherwise the models seem to be identical. I will probably wait until the end of this week to make my decision. If Ken gets the shipment as promised I will happily take the unit from him.

I thought that Windows 7 is coming out in October or some such.

 

Thing is this is not some scam or strange event everybody is out of the W90 even newegg was.

Id cancel too if I had reason to think the item was available somewhere but the W90-A1 has not been.

Getting from newegg is a risk, there CS and returns are not even close to what you get via Gentech.

I personally owe Ken a good chunk of my hind side as he has saved it a few times

As for Win 7 I was referring to the free upgrade, I have a post on it in the main asus section, its still on the first page.

 

Newegg has the X2 in stock. Better hurry though cuz they went up $50 in the last two hours. I was thinking about doing the same thing but I waited this long.

 

It was my choice to pay in advance to save 3%. If I ordered by card Ken would not have charged me prior to shipment.

 

Saved 70$ for a 1 1/2 month wait....was it worth it ?

 

I would have to wait anyway. Sitting in the bank i wouldn't make more.

 

OK, youre choice it was...

 

it can be any test, ran any way, with any settings...just has to not have cpu/memory/fsb over clocking is all...only the gpu.

 

hi Elvn

I lowered my resolution only because at native in Wow, it lowered my fps even moreso.
I am running from Administrator - I do have CatAI off, and I have not done anything to drivers or installed anything from the guides here.. I will leave that to you guys that are more adept at messing with that stuff.

For now I have my W90vp-X2 up for sale on the marketplace section of the forums. $1999. $25 to ship FedX or UPS, Paypal or cashiers check USA ONLY - ebay refs.

This is a beautiful machine, I just lack the knowledge to fiddle with it for this particular game to play as I desire.

 

Really glad to hear you got things worked out Vicious. I can't imagine what would have been going through my head if that was me.

 

Vicious was the bios the same on the ati cards?

 

Sorry to hear that you are having trouble and selling your W90vp RMPG505... I understand that not everyone has tech experience and that dropping over 2k on a DTR shouldn't really require you to go 'under the hood" to get the advertised and well paid for performance. I was just trying to give a few ideas if you felt like trying.

Running an app from the administrator account vs. right-clicking the wow.exe file in the game folder -> clicking properties, and checking the box "run as administrator" aren't the same thing as unintuitive as that sounds. Checking that box will engage the user account control (UAC) prompt in vista which when you click "Yes" gives a sort of green light to that application that sometimes helps with some snags even if you are already on an admin account.

Going into the world of warcraft folder from mycomputer ~ program files folder, you would find a WTB and a WTeeF folder that you could delete to reset the game to default hardware settings. Thats one of the first things I would have tried. It deletes all your player settings though so I would copy and paste both folders to another folder as a backup before deleting them.

That doesn't mean any of my suggestions would fix the problem for your game though, as the gpu ~ bios/driver fixes people are so gracious to work on, test on their own rigs and post here are more likely what is needed.

 

Buy another Seagate Momentus 320GB for $50, a SATA Blu-ray drive for $100. Install and save $250. Done and done. If you really wanted the faster C2D, sell the Q9000 and get at P9600.

I can't believe people are waiting weeks (months?). My dislike for Newegg notwithstanding, I ordered mine last week and it was at my door shiny and new in 3 days.

 

I also ordered this system to play wow (raiding). Is anyone else having the same problem in wow? Has anyone been able to successfully raid (on high settings) with this machine? This is making me worried a bit

 

At what I am paying Ken versus current Newegg price the difference is $80

 

wow, that sucks.. so everybody who waits until june 26th gets a free copy of win7? so lame, i think i'm going to call asus and complain in hopes of getting a free upgrade, haha.

 

Does anybody know how to deactivate the tactile volume control on the right of the keyboard?
Is someone having issues with the keyboard? sometimes I lose the "q,c,v,n" for no reason ...

 

Well all I know is the bios file size, and checksum is the same on the new card as the old one, but it shows a different "flash type"

When I flashed my old modified bios to the slave card it worked fine, when I flashed the master it froze up on me. I am not sure if its the bios, bad luck, or something else.

I was able to fix it becuse I had ripped both bios off first and saved them and because I flashed the slave to a master first.

So I had to swich the cards around, and then flash the master again, but when I fixed it I flashed it with ATIFlash in Dos not WinFlash in windows.

It was more complicated than that and took a lot of work/stress, more details on what I had to do are a few pages back.


All I can say is if your cards have two different flash types like my new unit does dont flash the master just the slave, and if you do want to flash the master use a new bios that I will upload soon and do it in dos with atiflash.

When I find the time I will make a new guide on how to use ATIFlash and supply all the files. its safer than winflash and faster, also the great thing is that even if you broke both cards as long as the machine boots without a gpu you can possibly blind flash back (I had done this before on the C90S)

The old guide shows the flash type for the old W90 I had, both cards are the same, here is what my new W90 looked like in Winflash -

From Misc

You can clearly see the Master card has a differnt flash type. I just wanna call bad luck or Winflash not compatible with that flash type as I see no reason for that to effect the actual bios. Also when I took both cards out and looked at them besides the heat sinks they looked exactly the same.

 

Just got over 17k with my W90 using an X9000 processor dropped in!

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=11109525

 

Nice (though I already commented on that in your other post). When you get the chance, try Vantage and any games you may have to see if your clockspeeds are stable for gaming and other intensive apps.

 

Well guys....I managed to get an ATI Catalyst 9.5 BETA....that supports the W90VP mobile drivers....anyone interested??
I havent been following the thread lately...Vicious...did you update your page with new BIOS and guides....???

 

Where did you get 9.5 beta drivers that work with w90?

 

I am interested in those drivers....

 

I detect troll yus?