ASUS Zenbook UX32LN (Nvidia GT 840M)

Hi,
I just received the UX32LA I bought in Singapore.
I have a question regarding the CAPS LOCK, F2 (wireless) and power button indicator lights,
they don't seem to work when I press them.
Keyboard backlight works fine.
Is it normal, is it a software issue?

Thanks a lot in advance.

 

My Singapore-bought UX32LN works fine. No problem with the keys you just mentioned

power light and wifi light (with wifi enabled of course) are always on, caps lock depends

 

For those who has changed to SSD, how is the battery life compared to hdd?

I just changed to M500 240G, the battery life unfortunately dropped to 8-9hr+ from 10hrs with hdd. Though it doesn't matter much to me, but shouldn't ssd save more power?

PS: the original hdd is seagate laptop thin, official announced average power consumption is 2.9W

PPS: 8hr+ is tested on intel driver iastorA. Now I have changed to storahci (aka msahci) and will run another test

 

Hmm, I didn't really notice, but that might just be me, though I would imagine ssd conserves power though some real world tests seem to beg the differ

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

I got the same fan problem after switching to SSD. NBFC seems not working on my laptop and I certainly want the system to fix it automatically

 

I am about to change the SSD to new one, so my question is how can I install a fresh Windows 8 from my new disk?
On the old SSD there was an OEM win 8 installed, so there is no serial number sticked to the bottom of the laptop...

 

Search for Asus backtracker on your Windowsyou should be able to build a recovery usb from that

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

Ok I was able to make a bootable recovery USB dongle from existing recovery partition using windows tools

 

a clean win8 reinstall doesn't help fan-kicking problem.

Also, battery life under storahci seems better than that under iastorA. But I can't confirm it since Intel refuse to authorize me to use Battery Life Analyzer. Could anyone share it with me please?

 

840m drivers are out. 337.88 WHQL

 

Excellent. Do they result in any performance increase? Have you run any benchmarks?

 

Have you tried NBFC on your unit? I manually set the fan speed to 12.5%, then the fan kick in and out every 2 seconds... Even more annoying than continuous noise.

Strange thing is NBFC doesn't work on my unit. I set down threshold to 50C but the fan is still idle at 54C...

------------------------------------------------------

After testing with NBFC, my fan is not running at full speed since full speed is much much louder than that of normal use. I can clearly hear the fan kicks in so I guess that's why I mistook it

Now I'll focus on extending battery life with SSD

 

Hi, thanks for your reply!
do mind posting a photo, I just want to be sure about my situation before I contact Asus.

 

As you wish

See the white spot on power button and f2?

 

Totally works. mine doesn't
Thanks a lot for uploading the pic!!

 

So just to get this straight; the fans are constantly running on this laptop, even when just doing office work?

 

For me, I didn't notice the fan noise at all...

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

I'm making simple things complicated, my bad...

Fans are not constantly running, it kicks in when temp goes up to 50C (as is said on ux32vd), but it's not loud at all

For me, I can clearly notice the fan kicks in during night time. Maybe it's because I switched to SSD which is silent and makes fan noise more noticeable

 

When I saw this model annouced a few months ago I was actually pretty convinced it would be the perfect machine. I've been looking to replace my 5 year old Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 13 with something of a similar size/smaller but a higher resolution screen. Especially at the £700-800 price point that this was looking like!

But I still can't find this model anywhere in the UK. Even in mainland Europe it only seems to be available on a few German/French sites.

Does anyone know if this will ever be available in the UK?

I really want a higher-res screen than the horrible 1366x768 that you get everywhere. It annoys me that the entire industry has been fixed at 1366x768 for the past 8+ years. I had an Asus Z71VP in 2004 that had a 1680x1050 screen which was amazing.

So anyone got any alternate suggestions of other hi-res ultrabooks that come in at under £800?

Cheers, B

 

try searching for Acer s7-391, if there's any, it should be cheap right about now, or if u can, ux302la should come in quite nicely too

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Another russian review: Google Translate

 

do you mind explaining how to do that?

 

Does anybody know if the Singaporean electrical outlet is detachable like here?

 

No, it's not like that. pins have an extra wire connected to the square box, and it's imperial standard in SG.

 

There should be a built-in tool on you laptop: Asus Backtracker

 

Hey dude,

Where did u find your computer ? Please tell me, not in Singapour. I'm ing looking for a QWERTY, and as you seem have a proper one ...

 

Hi, just got this laptop today. Does anyone know how I can do a clean windows 8.1 install for this into a new ssd?

 

@cycy, if you want the oem Windows 8.1, use the ASUS backtracker software to create a bootable recovery usb that came pre-installed on every ux32ln. Though if you want to do a "clean" install, meaning 0 oem software, I think u are on your own there.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

You would need to get an iso of the disk, the key in the bios should activate it.

 

@meaker, I have seen mixed results using that method on the internet, though it should work

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Yup got it to work already, thanks!

 

Hi, can someone test his screen on Zenbook by this site?: Retina MBP (rMBP) image-retention test
It is screen ghosting test, please keep that chessboard on your screen at least 3 min - later switch to gray, if chessboard will be visible on gray colour this means that screen has ghosting issue.
Thx

 

The OS disc needs to match the key, such as OEM/Retail and Edition type.

 

yea, this.

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Well...I got my laptop in SG

If I remember it rightly, South Korean seems offer this model but not very sure of that.

Also, it's available in HongKong with 1T HDD. But I am not sure of if it comes with FHD screen.

Just FYI

 

Just bought the HK version:

i5-4200
8GB RAM
1 TB HD
QWERTY keyboard

 

And FHD screen?

