ASUS G51J-A1 - any major problems?

Hi,

I'm looking to buy the ASUS G51J. I know about the short battery life and such but I was wondering if there are any other negative issues that stand out on this laptop which I may have missed during my internet scavenger hunt.

Things like overheating, speaker quality, keyboard quality, poorly placed connection ports, dead pixels and software incompatibilities are high on the list of things I want to know about this laptop.

Would it be possible to upgrade parts such as the CPU and GPU?

Can anyone vouch for build quality? I don't live anywhere that I'm going to be able to physically handle this laptop before I buy it, so that's a pretty big issue aswell.

Anything you can tell me about its gaming performance would be great. I've seen lots of gaming benchmarks but I know from experience that they don't really compare to somebody actually sitting and using the 'top.

How does the J compare to Vx or other models in terms of gaming performance?

Also, how can I go about buying the 9-cell battery for it? Does anyone have the battery's part number? And is there any way of getting a different lid design without buying a different model?

 

ryzeki wrote an excellent review on most of the questions you asked

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=427948

I can vouch pretty much everything ryzeki wrote in there as I own a G51J myself


Some users have experience with BSODs with the current BIOS build (and the stock bios as well) in games such as COD4:MF2 and Borderlands. Currently there isn't a "fix" for the problem

No idea about the battery

 

For me, the heat is an issue. I get 94C max temperature while running furmark. The heat stabilized at 92C.

If you get this laptop, you should get yourself a cooler.

 

You get those temp with a cooler? If yes, then which cooler are you using?

 

I'm not using any cooler right now.
I haven't got the chance to get a cooler yet.

 

I have a Zalman NC2000. Worked out quite well so just throwing this out if your looking at different models to buy. I like how the air shoots out to the mid/lower half of the laptop because that's where the vent holes are.

As the first post in this thread, I'm also wondering how the g51vx and g51j stack up against each other in performance.

 

dune, what's your furmark GPU temperature without cooler and with cooler?

 

Sorry I never installed any benchmark tools yet But the cooler takes about 5 degrees off. Even more at times. Just surfing and listening to music the GPU can go up to 62-65c, CPU 52-55. When I use the cooler on lowest speed the temps would go down to GPU 50-55c and CPU 41-45c approx. Depending on ambient temps too but it makes a difference.

 

Hmm, if I'm gonna have to lug a cooler around with this thing, I'm seriously considering just going for the M15x. It's thicker at 2 inches but I hear the cooling is excellent. Also, since it's for school use, I need something that's not going to sound like a vacuum cleaner.

 

My G51j comes tomorrow, I'll report in the BSoD thread if I encounter any issues.

I plan on finishing my COD MW2 single player campaign on it, so that should be a decent test.

thalanix has posted that on XP there is no problem with the PCI-E related BSOD.

Mostly what I plan on using it for is Linux audio so I may just end up putting XP on it for games. In about 12 hours I should have it in my hands.

 

Do you play games at school? If not, G51J without cooler is fine enough. I lug this laptop to campus very often to do work. Most of the time GPU temperature is 61C. I have word documents, excels, firefox, and winamp open at the same time. However, if I watched a video, temperature would go up to 65C.
CPU stay between 50s to 60s.

 

I do a lot of work using graphical applications and data models, so I need something that can beef up to the task, but noise just really bothers me. Also, since my dad works for them, I can get a really great deal from Dell on the M15x.

 

if you can get a better price on m15x, go for it. m15x has better cooling than g51j, but a lot more expensive.

 

borderlands is incredibly choppy on xp for some reason, either because i removed half of XP with nlite (or it's because of whatever's causing the bsod on win7).

(k)ubuntu 9.10 and fedora 12 work out of the box, haven't tested sound fully but the startup ones worked so i'd assume no problems.

 

I finished my MW2 single player campaign and did a bit of multiplayer on my G51J. I haven't gotten any problems except for some bad frame droppage in the level with the EMP where all the stuff is falling out of the sky. No BSOD. I'm on the stock factory Win7 install with the latest BIOS and drivers from the ASUS support site.

The only difference I noticed when upgrading the BIOS is that I don't get a kernel oops when I unplug the AC adapter in Linux anymore. Oh and my backspace key finally stopped chirping. Maybe that was the BIOS update.

 

I was in the same boat as you with the G72 w/ Q9000 or the G51J with the 720QM. Apparentaly, the 720 doesn't score much higher on benchmarks, and if you overclock the Q9000 you can make up the difference on benchmarks. Thats not saying it will be faster in real applications, but it will be on par with it. A 2.4ghz quad is going to be on par or faster than a ~1.6ghz quad of the current gen.

The G72gx also has a bigger screen and a backlit keyboard, and costs a bit less.

 

It would get heavy after a while with the Zalman. I don't know the exact weight but when I take it off to surf or do some light work it feels far lighter. Not sure how heavy the mx15 is but maybe you should get all the weights and compare. If your doing hard fast work in 3D I'm quite sure you'd need a cooler with the g51j.

Q9000 at 2.4Ghz here and it's real fine I should try for higher, never had any problems at that OC yet.

 

Yea, the G51J also has the backlit keyboard and it somewhat makes up for the larger screen with the 1080p resolution.

 

And a lot of ppl still didn't read up in i7 clocking it's not 1.6GHz fixed as sites write.
They still want to sell out the old c2d-s on the shelf.

 

Dude what you waiting for, if you can get a really good deal on a m15x do it!

 

How would the overclocking affect the turbo mode where it loses cores and ups the clock rate? I imagine it'd be pretty sensitive and BSoD easy, no?