 

Yup, FHD screen. Came with HK plug where I bought it from, said there were no U.S. or other style plugs.

 

Hi everyone and thanks for many useful comments here, after which i decided to go for the ux32ln-r4048h: i7, FullHD, SSHD, 6gb, qwerty keyboard.
I belive i might have gotten the last piece in Czech Republic, as it was sold out in all e-shops but one. Lucky me

So far very satisfied, in the end decided not to go for a fresh install, but removed all the bloatware from asus and the speed is great. Wanted to buy a ssd as well, but so far sshd with 8gb cache that was in included seems quite fast(of course compared to my older regular hdd). With adobe master suite installed as well some CAD software the booting time is within 15-20s to lock screen. I did some service tweaks and disabled some stuff, so that makes is faster.

A little while ago i tested the 3d mark, and encountered the vsync issues showing horizontal lines. After a while trying out different nvidia options i ran the benchmark with the integratred card and the issue was gone.
Than i decided to uninstall the integrated intel driver, to run the whole system only on nvidia gpu. After restart, the brightness control didnt work, as well as the ambient sensor, however when i ran 3dmark test, it did not show the vsync issues anymore!!

And as the test finished To my surprise i realized that meanwhile windows installed the missing driver for intel graphics...so it did not ran without intel driver as i wanted, but with it-reinstalled one.huh

Long story short, it seems to be working now, with all drivers installed again, brightness and ambient sensor working and 3dmark does not show any horizontal lines and tears anymore!! So the issue could have been just a driver one, not faulty gpu.(probably caused by the preinstalled driver) For anyone having the issue try to UNINSTALL the intel graphics, and have windows find and install it for you via windows update(so far not sure if the intel graphics version that windows downloaded for me is the same as was pre-installed on my system, will check it).
Im also using new nvidia driver, downloaded last week!

Would be nice if someone tried it and confirmed that it can solve it, otherwise i was just lucky )Im very glad its working!

 

Apologies for the common question, but did you pick this up from a retailer online? Struggling to find a Singaporean store that ships overseas...

 

Hi all,

I'm an owner of asus ux32vd with i7, 10gb RAM, SSD 512go sandisk

I was thinking about upgrading to ux32ln but having a look at this : Intel Core i7 4500U vs 3517U made me wondering if it was really worthy to spend so much money to have ux32ln with i7 + 6gb RAM +SSD

What do you think about it ?

 

Another unit from Bangkok today.
i7, FHD, 4g mem and hybrid-disk (8Gt/500Gt), got QWERTY/thai keys. Price around 750€, comes with extra carrying case and some stuff from the local store ( IT City). Also saw the i5 model for around 700€.
Only grievance so far is that few keys from keyboard are loose or almost falling, is this normal issue with this model?
Anyone done some bloatware removing? Pondering about clean install / cutting away the bloatware - any thoughts from wiser users?

 

Hi,
I might be the one to buy the second last i7 (bought it on May 30th in Mironet) (-:. I had the screen tearing problem as well, even after clean windows reinstall from external usb. There was some driver update for the intel gpu and it definitely solved the problem for me. So, you are not the only one. I am really glad the problem was not hardware-related.

 

Hi, flashmp3,
I don´t think the upgrade is worth it. You should specify your needs first. The dedicated GPU is supposedly a bit better, but if you are into gaming, the 840m is not strong enough. It can play battlefield 3 and pretty much any game from last couple of years, but I wouldn't count on it being really usable let's say two years down the line. The haswell i7's main benefits can be appreciated mainly when doing light tasks, that's when you will notice the lower power consumption and better battery life. But under heavy load, the TDP and performance is very similar to Ivy Bridge (If this is BS, please anyone correct me, but I belive it to be so...). If battery life is important to you then it might make sense. But in such case I would consider laptops with better battery life than ux32ln. I personally bought the laptop because I wanted a fullHD IPS matte 13inch screen with dedicated GPU for After Effects and CUDA accelerated processing (and occasional light-gaming, such as Portal 2 etc.) in light, yet solidly built body and appropriate battery life - there are not many laptops that fit the description...

 

The 840M is a great entry level chip, so long as you don't mind playing at 720p then it will keep going for some time.

 

English review is up @ Notebookcheck.net.

 

Hi Picazsoo,

Thank you very much for your answer.

I did buy the UX32VD cause i firstly wanted a light 13" laptop. Then as i make video mix, i use a software that didn't work with Intel GPU. So i needed a dedicated GPU. So the UX32VD was just perfect. Now i have always changed laptop every 2 years while i can still sell the old one. So that is why i was thinking of ux32ln or ux303. But in fact it seems that for my usage it's not really worthy. I'll perhaps be able to mix 1080p video clips with a better FPS but nothing more. I find that during 2 years, they could have done better ! i remember how 10 years ago, 2 years was a lot in terms of hardware. Seems that we are approaching the limits..........

 

Hi guys,
I finally ordered the machine (and badly, not in QWERTY, not available in Europe, and Asia doesnt deliver out of their country ...).
I see people talking about a clean install. What does it really mean ?
Do you advise me to just follow the steps for the installation, and then uninstal the useless programs (McAfee and Asus ones for most), or to do this "clean install" ?
If first option, what software are useless, thus i dont uninstall smth important ...
If second, what is it, and how do i do this ?

Thanks a lot, and have a good day

 

Clean install - installing the OS from a Microsoft standard disk with no vendor software on it.

 

Clean install is such a pain. If anyone can point me in some direction for successful win 8.1 installation and activation (disk thoroughly formatted), I would be really glad. My system just crashed in the worst time possible and I would like to get it up and running. I have been at it for last 3 hours at least, tried like 3 different os versions and still can't activate...